I’ve been working on my social media series behind the scenes over the last few months, trying to figure out how to explain things in a way that makes sense. Today’s the fourth essay in the series, about how we use social media to search for meaning.
Essay 1: Getting to the heart of social media
"Man is a being in search of meaning. We have seen that today his search is unsatisfied and thus constitutes the pathology of our age." — Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
As I was scrolling through Instagram a few weeks ago, I went by an ad for a therapy app. A guy in his twenties was sitting on a couch, explaining how he was haunted by the question, “Do I actually matter?” While few of us ever ask this question so directly, every human being is faced with this question: does my life matter?
At the heart of this question is a desire for meaning. Every person is on a search for meaning, for a way to feel like their life makes sense and contributes to something worthwhile. We all ache to know that our lives are valuable and make a difference in the world around us. Every person that exists wants to know that their life matters, that what they’re doing makes a difference. We all ache to know that our lives are valuable and have worth.
While few people ever acknowledge how much this search for meaning drives their lives, it’s one of the core motivations for why our culture flocks to share our lives on social media.
life and the search for meaning
Before we can understand how our search for meaning drives us to use social media, we have to think about what meaning even means. Meaning is what you feel when you can connect the day-to-day events of your life to something significant. It happens when you understand how the different parts of your life fit together and contribute to something worthwhile.
All of us crave meaning and are always probing our lives for it. We constantly trying to figure out whether the random parts and experiences of our lives are meaningful to us. If you can understand how something contributes to where you’re going in life, then you feel meaning. But if you can’t, then you feel meaningless, like it is just a waste of time.
The easiest way to see our search for meaning is to see how much we hate meaninglessness, when we can’t connect the events of our lives to something significant. I remember when teachers would assign busy work to my class in high school. “Why do we have to do this?” we’d all complain, “It doesn’t matter.” Even though we never formally asked the questions of meaning, we instantly knew that these assignments were meaningless, meant to kill time and not increase our understanding.
Finding meaning consists of two parts: an event and an overarching framework. To have meaning, you use the overarching framework to interpret your life and figure out how the events of your life fit together. You use this interpretative framework like a LEGO instruction booklet; it shows you how all of the little pieces of your life fit together into a coherent whole.
So what do we use as a framework to interpret the individual parts of our lives? A story. We use stories to find meaning, as they help us arrange the events of our lives into a narrative and interpret how everything is connected. As the philosopher Mortimer Adler wrote:
Life is incredibly complex, there are lots of things going on in our environment and in our lives at all times, and to hold onto our experience, we need to make meaning out of it. The way we do that is by structuring our lives into stories.
A story allows you to simplify all of the random details of your life into one linear line of thought, giving you the ability to make sense of your life and show how it all fits together. It's why when you go on a date with someone you don't exchange random facts about your lives, but rather tell each other your life stories.
Stories help us connect the dots of our lives and align the random points of our lives into a coherent whole that we can then use to interpret whether something feels meaningful or meaningless. This is why Joan Didion wrote, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
And so every person uses some type of story as a framework by which they interpret their life and determine whether something feels meaningful. When an event contributes to our overarching story, you feel meaning. But when an event doesn’t fit in with our overarching story, then you feel meaningless. For example:
If you dream of being a lawyer, studying for the LSAT will feel meaningful while studying calculus will feel meaningless.
If you dream of playing college basketball, practicing shooting a basketball will feel meaningful while practicing oil painting will feel meaningless.
If you dream of falling in love, watching romantic comedies will feel meaningful while watching a documentary on the Civil War will feel meaningless.
So what does all of this have to do with social media? (See, you're already asking a question of meaning!) One of the key reasons social media has become so popular is that we use these apps to create meaning by telling our life stories.
what stories does our culture use to find meaning?
Historically, people in our culture found meaning in their lives by interpreting their lives through the Bible's story of life. People would gain a sense of significance and a belief that their lives mattered as they viewed the day-to-day events of their lives through the Bible’s narrative for life.
