social media and the search for significance
The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it’s their fault. — Henry Kissinger
At some point, every young person dreams of becoming a celebrity. We grow up captivated by the idea of “making it,” and yearn for the attention and recognition that it would bring from our peers.
As we’ve looked at the different things that we search for through our use of social media, the desires for approval, identity, meaning, and purpose culminate in one last final search: the search for celebrity. The idea of becoming a social media celebrity has captured the hearts of young people everywhere, pushing them to spend more and more time on these platforms. As writer Will Storr put it, “For many on social media, their life ambition is to be known. By lots of people.”
Even if your hopes of becoming a celebrity didn’t make it through middle school, we all subconsciously think that being a celebrity is the best way to live. As Leo Baudy explained in The Frenzy of Renown: “Not everyone can be famous. But much of our daily experiences tells us that we should if we possibly can, because it is the best, perhaps the only way to be.”
This all causes young people everywhere to look at social media and secretly believe, “If I could just get that kind of attention and praise, then I’d finally know I was somebody important.” And so we use social media to search for celebrity, hoping it will once and for all solve our need for approval, identity, meaning, and purpose.
human beings and the search for celebrity
So why are we so interested in becoming a celebrity? Why do we see celebrity as such a desirable state? Because every person wants to know that they’re significant. Deep down, our search for celebrity is really a search for significance. We’re all looking for someone to tell us that we’re important and special.
Growing up, we all struggle with feeling insignificant, average, and unknown, just another nameless face in the crowd. We hate these feelings, which make us feel worthless and unwanted, as if no one cares about us.
Our culture encourages this thinking, telling us that to be ordinary is the worst outcome in life. In Daring Greatly, Brene Brown writes:
I see the cultural message everywhere that says that an ordinary life is a meaningless life. And I see how kids that grow up on a steady diet of reality TV, celebrity culture, and unsupervised social media can absorb this messaging and develop a completely skewed sense of the world.
Everything around us is telling us to hate feeling ordinary and yearn for recognition. As Dallas Willard says:
To be ordinary is to be only 'more of the same.' The human being screams against this from its every pore. To be just 'another one of those' is deadening agony for us.' This is why everyone, from the smallest child to the oldest adult naturally wants in some way to be extraordinary, outstanding, making a unique contribution or, if all else fails, wants to be thought so—if only for a brief time.
To try to solve our fear of being ordinary, we look for ways to stand out from the crowd, in hopes that this will make us feel special and valuable. We see celebrities, with their popularity, status, and people crowded around them, and think that if we could someday become a celebrity ourselves, then we’d get the attention, recognition, and sense of significance we so deeply crave. As Chris Rojek explains in his book on celebrity:
"Public acclaim answers a deep psychological need in all of us for recognition. Acclaim carries the sensual pleasure of being acknowledged as an object of desire and approval."
We believe that if we were being celebrated, then we'd finally answer the doubts, discouragements, and insecurities that we feel here as a part of the anonymous crowd. "If I could just make it and become a celebrity," so many young people think, "Then I'd finally prove to myself that I'm somebody significant."1
Traditionally, this search for significance through celebrity droves young people to do all kinds of things to gain attention, whether that's applying for reality TV shows or moving to New York or Los Angeles. Today, though, that has all changed with the rise of social media. Social media has democratized celebrity, making it possible for young people anywhere in the world to become a celebrity.
And so social media celebrity has become the unspoken dream of so many young people. They imagine how good it would feel if thousands of people were watching their lives and liking their posts, adoring your every moment. They would finally, for the first time in their lives, feel significant.
so what is a celebrity?
Before we think about how we use social media to solve our search for celebrity, we need to understand what makes someone a celebrity. While it’s easy to name celebrities, we never think about what makes someone a celebrity.
A celebrity is a person who uses the events of their life to entertain others and gain recognition. Neil Gabler, in his book Life: A Movie, describes a celebrity as someone who “stars in his or her own life movie and provides entertainment by the very process of living.” Gabler says that celebrities live out “real-life melodramas” that the public finds interesting and compelling.
Celebrity in this sense is a recent cultural innovation. In the past, people were famous, which is different from celebrity. Fame is recognition of a noteworthy achievement or accomplishment, which is why people like Abraham Lincoln, Jane Austen, and Albert Einstein are famous; they all made significant contributions to society.
