social media and the problem of pride
There’s a problem that lurks deep within our hearts as we use social media. That problem is pride, which causes us to become obsessed with our lives and hope we can convince other people that we matter. Our entire social media culture flows out of pride, causing us to use these apps to fixate on ourselves.
Even though pride affects every part of social media, no one ever thinks that they struggle with it. And even if they did, our culture tells us that pride is a good thing. It means, after all, that you have something worth being proud of!
But pride on social media isn’t a good thing; it causes so many problems that are quietly destroying our lives. This is why Tim Keller called pride the carbon monoxide of sin; even though you can’t see it, pride silently kills you.
To understand why so many people struggle with social media, we need to get to the root of pride in our lives. We’ve got to figure out what pride is, how it shows up on social media, and whether there’s any solution for our pride-saturated hearts.
what does it mean to be proud?
To under how pride causes problems on social media, we first have to understand what pride even is. Simply put, pride is an exaggerated sense of your own self-importance, which causes you to focus on yourself. Proud people are self-obsessed and become excessively preoccupied with every part of their lives.
This causes proud people to become hyper-aware of themselves, always focused on how their life is going. They're constantly monitoring how they appear to others and how those people treat them. And so pride encourages you to:
Think about yourself all of the time.
Want the focus to always be on yourself.
Become preoccupied with what other people think of you.
View every situation in your life through the lens of how it affects you.
Believe that you’re worth more than others.
In these ways, pride becomes an invisible expectation: everyone else needs to recognize that we’re the most important person in the world.
To be clear, pride isn’t caused by excellence or achievement, but rather by a sense of self-importance. As one pastor described it:
Pride is not possessing extraordinary talents, viewing my skills highly, or even showcasing my gifts for the benefit of others. Pride instead spurs me to view myself as the only one in the entire world who matters, to think that I have somehow earned the prime spot in the universe, and now all of creation is a grand symphony celebrating me.
That’s pride, that belief that I’m the most important person here and deserved to be recognized and celebrated by everyone around me. Pride isn’t, “I’m good at something,” but rather, “I am the person that the world should obsess over!” This attitude causes you to believe that you’re superior to your peers and should be recognized by them for your greatness.
While pride has always existed, our individualistic culture encourages our sense of self-importance, telling us to put our individual needs, desires, and feeling ahead of everyone else. As David Foster Wallace wrote:
Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid, and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default setting, hardwired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of.
Growing up, we soak up our culture’s emphasis on pride, believing that our lives and interests should be society’s primary concern. We may not believe that we’re the only one that matters, but we certainly think that we matter most, as exemplified in Winston Churchill’s quote: “We are all worms, but I do believe I am a glow worm.”
Believing in our own specialness, we then look to others to cooperate with our desire to be the most important person around. When our peers give us the feedback that we want, we’re inwardly pleased, happy that they recognize our importance. But if they don’t mirror our self-importance back to us, our egos feel hurt, frustrated, and angry.
Because of this, pride often shows up as an over-the-top need for praise, attention, and admiration. And so pride expresses itself in vanity, an excessive concern with how we appear. The philosopher Bertrand Russell said that this vanity drives so much of our lives. He writes:
Vanity is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children knows how they are constantly performing some antic, and saying, “Look at me.” “Look at me” is one of the fundamental desires of the human heart. It can take innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of posthumous fame.
While we get better as we grow up at hiding our vanity, adults are just children in full-grown bodies, looking for ways to call attention to ourselves so that we can get other people’s adoration.
Whereas previous generations thought pride was unhealthy, today it’s a virtue on social media. Why? Because pride gives you the self-belief you need to broadcast your life on social media and get the attention and approval you need to feel good. To us, pride and vanity aren’t seen as problems, but rather as necessary character traits if you want to get ahead and win at life.
And so social media has capitalized on the pride inherent in our individualistic culture, giving us the tools we need to share our sense of self-importance and gauge how other people see us. While social media didn't create our problems with pride, it serves as a set of bellows, feeding our hearts with the oxygen we need to burn white-hot with pride.
so how does pride show up on social media?
While you can’t directly see pride on social media, it’s what pushes people to share so much of their lives. We use social media to call attention to ourselves and present an argument for our importance, in hopes that our audience will agree that we’re the most important person in our social circles.