But when philosophers in the 1800s like Friedrich Nietzsche declared that God was dead, people began to reject God’s existence, and with that, the belief that you should interpret your life through the Bible’s narrative. This accelerated in the 1960s, as the belief spread that there was no transcendent story (a metanarrative) that you could use to interpret your life and find meaning.
This created a problem, though. If you reject God and His story as your reference point for finding meaning, you have to find another way to prove that your life is valuable and that the ordinary events of day-to-day life matter. This created a crisis of meaning, as the intellectual class announced that there was no longer any transcendent story you could use to make sense of your life. The famous French thinker Jean-Paul Sartre summarized it like this:
If I’ve discarded God the Father…life has no meaning a priori. Before you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning you choose.
He’s saying that because there’s no transcendent story, there’s no way that life has inherent meaning. But rather than replace God’s story, our culture believes that now there’s no story: human life started as an accident and will end as an accident. As the famous Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould explains, this has a huge impact on how we find meaning:
We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar anatomy that would transform into legs for terrestrial creatures. We are here because comets struck the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, giving us mammals the chance that otherwise would not have been available. So thank your lucky stars, in a literal sense.
Now this explanation of why we are here, though superficially troubling, if not terrifying, is ultimately liberating and exhilarating. We cannot read the meaning of life from nature, we must construct the meaning of life ourselves.
His last phrase makes the views of our current society clear: you can't find meaning in life, but rather must create it yourself. As this belief has taken over our culture, we now assume that life has no meaning and that it's up to us to create it ourselves. As Joseph Campbell, an influential professor in the 1980s, declared: "Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer."
As often happens, what starts as academic beliefs eventually trickles down into popular culture. I recently ran across a guy in his mid-twenties who sang these lyrics to his 300,000 Instagram followers:
I'm pretty sure that life doesn't have a meaning. And if there's a god he doesn't look like me. We've only been around 200,000 years out of 13.5 billion years! There's a couple hundred billion stars, and we act like it was all made for us?
I'm not important and neither are you, so let's do whatever we want to do. Bask in our cosmic insignificance, soak up this blip we're living in. Cause nothing matters anyway. Isn't that great!
This song reads like a paraphrase of Gould: there's no God, so quit trying to find meaning in life. The only way to answer the question of “does my life matter?” is to admit that it doesn’t. And while this sounds terrifying, at least you’re free to do whatever you want! The Australian pastor Mark Sayers describes our culture well when he says:
We no longer look for meaning from our greater cultural stories (religion, country, town). Instead, we work to create meaning in our own story. This is no story more important than my story. The success of others doesn't matter as much as my own success. There's no greater story than individual success.
This is why social media is so important to our search for meaning. Young people today still yearn for meaning, for an overarching story to make sense of their lives and feel that they are valuable, but our culture tells us there’s no way to find meaning in life; that it’s up to each of us to create our own meaning in life.
So how does our culture try to solve this tension? By using social media to elevate our personal story into the universe’s most important story, using it to then interpret the individual events of our lives in an attempt to satisfy our search for meaning and show that our lives matter. As one Instagram influencer proclaimed, “The meaning of life is to create a life of meaning.”
I know we've covered a lot of ground in this first section, so here's a quick summary:
Every person is searching for meaning, the feeling that their life matters and makes sense.
Our culture tells us that because there's no God and transcendent story for the world, there's no such thing as ultimate meaning.
To solve this dilemma, we use social media to elevate our lives into the most important story in the universe and try to create meaning by telling our stories and interpreting our lives.
So if social media is what we use to create meaning in our lives, then how does that happen?
how do you use social media to create meaning?
To use social media to create meaning, we have to first turn our lives into a personal story. You see, all of us have a personal story that we are writing in our heads, a story where you make sense of your life and tie all of the random things you experience into one coherent narrative.
Dan McAdams, a narrative psychologist from Northwestern, says that through our personal story, "each of us discovers what is true and what is meaningful in life. In order to live well, with unity and purpose, we compose a heroic narrative of the self." We do this to “provide our scattered and confusing experiences with a sense of coherence by arranging the episodes of our lives into stories."