With the rise of mass media, though, we moved from a culture of fame to one of celebrity.2 Unlike famous people, celebrities receive recognition not so much for what they have done, but rather for who they are. Celebrities like Prince Diana, Marilyn Monroe, and the Kardashian sisters aren’t heroes for us to emulate, but rather entertainment to consume.3
The sociologist Christopher Lasch described this shift from fame to celebrity well:
Today men seek the kind of approval that applauds not their actions but their personal attributes. They wish to be not so much esteemed as admired. They crave not fame but the glamour and excitement of celebrity.
Whereas fame depends on the performance of notable deeds acclaimed in biography and works of history, celebrity—the reward of those who project a vivid or pleasing exterior or have otherwise attracted attention to themselves—is acclaimed in the news media, in gossip columns, on talk shows, in magazines devoted to 'personalities.'
Today, most young people aren't interested in fame, since that would require the hard work of doing something noteworthy. Instead, we want to use our personalities to entertain others and become a celebrity. To be a celebrity, all you need is a:
Fascinating narrative: the foundation of celebrity is a personal story that other people find interesting and entertaining. Your life narrative should center around something unique but valuable, whether that’s your looks, talent, career, family, or personality.
Way to get publicity: Celebrity requires publicity, a way to get your story in front of other people. You can’t entertain others if they don’t have access to your life, which is why celebrities traditionally lived in NYC or LA, where mass media was centered.
Crowd/audience: the last thing a celebrity needs is a group of people who find their life entertaining. The greater public has to find your narrative fascinating and feel compelled to find out what's going on, seeking out details about who they’re dating, where they vacation, or what they name their children.
If a person can bring these three things together, they can become a celebrity, real-life entertainment for an entertainment-starved world. As a celebrity gets better at using the twists and turns of their lives to garner publicity and entertain the masses, they become more and more well-known.
So what does celebrity have to do with social media? As our culture has shifted from mass media (newspapers, magazines, TV, and movies) to social media, young people everywhere can now pursue becoming a celebrity.
In the past, publicity was the limiting factor for celebrity, since photography, video, and printed pages were expensive and time-consuming. Now, with the rise of smartphones and social media, publicity is practically free. You no longer have to hire a PR rep to convince some mass media gatekeeper to give you publicity. Instead, you can use your smartphone and create as much publicity for yourself as you want.
With this shift, young people anywhere can use social media to present their lives as human entertainment and try to become a celebrity. As Robert Greene wrote:
"People have always pursued fame and attention as a way to feel enlarged and more important. They become dependent on the number of people applauding, the size of the army they command, the crowd of courtiers that serve them. But this false sense of purpose has become greatly democratized and widespread through social media. Now almost any one of us can have the quantity of attention that past kings and conquerors could only dream about."
Since the opportunity to be a celebrity is now open to everyone, young people have become obsessed with making it on social media. They dream of being the next big social media star, whether they vlog on YouTube, dance on TikTok, or model on Instagram.
Today, social media promises the possibility of celebrity, with all of its corresponding blessings, to anyone who can use publicity to turn their lives into entertainment and attract the attention of the public. We believe that with hard work and a little bit of luck from the algorithm, anyone can become the next Charli D’Amelio, Mr. Beast, Sadie Robertson, or Logan Paul.
how does the search for celebrity show up on social media?
This dream of social media celebrity has changed how we use social media. While social media started as social networks that mirror real-life relationships, it has evolved into entertainment platforms built around social media celebrities. As TikTok’s president of global solutions said, “Facebook is a social platform. We (TikTok) are an entertainment platform. The difference is significant.”
In today’s social media climate, you don’t post to share life with your friends but rather to entertain strangers. Social media companies changed the algorithm to require you to entertain others, otherwise, you will never be noticed. These companies push this entertainment aspect since it keeps eyeballs on their apps longer, allowing them to generate more revenue from advertising.
Young people have responded to these shifts, and to solve their search for significance, have brought celebrity culture to every part of social media. While we recognize we’ll probably never become mega-celebrities, we still hold out hope of being micro-celebrities, celebrated by a few hundred thousand followers in our corner of the internet. And so we turn ourselves into a social media personality that’ll attract attention and entertain other people. As Chris Rojek says:
Our high level of exposure to celebrity culture has meant that, just like celebrities, we construct ourselves into objects that immediately arouse sentiments of desire and approval in others.