This causes social media to become our version of the Westminster Kennel Club dog show. We parade our lives in front of the judges, trying to convince them to give us the “best in show” award. As we do this, pride shows up in three main ways on social media. It starts with…
Self-preoccupation: social media puts us at the center of our world, making us hyper-aware of how we appear and how other people respond to us. We see our lives as the main event of social media, which leads to…
Self-exaltation: we use social media to exalt our lives and demonstrate our sense of importance. We’re always sharing content that shows we’re above others, whether that’s in status, success, wit, or personal taste, which leads to…
Self-promotion: we use social media to promote a certain image of ourselves, always finding new and creative ways to make us look good and argue for our importance. Social media becomes a nonstop advertisement showing other people how awesome we are.
As social media has spread through society, it’s made these three attitudes not only okay but expected. This causes us to believe that other people should:
Want to know every little detail about our day.
Rave about our every insight and observation.
Watch and like our videos, stories, and posts.
Pride causes us to take the ordinary events of our lives and share them on social media, to make a case for our relative self-importance. As Ryan Holiday wrote in his book, The Ego Is the Enemy:
Pride takes a minor accomplishment and makes it feel like a major one. It smiles at our cleverness and genius, as though what we’ve exhibited was merely a hint of what ought to come.
And so social media becomes a constant stream of people promoting themselves to others, sharing the best parts of their lives to try to get other people to recognize our importance.
While pride is such an ordinary occurrence on social media that we get used to it, a proud heart can’t hide in the background for long. This means that when you start to look closely, you’ll see our egos clamoring for attention through our posts.
To illustrate this, here are some real posts that I’ve seen on my feed over the past few days. See how each person subtly makes an argument for their own importance:
A woman posted a picture of her playing violin at a jazz club with the caption, “If you would have told me 10 years ago that I’d be living in NYC with a masters degree and getting paid to play music I love with people I adore, I would’ve called you absolutely insane.” Pride uses surprise and shock as cover to call attention to ourselves.
A guy shared about his latest international trip, saying, “I’m so exhausted from traveling so much this summer, but I can’t stop doing what I love.” Pride often shows up as a self-pity-filled humble brag, to get other people to sympathize with us.
A woman in a gown posed in front of the beautiful mansion that hosted her friend’s wedding, with the caption, “This venue!” The venue looks great, but the point of the post isn’t for you to see the venue, but her. Pride tries to increase our importance by attaching itself to other important things.
A guy posted a picture of him walking the streets of Sweden with the caption, “You know when you feel positive changes coming but you just can’t your finger on it?! That’s the moment. Love y’all!” Pride tries to cover its attention-seeking behavior by pointing to the audience at the end, but the self-emphasis shines through.
A woman poses with her friends at a beautiful vineyard and rhetorically asks: “How did we get it this good?” While she tries to deflect attention by chalking her life up to chance, she wants you to know how incredible her life is.
A woman highlighted her service at a food pantry by posing in front of a pallet of food with the caption, “Warehouse fit check.” Pride is always calling attention to our good deeds, patting ourselves on the back in front of other people.
A guy posted pictures of him lounging around Los Angeles in trendy outfits with the caption, “28 is off to a pretty good start.” Pride tries to hide itself in the false humility of casual statements, but pictures speak louder than words.
A woman shared a picture of a sandwich with the caption, “When you make your husband a sandwich and it looks so good you want to take a bite.” Pride often shows up in oversharing, caused by the belief that we do ordinary things in extraordinary ways.
A guy posted a picture of him kissing his girlfriend with the caption, “Life has never been filled with so much laughter. You are proof unicorns do exist.” Pride tries to get attention indirectly, by shining a spotlight on someone close enough to us that we can still share in the light.
A woman posted a picture of her posing on a bike in front of an Amsterdam canal with the caption, “I can't ride a bike, this is just for clout.” She tries to be authentic and admit that we post things just for pride, but she’s still saying, “I have a life worth being proud of.”
A woman posted pictures of her baby shower with the caption, “I’m so humbled that we got to worship God with our friends at my baby shower.” Pride often shows up in religious ways, as we become proud of our devotion to God and how humble we are.
I hope you can see how our proud hearts use social media to slyly call attention to ourselves while giving us just enough plausible deniability. We insist that we’re just sharing our lives, but so many (most?) social media posts contain a “Look at me!” element that betrays our pride-saturated hearts.
Pride, though, doesn’t just show up in how we post on social media; it also can be seen in how we view other people’s posts. While pride pushes us to create so much content about ourselves, it also causes us to never have time to view other people’s content.
Pride makes us ignore the posts of even our closest friends, quickly clicking through them to get to something that interests us. We believe that our time is too important to be wasted watching other people’s lives, so despite the hours we spend on our phones each day, we’re always too busy to engage with other people’s posts. When our peers subconsciously ask us through their posts, “Do you think my life’s important?”, we’re all too willing to say, “Nope.”