Your personal story helps you arrange the scattered events of your life into one lifelong story, bringing together memories and experiences from childhood to high school to your current life stage.
While your personal story gets written in your head, social media gives us each a platform to share this private story with the world. And so when we share our lives on social media, we’re not just posting random pieces of information, but rather using these apps to share our story scene-by-scene and interpret our lives, in hopes of creating a sense of meaning.
While there are no official instructions to use social media in this way, these apps are designed to make us feel like we are the main character of the universe, while giving us the tools to interpret our lives. I recently saw an Insta Story where a New York City influencer shared this message with his followers:
What story do you want to tell? Where are the places you want to go? Here's your sign: go, do, see. Create your experience. There's no time to waste. Fall in love with your life. Have the courage to author your story. Romanticize your life. This is a movie and you're the main character.
Through this monologue, he encourages his followers to:
View your life as a movie.
View yourself as the main character.
View your role as the author of your story.
View your life as a story that you are responsible for creating.
While he doesn’t explicitly mention it, we all understand that social media is what we’re supposed to use to do these things. Social media is where we share our life, showing what we’re up to and how our life story is progressing. Social media lets you be the main character of your life, but also the narrator, explaining your inner thoughts on life to your audience.
It’s through this experience, that we use social media to act, author, and narrate our life story, that we create meaning. As you share your life post by post, you aren’t just giving highlights, but rather revealing your life’s plot scene-by-scene, using your role as narrator to explain what’s happening and tie everything together. You use these posts to interpret your lives, weaving our accomplishments, setbacks, and experiences into a grand narrative that makes us feel like we matter and are contributing to something important.
You can see this in every person on social media. We all frame our lives through the elements of a story, starting with you, the main character and protagonist. As you share about your life, you establish a setting and introduce the supporting characters of your life, including your friends, spouse, children, coworkers, or peers.
Over time, you will use your social media posts to reveal the motive or desire that’s driving your personal story. Every story is built around the protagonist wanting something, whether it’s to get married, find happiness, or turn their business into a success. In our culture, the three most popular motives for our personal stories break down into three major categories:
Self-achievement: the desire to be successful/make progress. People who are motivated by this show how they are accomplishing their goals in life and making progress toward what society considers success.
Self-discovery: the desire to be authentic. People who are motivated by this show how through reflection and inner work they have come to a greater understanding of who they are and why they are on earth.
Self-belonging: the desire to be accepted by others. People who are motivated by this show how they have strong relationships with all of the important people in their lives, such as their spouse, children, friends, coworkers, and neighbors.
Now a story where the main character instantly attains their desire would be boring. To create intrigue, we use our posts to identify a villain, either real or imagined, that is working against your and your desire. Your villain could be a person, such as a boss, your ex, your messy children, or people who didn’t believe in you. It could also be an abstraction, such as the monotonous suburbs, work, winter weather, trauma, or an oppressive society.
As you pursue your desires and try to overcome your villain, this leads to conflict, the battle between good and evil. While conflict makes us most of a movie, most people on social media avoid sharing during the messy middle of life, choosing instead to share only once they have defeated their villain and achieved resolution, their version of “happily ever after.” When they post at this point of resolution, they interpret the struggle and draw out themes from their story to share with their audience.
I know that these terms are abstract, so here are some examples from the most popular kinds of personal stories that young people tell on social media:
As you use social media to share your life story, you take the random events of your life and turn them into a coherent narrative where everything fits together. We do this by engaging in what McAdams calls autobiographical reasoning, where we "identify lessons learned or insights gained in life experiences, marking development or growth through a sequence of scenes, and showing how specific life episodes illustrate enduring truths about the self."
Autobiographical reasoning is how we process our lives, as we make narrative choices about which events to feature (getting engaged, buying a house, vacations, having a child) and which events to hide (ordinary events and setbacks) as we weave our life together and use it to create meaning.