We know that you have to entertain others to get likes and followers on social media. Since the limiting factor isn’t publicity, but rather attention, young people compete in a digital landscape saturated with content for a limited amount of eyeballs.
Because of this, all social media content today has to be entertainment, whether you’re cooking a recipe, remodeling your house, or visiting a different country. Your content has to be fast, energetic, and catchy. And since your audience has been trained to expect entertainment, if you don’t give it to them, they’ll keep scrolling until they find someone who will.
This creates a social media culture where young people rush to turn their lives into entertainment, as they scramble for other people’s attention. And so life becomes about creating content that other people find entertaining, feeding the algorithm in hopes that we’ll go viral.
the rise of pseudo-events
This shift on social media, from connecting with others to entertaining others, has caused the proliferation of "pseudo-event" content. Daniel Boorstin coined the term pseudo-event in the 1960s to describe made-up events that looked real, but whose only purpose was to generate attention and publicity through the media.
The power of pseudo-events, first for mass media and now for social media, is that they can be repeated over and over on command, giving us the ability to create unlimited content to entertain others. When Boorstin wrote about pseudo-events, he was talking about things like press conferences, speeches, and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Pseudo-events like these look spontaneous and natural, but in reality, they’re carefully planned out and staged to create content for the media to share.
Social media pseudo-events grew in popularity because they solve the biggest issue of social media’s shift to entertainment: real life doesn’t provide enough entertaining content. As we saw, sharing pictures of latte art on Instagram gets old pretty quickly.
So what is a social media pseudo-event? It’s a planned and formulaic way to create content that will entertain others. Social media pseudo-events started with simple things, like the celebration of birthdays, milestones, and anniversaries, as well as by using hashtags like #throwbackthursday and #outfitoftheday. These pseudo-events gave us a reason to post photos about our lives.
Since photos were the primary medium of social media, young people planned out their lives to entertain others through great photos, they shared pictures that celebrating the day they started dating, bought a new house, moved to a new city, went on a glamorous vacation, or took “first day of school” pictures for all of their kids on the front step.
This content was planned out so that the pictures would be as good as possible, ensuring that people would find them entertaining and like them. Young people acted as their own PR agents, planning out photo shoots with professional photographers and setting up carefully constructed backdrops to ensure the best photos possible.4
As short-form video took over social media, though, pseudo-events exploded. Young people needed to make entertaining content, so they started to copy the latest content. This led to so much artificial content being created to share on social media to entertain others. Popular pseudo-event content is:
Interviews: people walking around doing "man on the street" interviews, asking other people probing questions to get them to reveal intimate, embarrassing, or funny details about their lives.
Skits: couples, parents, or groups of friends film short skits highlighting funny or bizarre parts of friendship, marriage, or family life.
Choreographed movements: TikTok dances and other choreographed videos exploded, as the ability to pair movements with music mesmerized viewers.
Challenges: people go on all kinds of crazy adventures, activities, and challenges, whether that's to ride your bike from Canada to Patagonia, visit every country in Europe, cook each state's most popular food, or just put Mentos in a bottle of Coke, all to provide a steady stream of entertainment.
FAQs: people do "Ask Me Anything" segments and answer their follower’s questions, whether that's why they decided to move to a new place or how they got engaged.
How-to guides: whether it's putting on your makeup, cooking a new recipe, or completing a project, these fast-paced guides package small bits of information as entertainment. We don't watch these guides to learn but rather to be entertained, which is why we wait around for the big payoff, whether that's seeing the finished meal or the fully remodeled room.
Opinions/advice: while we often think of entertainment as being happy, courting controversy and outrage are some of the best ways to entertain others and generate attention. People share controversial or funny clips of larger form content (podcasts, lectures, shows) to get views and reactions.
Vlogs: people share summaries of their daily lives, compressing each day into a fast-paced highlight reel summarizing all of the fun or interesting things that they did that day.
Bizarre life moments: whether it's taking a pregnancy test in Target, sharing every date you go on, or recording your significant other's reaction as you play a prank on them, these strange moments are created just to post on social media.
The object of all of these pseudo-events is to give content creators, whether big or small, ways to reliably create entertaining material for their audiences. Every month brings a new type of pseudo-event, whether it’s a new music clip or a new style of video, which young people copy, hoping they can ride the trend and grow their celebrity.