This creates the tension point of social media pride: we’re all fighting for other people’s attention to bolster our sense of self-importance, but hate giving people our attention. Since there’s more content created each day than there are eyeballs to watch it, we battle against each other for attention, our pride on the line.
While pride isn’t something that we ever talk about on social media, we’re all using these apps to promote our lives, trying to get other people to recognize our importance and reflect that on us.
what do we want out of social media?
So why does the proud person want to be recognized as the most important person in the universe? Why do we spend so much time and energy bragging about our lives on social media? Because we’re all hungry for glory. We don’t just randomly share our lives but use social media in hopes that other people will see our posts and give us glory.
So what is glory? While we might think of glory as a dazzling amount of fame, the Bible defines glory as “weightiness.” Something receives glory when it’s weighty, substantial, and heavy.
While defining glory as weightiness might seem strange, we use the word “matter” in a similar way. Matter describes weight in a scientific sense, but it’s also used to say something’s important, as in “This thing matters.”1 We give glory to the things that matter in our lives, that are bigger and more substantial than us.
And so pride on social media flows out of a desire for glory, to truly matter. As Ernest Becker wrote in his book The Denial of Death, every human “must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; he must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible contribution to world life, show that he counts more than anything or anyone else.”
This is why we brag about our lives on social media. Our hearts feel empty, causing us to try to prove to others that we’re significant, all in the hope that they’ll give us glory in the form of likes, views, and followers. "Yes," we think when we receive glory on social media, "I really am something special." We want people to worship us, to prove to ourselves that we matter and affirm our place of importance at the center of the universe.
the problems caused by pride
While posting on social media in prideful ways is the accepted way to get glory in our current culture, it destroys our lives and creates some major problems.
Pride is a major reason why there's so much dysfunction on social media. Everyone’s trying to get the rest of the universe to revolve around them, which causes our little "solar systems" to collide with each other. This causes us to compete over views, likes, and followers, hoping we can pull other people into the power of our orbit. As one pastor wrote:
"The more I make my life, my well-being, my enlightenment, and my success primary, the farther I step from reality. Thus the hell-bound do not travel downward; they travel inward, cocooning themselves behind a mass of vanity, personal rights, religiosity, and defensiveness. Obsession with self is the defining mark of a disintegrating soul."
This describes the culture of pride in our social media culture well. The human soul was not made to be self-obsessed, to think of itself as the center of the universe. And so when young people use social media to try to do this, their lives disintegrate into dysfunction in some of the following ways. We’re…
Highly sensitive to feeling slighted: Our pride cause us to constantly monitor other people’s reactions to us, causing us to feel hurt when we don’t get the attention we think we deserve. Our egos become incredibly fragile and sensitive to feedback, and we get easily offended when other people don’t value our posts.
Constantly in conflict: When our peers don't give us the recognition that we think we deserve, we feel worthless and lash out at them, frustrated that they don't recognize how important we are. We battle against our peers for the scarce amount of glory available and get mad when other people don’t see us as special.
Always putting down other people: To prove that we’re more important than our peers, we belittle, make fun of, and put down other people. We develop a condescending and disdainful attitude towards anyone that we feel is "below" us, to remind them that we’re more important than they are.
Tempted towards narcissism: We become enslaved to how other people react to us and obsess over how they view us. We treat our peers not as people but as mirrors, existing only to reflect glory to us.
Fall prey to self-pity: When we don't get the glory that we think we deserve, we flip from pride to despair. We fall into self-pity, which is still an obsession with ourselves, just as a victim and not as a victor. We grow discouraged and depressed, causing us to lick our wounds and say, “Woe is me!”
Always living for the self: Pride distorts our view of self and makes us think that whatever we’re doing is the most important thing in the world. This causes many young people to spend their lives focused on the silly and superficial (meme culture, juvenile YouTubers, etc.) rather than living for more important things.
These symptoms of pride are everywhere in our social media culture. Despite how destructive pride is to our lives on social media, no one wants to admit that’s the problem. Instead, our culture focuses on its favorite catch-all term: mental health.
An example of this is Instagram’s decision to allow users to hide the number of like that they receive on each post. While this change was made under the guise of promoting mental health, in reality, the reason it causes mental health problems is because of our pride. People’s egos can’t handle the sense of failure they feel when other people see their relative lack of importance.
While Instagram isn’t an innocent bystander to this problem, our culture refuses to acknowledge the role that our pride has in creating our dysfunctional social media culture. You can promote mental health all that you want, but the problems of social media won’t be addressed until we get to the real issue: we’re all filled with pride and can never get enough glory to ever feel satisfied.
so what’s the core issue?