We create meaning by using different techniques to create coherence, the feeling that life fits together and contributes to something greater. We work to create:
Chronological coherence: we create coherence in our stories by arranging the events in a chronological sequence. Our social media stories have a beginning and end and we work to show how the major events of our lives lead from one to another. Here’s a real example:
"Our story is unique: we met, we traveled, we got engaged, got pregnant, eloped, sold our things, got pregnant again…who knows what is next!?"
Causal coherence: we use our social media stories to show cause-and-effect relationships between different events. This type of coherence shows how the events of our lives don’t just follow each other, but rather cause each other, explaining how they are interconnected. Here’s a real example:
“Me: 25, unemployed, divorced, in debt → buys a minivan → 4 years of creating a new story and falling in love with my life."
Thematic coherence: we also create coherence by drawing out different themes, values, morals, and life lessons. We share what we have learned from different events and situations in life and how the events of our lives follow the same core themes. Here’s a real example:
“What if I told you that you were in the driver's seat of your life? For me, that experience came when I decided to end my marriage. It was the first thing I did in my life for me, and putting my own self first. Remember, life is a living document. You're never done growing."
Everyone on social media is using these techniques and others (like throwback posts, where we reinterpret past events through the lens of present circumstances) to engage in meaning-making, the process of showing that the events of our lives matter.
Social media gives us all kinds of ways to share our interpretations and create meaning out of our lives. We're always narrativizing our lives as we discuss key themes, reframe flashbacks from our past, or celebrate the milestones that give our lives shape. We feel meaning when we defeat our villains, overcome obstacles, and find the resolution we are looking for.
It’s important to remember that social media isn’t a factual recounting of life, but rather a subjective interpretation of how certain events fit into your life story. We are so hungry for coherence between the events of our lives that we twist and exaggerate what happens to us to fit our preferred interpretation and lead to a greater sense of meaning.
At this point, you might be thinking, “But I never post on social media, so this doesn’t describe me, right?!” People who don’t share their lives on social media don’t refuse to post because they don’t have a personal story, but rather because they are afraid that their story isn’t compelling or interesting enough to share. So they clam up, using these platforms just to watch other people’s life stories from the cheap seats of life.
Social media stories, to give us a sense of meaning, need more than just coherence and connection, they also need significance. And the best way to pursue significance is by telling the types of stories our culture says are important. In our culture, the shared stories that we find significant are salvation stories, where the main character overcomes their villain and solves their problems.
what kind of stories do we tell on social media to create meaning?
Salvation stories are as old as civilization, since human beings have always been looking for a way to solve their problems and create a happy ending. Why else would every fairy tale ends with the phrase, “And they lived happily ever after.”
In our culture, we create meaning through our social media stories to show how our the events of our lives contribute to our own version of heaven on earth. Whether it's a guy living in a van watching a sunset, a family with young kids unwrapping Christmas presents in matching pajamas, or a happy couple on their wedding day, the unspoken goal of our social media stories is always, "I am in my version of heaven, living out my happily ever after!"
It's important to realize, though, that since our culture doesn't find the existence of God plausible, salvation doesn't mean being saved from sin and going to a future heaven, but rather centers on self-actualization and the life of perpetual happiness that you create by defeating your story’s villain(s).
There are two main types of salvation stories that people use on social media to create meaning in their lives and show how they are making progress toward their version of heaven.
The first type of salvation story is "from good to even better" stories. In this type of story, people start with ideal circumstances but then build off of these advantages to make their lives even better.
These people tell a social media story where they get the kind of life that everyone wants, where things work out perfectly. They get into the right college, land their dream job, marry a beautiful person, buy the coolest home, and find themselves surrounded by other high-achieving people just like them. Sure, they have a lot of natural advantages in life, but they rise to a higher level of salvation through their hard work, talent, and personality.
I recently ran across a husband and wife who were using their social media profiles to tell this type of salvation story. As I scrolled through their profiles, they explained how they were high school sweethearts, went to the same college, and got married right after graduation. He then went to Harvard Law School while she stayed home and loved taking care of their right-on-time babies, before he landed his dream job in Colorado and they found their perfect home in the mountains, leaving only to take their kids on vacations to places like New Zealand and Thailand.