Right now, every popular social media platform, whether it’s Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, or Snapchat is filled with pseudo-events. All of the content will have carefully been planned out and produced, from the lightning-fast transitions to the clickbait headlines, all to convince you to watch their content.
Now that social media only rewards entertaining content, life becomes a staged show for social media, as many people plan out their day-to-day lives by asking the question: "What would make for the most entertaining content?" While lots of people aren't that entertaining, just because they're bad at it doesn't mean that that's not what they're trying to do.
the explosion of oversharing
Once you have attracted attention to yourself on social media through the use of pseudo-events, then you keep your audience’s attention with another popular trick: oversharing.
Unlike traditional celebrities, social media celebrities don’t entertain others so much through their glamour, but rather by revealing intimate details of their lives to their audience. They let their viewers see their performance of an “authentic” life, letting them tag along as they go through the ups and downs of life.
By doing this, celebrities use strategic self-disclosure to hook people on their lives. Christopher Lasch says that wannabe celebrities don't share an objective account of their feelings, but rather a selectively representative piece of reality in order "to seduce others into giving him their attention, acclaim, or sympathy, and thus to shore up his faltering sense of self."
Sharing intimate details about our lives works to generate entertainment, because social media celebrity, like all celebrity, is built on voyeurism, that hidden desire we all have to observe the secret parts of someone else's life.
While no one would admit it, we all enjoy getting to observe the intimate details of someone else's life. This is why there are paparazzi after all. But while traditional celebrities hate the paparazzi, social media has trained us to be our own paparazzi, encouraging us to share details from every part of our private lives.5 And so we wield voyeurism as a way to get people interested in our lives.
This causes many young people to disclose secrets and private details from their lives to create an artificial sense of intimacy. Young people are pushed to do more and more unique things to stand out from the crowd, whether it’s showing themselves showering, changing clothes, or talking about their sex lives. Couples and families vlog every part of their relationships, pushing to share as much as possible, knowing that it will push their views up and generate more clicks.
Through these two social media techniques, pseudo-events and oversharing, social media users hope to attract attention, gain recognition, and build up a base of followers that will celebrate them online. Many people don’t post anymore because they don’t feel like their lives are entertaining enough to compete with others. But for those who do post, they look at the number of likes, views, and followers we get, and use these numbers to determine whether we are significant or not.
This is the ultimate goal of everything we've talked about so far. If you can entertain strangers with your life and become a social media celebrity, then you think you’ll get the sense of approval, identity, meaning, purpose, and significance that you crave. You’ll feel important and have high self-worth, as you’re surrounded by your adoring virtual fans.
so what drives this social media culture?
So why do we do all of this? Why do young people try so hard to become a social media celebrity? Because we hope that by gaining enough significance through social media celebrity we can eventually experience transcendence, the sense of being above everyone else. As Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco wrote, "The most striking feature of contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence."
This desire for transcendence is what the search for celebrity is all about; we want to transcend our peers to be worshiped and adored. In short, we want to become God. And so in our post-God world, social media celebrity helps us replace God while retaining a sense of transcendence. The Australian pastor Mark Sayers says:
Without gods, saints, or shamans, our culture looks to celebrities to inject a sense of mystique and otherworldliness into what we see as the routine of our ordinary lives. … Having culturally lost a sense of the sacred, we grasp at what seems the closest replica of mystery and transcendence.
And so social media celebrities become our new gods, imparting a sense of the divine into our ordinary lives. Even if you never post, you use celebrities to try to fill the role of God, giving your life a sense of transcendence.6 It's no coincidence that we use a religious word, followers, to describe the people who pay attention to others online.
But why are we so fixated with transcendence? Because we all need how to figure out how to solve the problem of death. Deep down, each of us knows that death is the end of our significance, so we try to create lasting significance by pursuing transcendence through celebrity, hoping that our names will be remembered forever.7
Ernest Becker explains in The Denial of Death that every culture tries to solve death by creating a hero system that “allows us to believe that we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth,” whether that’s conquering an empire, accumulating a fortune, or having a three-generation family. He says that each person:
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.”
Today, our culture’s hero system revolves around becoming a social media celebrity. We believe that if we can become a celebrity on social media, then we’ll be able to become a cultural god, able to transcend death through the memories of our followers and achieve lasting significance. People do everything they can to become a celebrity in the “hope and belief that the things man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his product count.”