The core issue with pride isn’t that we don’t get enough attention, but that in trying to act as if we are the most important thing in the universe, we’ve set ourselves up against God. We’ve rejected God as God and tried to turn ourselves into our own god with a world that revolves around us. As the theologian Jurgen Moltmann said, "The person who loses God makes a god out of himself. And in this way a human being becomes a proud and unhappy mini-god."
We’ve learned this behavior from Satan, who due to his pride, wasn’t content being God’s angel and set out to become God’s equal. Isaiah 14 says that Satan said:
I will ascend to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the stars of God;
I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon.
I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.
And so Satan tried to overthrow God and become the most important thing in the universe. Satan couldn’t defeat God, though, so God cast him out of heaven.
Even though Satan lost his war against God, he still hates God, so he enlists humans to help him in his rebellion. This is why Satan tempted Adam and Eve, telling them that if they just ate this fruit, they’d become like God. But this was a lie. Adam and Eve didn’t become like God but lost connection with the true center of the universe.
Today, Satan comes to us with the same lie: if you disobey God and become proud, then you’ll become like God. But when you reject God in your pride and try to make the world revolve around you, you don’t become a god. Instead, you become isolated and alone, in full rebellion against God. As theologian Lawrence Smede writes:
Pride in the spiritual sense is the refusal to let God be God. It's to grab God's status for oneself, it's turning down God's invitation to join the dance of life, as a creature in his world, wishing instead to be the creator, independent and relying on one's resources.
The fantasy that we can make it as our own gods leaves us empty at the center. We are therefore attacked by demons of fear and anxiety all the time. We learn to swagger, we learn to bluff, but deep down inside we're afraid we can't make it on our own.
Now after sin, we are separated from the life of God and experience an inner emptiness. This is why we turn to pride, to try to cover over this feeling by proving our self-importance. As Tim Keller said:
The natural condition of the human ego is to be empty, painful, busy, and fragile. No matter how big our ego appears, we're all covering over an inner emptiness. This is why celebrities are still so sensitive to their reviews and the media. Because even though they appear to be the most important people in the world, they are still fighting their own inner emptiness.
And so we look to social media to get glory from other people and fill up our inner emptiness. Smede describes how this plays out in our lives:
Therefore we look around for people to use as buttresses for our shaky ego that our pride has created. What can I get out of this situation to support my ego's need for power and applause? And every new person elicits the question: how can this person contribute to my need to prove that I am better than other people? Life becomes a constant battle to use people to bolster your own self, and to avoid letting others use you the way you're using them. All because we're empty at the center.
This is how we all use social media. We believe that can show others our importance, then we can bolster our belief that we’re the most important person in the universe. And so we don’t use our talents, achievements, and opportunities to glorify God but rather to try to bring glory to ourselves. As Paul Tripp says, "We crave glory that does not belong to us, and we step on one another to get it. Rather than glorifying God by using the things he has given us to love other people, we use people to get the glory we love.”
This has catastrophic results, ripping the world apart as we fight to be the god of our little social media kingdoms. Paul predicted this long ago in 2 Timothy 3 when he said: “There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves.”
We know our pride isn’t working, but rather than admit this, we keep trying to be a god on social media, trying to get everyone else to bow down to us. We’re like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, who says it’s “Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.” We double down on trying to appear important, hoping it’ll give us the glory we crave.
so what’s the solution?
So is there any hope for us? Can we ever solve our problem of pride? There’s only one thing that can fix this issue: God’s gospel of grace. Admitting our need for God’s grace is the only way to solve our pride.
Why? J.D. Greear says it’s because “the gospel eliminates boasting, not by telling us to stop boasting, but by undercutting the very basis of pride: we aren't saved by anything that we do." Accepting God’s grace allows us to be loved even when we don’t deserve it, which gives us the freedom to finally admit how much we struggle with pride.
So how do you receive grace? Through humility, by repenting of your rebellion against God and admitting that you’re empty apart from Him. When we humble ourselves, we can finally admit what we all know to be true: we’re not the center of the universe. When we do this, like the father of the prodigal son, God lavishes His love on us and fills our empty hearts.
How is this possible? God doesn’t love us because of our humility; too often we become quite proud of how humble we are, after all. Instead, God loves us because Jesus humbled himself perfectly and never succumbed to the temptation of pride. Paul tells us in Philippians 2 that Jesus…
Did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!