This type of salvation story makes our social media profiles appear like a charmed life, where we have no major problems and are always able to handle life. Read how another woman summarized her “from good to even better” story in a post, sharing:
When you and your husband have no New Year's resolutions, no new diets or big changes planned, but you do have a happy marriage, healthy napping babies, and confidence we can handle whatever this year brings.
The underlying message in these types of stories is clear: my life is so good that I don't even need a savior, since I’m able to handle my life on my own. I saw this message most clearly in another Instagram post, where a guy in his thirties showed himself meditating at some trendy desert resort in California with the caption: "When you realize everything is working out exactly as it's supposed to be."
But this type of self-salvation story is hard to pull off. Why? Because while you might be able to suppress your struggles or setbacks for a while, eventually, everyone experiences something that doesn't fit an "everything's going great!" plot. When this happens, people tell a second type of salvation story, one that goes from bad to good.
A "from bad to good" story is a redemptive story, where you take a bad situation and turn it around through your effort and ability. In a redemptive story, you admit that something went wrong in your life, whether you were poor, overweight, or feeling directionless in life.
But then, through their social media posts, these people share how they solved their problems and fixed their lives, redeeming their problems into something good. After summoning up your inner resolve, they figured out how to turn your life around, redeeming the situation and making things go from bad to good. Some examples of popular redemptive stories I’ve seen are:
You were tired of being overweight so you dedicated your life to working out and now you have a good-looking body.
You got fired from your job but this allowed you to finally start the business you always dreamed of.
You were struggling with anxiety but after going to therapy and learning how to meditate, you now have the confidence to achieve your dreams.
The underlying message of a redemptive story is that if your life does go wrong, you can be your own savior and do the work to save yourself.
Redemptive stories can also focus on how other people save us, though. Here's a redemptive story that an acquaintance of mine posted after she got engaged:
I did not think I would ever find a man this romantic…I honestly gave up. But after meeting him for a quick layover trip while he was nearby and then talking long distance until I finally saw him in person again—I told him, "You are my lost dream." I didn't know how many dreams I had lost until I met him, because he showed me everything I was missing—everything I had longed for was suddenly found.
In this post, she shares how her fiancé has redeemed her life. She had given up on the hope of happiness, but through the redeeming love of her boyfriend, she is now entering a heavenly state: the perfect marriage that she's always dreamed about. This redemption allows her to make sense of and create meaning out of years of bad dates and lonely nights: they were all preparing her for this!
So why do we tell so many redemptive stories? Because they help us to create meaning out of difficult and stressful moments in life, things that usually feel meaningless. Redemptive stories allow us to re-narrativize our setbacks and save face in a culture that hates failure. We can prove that we have overcome our disappointments and are still progressing toward our goals of self-salvation.
When we tell "from bad to good" stories on social media, we admit that we need a savior, but focus on how we can save ourselves. This is why people only post about their bad moments once they have "redeemed" themselves and gotten their life together again. Their redemptive story shows how their personal story is still tracking towards salvation, giving hope that our lives are still getting better. As Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco writes in his book The Real American Dream:
Human beings need to organize the inchoate sensations by which we pass our days—pain, desire, pleasure, fear—into a story. When that story leads somewhere and thereby helps us navigate through life…it gives us hope.
Hope, the belief that things will get better, is why we love self-salvation stories so much; they help convince us that life is going to keep improving until we end up with our happy ending. Social media salvation stories help our culture cling fervently to John Lennon's line: “Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.”
So if social media helps create meaning through stories of personal salvation, everything must be great, right? There's just one problem: no matter how hard you try to create meaning through your own story, it will never give you the lasting meaning that you’re looking for.
what's the problem with trying to find meaning through your social media story?