And so we use social media as an immortality project, to deny death, be worshiped by our peers, and instill a sense of cosmic specialness into our lives, even if we never become a full-blown celebrity. As Christopher Lasch wrote: “Since the society has no future, it makes sense to live only for the moment, to fix our eyes on our own ‘private performance,’ to become connoisseurs of our own decadence, to cultivate a ‘transcendent self-attention.’”
Celebrity, both our search for and worship of, comes out of our deep desires for significance and ultimately transcendence. We ache to be important, and so we seek out social media celebrity, hopeful that we can transcend death by making a name for ourselves and live on in the memory of our culture forever. We all suspect it won’t work, but in our post-God culture, what other options do we have?
what are the results of our celebrity culture?
Social media celebrity presents itself as the catch-all solution to our deep searches for approval, identity, meaning, purpose, and significance. We think that if we could just become somebody online, we'd solve our insecurity, anxiety, and fear.
But in the end, whether you get five thousand or five million followers, social media celebrity backfires; it doesn’t solve your fear of obscurity but only heightens it. As Jim Carrey says, "I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer." Why is this? Because:
Celebrity doesn't free us, it just traps us on a larger stage: Becoming a celebrity promises freedom from the insecurities of everyday life. But getting more and more people to pay attention to your life won’t free you, but will only increase the scrutiny and social pressure that you feel. As Leo Braudy wrote, "Fame promises freedom from worry about the opinions of others only to trap the aspirer inside an even larger audience."
Celebrity creates a baseless "morality": celebrity culture causes us to forget about right and wrong, and instead base our choices on whatever attracts more attention and recognition. You’ll do whatever it takes to get people to look at you until you become an empty performer. Robert Greene says that when we pursue celebrity "our self-image and self-esteem become tied to the attention we receive on a daily basis. In social media, this often requires becoming increasingly outrageous to capture eyeballs. It is an exhausting and alienating quest, as we become more of a clown than anything else."
Insignificance and anonymity come for everyone: No matter how big of a star you become, you'll eventually be a nobody again. Even the biggest celebrities live with the constant terror that their recognition will not last. A new generation of young people who are cooler, prettier, and more current will soon replace them. As Christopher Lasch says, when "success is so largely a function of youth, glamour, and novelty, glory is more fleeting than ever, and those who win the attention of the public worry incessantly about losing it."
On top of celebrity culture’s inability to solve our search for significance, our obsession with it creates a toxic culture. Young people secretly believe they can and must become a celebrity to prove their value and worth to themselves and their peers.
This causes young people to obsess over themselves to an unhealthy degree. As one writer said, "The problem with celebrity culture is not that it creates too many celebrities, but rather that it makes everyone narcissistic." Young people perform for others, competing for the attention of their peers, hoping they’ll get the worship they think they deserve.
When this doesn't happen, since there are millions of young people vying for a few celebrity spots, many young people fall into a state of self-hatred and inadequacy, frustrated that people aren't paying attention to them. As Richard Rohr says,
"We often think you have to be famous in order to act and think like a celebrity. Most young people think like a celebrity, and then bemoan and get upset about the fact that they aren't a celebrity."
Celebrity culture accentuates our egoism, which Dallas Willard defines as "pathological self-obsession, a reaction to anxiety about whether one really does count." He says that a search for celebrity tries to give "desperate souls an assurance of uniqueness that could protect them from being 'nobody,' at least in their own eyes."
This is why the people who try the hardest to become a celebrity are often the most insecure and unhealthy. They act like they are confident and in control, but deep down, they are frightened people, unsure whether they have any worth at all. They have a deep hunger to be seen and recognized since they have no foundation to prove to themselves that they are significant.
So many young people give their lives to entertaining others, hoping to become the next big thing on social media. But the fleeting attention and recognition will always pass on, leaving stuck on a never-ending treadmill, needing more and more attention to keep your fragile self-worth afloat. As Shep Gordon, an influential talent manager in Hollywood, said, "There's nothing about fame that I've ever seen that's healthy. It is something that is very hard to survive and has no intrinsic value unto itself."
I hope you'll see that celebrity can't solve the problems of our lives. It can give us a temporary buzz of importance, but it can never permanently solve our fear of being a nobody.
so what's the root problem?
So why do we all struggle with this search for significance? Because without God, you have no way to prove that you’re important. If you’re just a random collection of molecules accidentally arranged on a random planet, how can you ever know that you’re significant? This uncertainty forces us to try to prove our importance on our own.