Jesus was so different from you and me. Rather than coming to earth to seek his own glory, he lived his entire life to glorify his Father's name. Unlike the rest of humanity, Jesus had no interest in being superior to God but rather gave his life on the cross so that we could be reconciled to God. Jesus, though, didn’t get God’s love but rather received the punishment that we deserved so that we could receive his relationship with God.
While humbling yourself and accepting an early death would feel like a social disaster to us, Jesus trusted God’s plan for his life. Paul says that because Jesus humbled himself and obeyed God, that…
God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father.
Now through Jesus, there’s an eternal glory available to us. We don’t get it by promoting our lives on social media, but rather by humbling ourselves and resting in Jesus’ life. When you do this, God bestows on you the same glory that He gave Jesus. As Jesus said in Matthew 23, “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”
Rather than having to boast about our lives to try to fill up our emptiness with glory from others, we are filled by God’s love, knowing that because of Christ, one day God will tell us, “Well done, good and faithful servant!”
When our relationship with God is restored and our future glory assured, then our lives are reordered around Him. We recognize that we live in God’s universe and no longer need to make our lives all about us. God's glory fills our hearts and gives us the sense of self-worth, fullness, and contentment that is only possible in God.
This then sets you free in gospel humility, giving you the ability to forget about yourself. As Tim Keller said:
Gospel humility is not needing to think about myself. Not needing to connect things with myself. It is an end to thoughts such as, 'I'm in this room with these people, does this make me look good? Do I want to be here?' True gospel humility means I stop connecting every experience, every conversation, with myself. In fact, I stop thinking about myself.
Now, we are freed from our self-obsession, self-exaltation, and self-promotion. We can now use our lives to give honor and glory to God, and not ourselves. As Paul instructs us in 2 Corinthians 10, "Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord."
what does gospel-centered social media look like?
In gospel-saturated social media, we’re no longer motivated by selfish ambition or vanity, but rather through humility, are moved to consider others better and more important than ourselves. This is what Paul commands in Philippians 2:
Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourself, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interest of others as well.
When we let Jesus’ love for us melt our pride and fill up our emptiness, it allows us to use social media to glorify God as we love and serve others, rather than seeking our own glory. Isaiah says that the glory of the Lord covers the earth, so wherever you go and whatever you do, you have to opportunity to point others toward God’s glory.
When the gospel penetrates our proud hearts, humbles us, and gives us the security of God’s love, we no longer have to use social media to translate our blessings and achievements into our glory. We are free to just be ourselves, rather than push some self-important version of ourselves. As Brennan Manning wrote:
The kingdom belongs to people who aren't trying to look good or impress anybody, even themselves. They are not plotting how they can call attention to themselves, worrying about how their actions will be interpreted or wondering if they will get gold stars for their behavior.
When the gospel strips us of our pride, it sets us free to use social media completely differently. As the gospel breaks us of our self-absorption, our lives might look smaller on social media, but in reality, they become much richer. As G.K. Chesterton wrote:
How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they are not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.
While a spirit of pride seeks attention, a spirit of humility seeks connection, causing you to become curious about the people and places around you. We no longer fight against our peers to receive more attention than them, but instead, try to connect with them and lift them up. Rather than posting out of a "Here I am!" mindset, we change and start to use social media out of a "There you are!" mindset.
And because I am secure in God's love, my ego no longer has to be overly sensitive to what other people think of me. My importance is based on God sending His Son to die for me, not the number of likes, followers, or views that I get.
Rather than competing on social media for the spotlight, you use your social media platform to shine a light on the people around you. John Piper says, "God gave us a self, not so that we would have something to exalt in, but something to exalt with. He gave us a self, not to be the object of our joy, but the subject of joy."
When you get this, social media can be a way to provide value for other people, rather than get value for yourself. Make them laugh, make them think, make them cry, make them reflect. You can use social media to serve others by sharing:
Things they might find interesting.
The stories of other people and places around you.
How God’s working in your life.
The good things of God’s creations that you enjoy.
The gifts and talents that God has blessed you with.
Here’s the thing, though, only you know your heart. If you’re still wondering, here’s a simple question I try to use whenever I post. Ask yourself:
Am I posting this to glorify myself or God? Is this about trying to prove my importance or about using my life to honor and serve God?
This feels counter-intuitive, but it’s only by dropping your prideful self-importance in favor of humble service that you can use social media in a healthy and beneficial way. We no longer have to use social media to make others think that we’re important. Instead, we can give glory away, using these platforms to glorify God as we love and serve others.
Gravitas is another heaviness word that we use similarly; this person has a weight to them that demands our respect and honor.