Your social media story will never give you the meaning you’re searching for in life because everyone will eventually encounter life events and circumstances that you can’t redeem. Contrary to John Lennon's platitude and the general tenor of social media, no one's personal story will ultimately have a happy ending. While we hate to admit it, we are all finite people living in a world full of brokenness, setbacks, suffering, sickness, and ultimately, death.
You might be able to use your social media story of self-salvation to distract yourself from this fact, but no matter how hard you work, you can’t change this reality. What’s the problem with this?
If you are trusting in your story to give you meaning in life, then you have built your life on a ticking time bomb. At some point, your personal story will hit a wall and fall apart, causing you to lose all sense of meaning. You’ll realize that nothing matters and free-fall into crisis.
This is what happened to Leo Tolstoy, one of the most successful novelists of all time. When Tolstoy turned 50, he had a spiritual crisis, as he realized that if his life was all that there was, then he couldn't prove that he mattered and that his life meant anything. His reflections are striking:
I stood on that summit — like an arch-fool — seeing clearly that there is nothing in life, and that there has been and will be nothing. … I could give no reasonable meaning to any single action or to my whole life. I was only surprised that I could have avoided understanding this from the very beginning. Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come to those I love or to me; nothing will remain but stench and worms. Sooner or later my affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort?
How can man fail to see this? And how go on living? This is what is surprising! One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud!
My question…was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man from the foolish child to the wisest elder: it was a question without an answer to which one cannot live, as I had found by experience. It was: “What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?” Differently expressed, the question is: “Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?” It can also be expressed thus: “Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”
Had I simply understood that life had no meaning I could have borne it quietly, knowing that that was my lot. But I could not satisfy myself with that. …And to rid myself with terror I wished to kill myself.
As Tolstoy aged, he was unable to find meaning in life that held up to the reality of death, causing him to be haunted by the question, “Does any of my life matter?” When he realized that he and everyone he loved would die and eventually be forgotten, he lost all meaning in life. Tolstoy was stuck in the human dilemma that we all face; he wanted his life to matter but his beliefs about the world gave him no way to show that it did.
Tolstoy acknowledges that these questions seem unimportant when you are young and intoxicated with life, like 99% of the people in our social media circles. We assume that everyone else will die except for us, and are confident that our lives and social media stories will continue to progress toward a meaningful end.
But Tolstoy is right. Eventually, we all have to face the question that he asked: "Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?" Irving Yalom, a leading secular psychotherapist, has written about how we all struggle with the same question:
If death is inevitable, if all of our accomplishments, indeed our entire solar system, shall one day lie in ruins, if human beings must construct the world and the human design within that world, then what enduring meaning can there be in life?
If you use your social media story to create meaning, it might help you feel a sense of meaning for a while, but eventually, you will experience suffering, sickness, and failure, things that you can't redeem through your own story. And when your personal story hits a wall, if you don't have a greater story to give you meaning then you are going to experience profound meaninglessness. You will have no way to prove that anything that you’ve done ultimately matters.
If you operate out of the secular understanding of the universe, that you are just a random collection of molecules accidentally thrown together in an impersonal universe, you will reach a point where you can’t create meaning. There's just no way to spin evil, suffering, and death into a self-salvation "happily ever after" narrative.
If we no longer have a transcendent story to connect our lives to, then our lives break down. Richard Rohr describes how this happens:
Without a transcendent connection, each of us is stuck in his own little psyche, struggling to create meaning and produce an identity all by himself. When we inevitably fail at this—because we can't do it alone—we suffer shame and self-defeat. Without a functioning storyline in which to place our small story, we get lost in our own insignificance.
What Rohr describes here is what is happening in the lives of so many young people on social media today. When our attempts at creating meaning on our own inevitably fail, we feel shame and self-defeat, blaming ourselves for not being able to tell a self-salvation story. But as people lose meaning in life, Rohr explains how things get worse:
When people lose a meaningful storyline for their lives, they disintegrate both personally and culturally. A mythic universe holds the individual and group soul together, by giving it purpose and meaning. It operates in our unconscious for the most part, but when it breaks down, sickness, addiction, neuroses, desperation, and suicide prevail.