This all started when Adam and Eve sinned against God. Satan convinced them that if they disobeyed God and did their own thing, they’d be as significant and transcendent as God. But as a result of their sin, they introduce death into the world, causing us instead to be put on a path to cosmic insignificance.
The problem with Adam and Eve’s actions wasn’t that they wanted to be like God. That’s what God wanted, too. Their real problem, as David Brenner points out, is that they wanted to become like God without God. He writes:
Their desire to be like God was not in itself the problem. For God had created them in the Divine image and wanted them to be like God. The core of the lie that Adam and Eve believed was that they could be God without God. It is a lie because the autonomy that it promises is an illusion. Trying to gain more than the everything God offers, we end up with less than nothing. Rejecting God, we end up with a nest of lies and illusions. Displacing God, we become a god unto a self.
Adam and Eve refused to be content with just being made in the image of God and instead wanted to be equal to God Himself. They didn’t just want to be a reflection of God, but rather a god themselves. As Albert Camus wrote, "The rebel, who at first denies God, finally aspires to replace him."
That is what celebrity culture is, the desire to be a god and become significant apart from God. In desiring to be a celebrity, we want to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and without beginning or end. We want to replace God and be worshiped as a god.
There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting significance, to be more than ordinary. We each crave significance, recognition, and being valued. Not just temporarily, but for all of time. But since we've rebelled against God, we refuse to base our significance on being made in God’s image, crowned by Him with glory and honor, and instead try to fill this hole on our own.
We see humanity's first major attempt at solving this search for significance apart from God in Genesis 11, when the people of Babel got together and said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves."
They were engaging in their culture's heroic project, to create their significance apart on their own. They denied God's existence and wanted to make their own name for themselves. Having rejected God, we all fall into this same trap, using our lives to make a name for ourselves and prove our significance apart from God.
And so the desire for celebrity is the ultimate end of our post-God world. Now that we no longer believe in his existence, we want to become him. But we're built to be mirrors of God, not God himself. So while you can get rid of God, you doom yourself to a life of cosmic insignificance.
This leads us to the question: is there any way for a human to actually solve our search for significance?
how does the gospel solve this problem?
If we want to ever find a lasting source of significance, we have to turn to the gospel; that’s the only thing that can solve our search for eternal importance. The gospel says that you’re significant not because of the name you make for yourself, but because God, in His abundant love, has chosen you by name. The Apostle Paul says in Ephesians 1:
God chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.
The fact that you are chosen by God to be His son or daughter before you did anything is the ultimate proof of your significance. Henri Nouwen explains why this chosenness changes everything:
As the Beloved, we are God's chosen ones. We have been seen by God from all eternity and seen as unique, special, precious beings. From all eternity, long before you were born and became a part of history, you existed in God's heart. Long before your parents admired you or your friends acknowledged your gifts or your teachers, colleagues, and employers encouraged you, you were already 'chosen.' The eyes of love had seen you as precious, as of infinite beauty, as of eternal value.
Your significance doesn’t come from the amount of attention you get from your strangers on the internet, but rather from the fact that God has chosen you as a special object of His eternal love. In a world telling us that we only have value if we’re a celebrity, Nouwen says, "We have to dare to reclaim the truth that we are God's chosen ones, even when our world doesn't choose us."
But how can God choose us to be His beloved when we’ve rejected Him? God tells us how in Isaiah 43, where Isaiah says: “Thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.’”
When you were chosen by God, you were selected to be redeemed through Jesus Christ. Philippians 2 describes how Jesus became the opposite of a celebrity, leaving His place in heaven to live an ordinary life and redeem God’s chosen people:
"Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Jesus’ spent His life on earth, not as a celebrity, but rather as a servant. Even as His ministry took off, He resisted all celebrity and refused to allow the crowds to make him a king. But the crowds turned against Him and His followers deserted Him, as the religious leaders turned Him over to the Romans to die a criminal’s death,
To us, this sounds like the worst ending possible, but Tim Keller describes how Jesus’ death reversed what we have done through our sin and brought about our redemption:
“Because we substituted ourselves for God by living as if we were God, calling our own shots, deciding what was right and wrong, living for our own glory, importance, and fulfillment; because we put ourselves in God's place, God has put himself in our place. Because we substitute ourselves for him, he substitutes himself for us.”
Paul explains that through God’s plan, Jesus’ “failure” as a celebrity resulted in eternal life for God’s chosen beloved, and more glory and honor than any earthly celebrity could ever earn: “God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.”
So how does this apply to you? Now, having been united with Christ through His death and resurrection, God crowns you with the name of Jesus, with all the honor and glory He deserves. This redemption means that we no longer have to make a name for ourselves, but rather can rest in the significance of Jesus’ name. As Tim Keller said: “The pressure is off for all of us to make a name for ourselves. Jesus has made a name for us already.”
This is why Jesus could tell his disciples in Luke that their significance doesn’t come from their ability to do incredible things for other people, but rather because their names were written in the Lamb’s book of life. Being chosen by God ensures that we will defeat death and secures us a place of eternal importance in heaven. As Henri Nouwen wrote:
Our preciousness, uniqueness, and individuality are not given to us by those who meet us in clock-time—our brief chronological existence—but by the One who has chosen us with an everlasting love, a love that existed from all eternity and will last through all eternity.
When you realize that He has chosen you by name, you will no longer need to hear the crowds cheering and worshiping your name. When we ground our significance on being chosen and redeemed by God, we realize, as one pastor put it, that “my place in heaven is secure. It doesn't matter whether I'm recognized on earth or not because I know who I am. The Christian knows that they are going to God and Jesus will reward you for everything that you do.”
Only the gospel of God’s love for us can fill us with the eternal significance that we’re looking for. We can know that we are significant, not because the crowds of social media cheer for us, but rather because God has chosen us for all eternity.
what does gospel-saturated social media look like?
When we let these truths saturate our lives, they’ll change how we use social media. Social media changes from trying to entertain others in hopes of receiving a transcendent amount of attention, to using your ordinary “clay pot” life to display the treasure of God’s love.
As you rest in your chosenness and in the name Jesus has made for you, it won’t matter whether the world ever recognizes your life or not. While recognition is nice, you have a Father in heaven who is beyond pleased with you as you faithfully carry out the ordinary life He has called you to live.
When you deeply know that you are chosen by God, you can use your life (and by extension social media) to serve others, rather than entertain them. As Jesus told his disciples when they were arguing over who was the greatest:
Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your servant, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.
Jesus wants us all to understand: in the kingdoms of this world, the celebrity is ultimate, but in the kingdom of God, the servant is who is most important.
This will set you free into the paradox of gospel-saturated social media: when you give up your obsession with trying to be interesting and special, you’ll quit copying the shallow pseudo-events that social media celebrities use to entertain others, and you’ll pursue the important things that are truly worth celebrating. You'll realize that:
Attention does not equal importance.
Recognition does not equal success.
Celebrity does not equal significance.
As you get this, you’ll accept the specific calling that God has placed on your life, even if the world says it’s too ordinary and insignificant, because you know that no changes in your earthly standing could ever make you more important to God.
When you let God give us His eternal significance through Jesus Christ, our hearts are filled with His love and we are freed to use social media as we follow Jesus and serve others, rather than to use social media to get others to follow and serve us.
This is the whole plotline of Avril Lavigne’s Sk8ter Boi: “He was a skater boy, she said see you later boy, he wasn’t good enough for her. Now he’s a superstar, slamming on his guitar, does your pretty face see what he’s worth?”
Today, we have celebrities in every area of life, whether they are a celebrity chef, entrepreneur, actor, or housewife.
Alexander Hamilton’s life is a perfect example of this. Current interest in his life isn’t driven by what he accomplished as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, but because Lin-Manuel Miranda used the twists and turns of his story to entertain us through a musical.
Getting engaged in today’s world is an example of a pseudo-event. The couple acts like it is a spontaneous event, but the whole day has been carefully scripted down to the minute, from the photographer hiding in the bushes to the friends waiting at the engagement party.
You could see the generational divide when social media started expanding deeper into our lives. Older generations felt like young people were sharing details about their lives that were inappropriate for the public, while young people approached things more pragmatically since it got them the views that they wanted.
Look at how people go crazy when they are around their favorite celebrities, it is almost as if they are interacting with the divine. When you see a celebrity, you are shocked; you can't believe they are real. They seem supernatural, as if they exist above life.
This is why Jay-Z says: “My name shall be passed down to generations while debating up in barbershops” in his song Young Forever.