Tragically, so many young people on social media today struggle with these feelings. They look like they're doing well because that’s when they post on social media but inwardly struggle with melancholy, anxiety, disillusionment, and stagnation, which culminates in despair, the belief that we’ve lost all hope of salvation.
When their social media story is making progress, they feel like their life is filled with meaning. But the moment there's a downturn, a stumble, a setback, or even a moment of uncertainty, they lose all meaning in life since there's no greater story to make sense of these difficulties. They sink into despair, convinced that if you can't save yourself through your own story that there's no way to ever experience salvation.
If you don't find meaning in a story bigger than yourself then you will never have a meaning that can make it through hard times. Even if your life goes well for a bit, someday, like Tolstoy, you’ll be confronted with your eventual mortality and ultimate insignificance and wonder, "Why am I doing this? What's it all for?" That's the reaction that the writer of Ecclesiastes, pondering life without God, had:
Everything is meaningless. What does man gain from all his labor? Generations come and go. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun. There is no remembrance of men of old. So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
Our culture’s attempts at trying to create meaning have yielded catastrophic results, yet we struggle to even name the problem, much less find a way to solve it. As Victor Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning: "Man is a being in search of meaning. We have seen that today his search is unsatisfied and thus constitutes the pathology of our age." So why do our attempts at creating meaning go so badly?
so what is the root issue?
The real issue with our culture’s attempts at trying to create meaning through our own story is that it doesn’t solve the root problem: having each rejected God and His transcendent story, we are separated from the only thing that can give our lives a meaning that suffering and death can’t take away.
You see, before sin, Adam and Eve lived a completely meaningful life, totally connected to God's story for the world. But then Adam and Eve rebelled against God's plan for their lives ("Don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil"), thinking that if they were free to write their own story they'd experience even more meaning. Rather than experience a greater sense of meaning, though, Adam and Eve were cut off from God's story, plunging them into lives that were disconnected from all lasting meaning.
But if rejecting God leaves us trapped in a world with no ultimate meaning, then why don’t people pursue a relationship with God? Because like Adam and Eve, we think that God’s story for our lives will hold us back, so we keep Him at arm’s length and try to create meaning on our own.
Even though our lives are filled with meaninglessness outside of a connection to a transcendent God, Satan has convinced us that God's story of the universe will oppress our lives and keep us from having fun. This is what the famous writer Aldous Huxley wrote:
I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.
The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do.
For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.
Huxley is clear about his desires: he wanted a world without meaning because in a world without God, he could have total control over his story. In our sinful condition, we find God’s story too stuffy, boring, and bland. What do you mean by no sex outside marriage? What do you mean by being generous towards others? What do you mean by loving our neighbor as yourself? No thank you. We want to be the main character of the universe and be free to do whatever we want to with our lives.
But if you refuse to acknowledge God and live in a relationship with Him, there's no way to find lasting meaning in life. If there's nothing transcendent in life, then there's nothing that will last beyond your life. You're consigning yourself to a frustrating life where malaise, stagnation, and despair will be your end. As Tim Keller says:
If there’s no God, you’re an accident. And an accident has no purpose or meaning at all. If there’s no God, it doesn’t matter how much order and structure you try to put into your life, you will continue to feel like an accident.
This is the problem with our culture's secular approach. If your beginning is an accident and your ending is nonexistence then there's no way to create real meaning in the middle. Without God, you’re just an accident on earth for 70 or 80 years before you’re gone forever. How could your life matter in that story?
Our culture tells us that we are the center of the universe and responsible for creating meaning in our lives, but as we experience life, we realize that this isn't working. But despite the symptoms of our meaninglessness, no one knows how to fix our meaning problem. Is there any hope for a solution? Can we find a meaning in this life that suffering won't diminish and death won't take away?
how do you solve this problem?
The only answer to this problem is the gospel. The gospel tells us that ultimate meaning is possible if you’ll quit trying to save yourself through your own story and instead surrender your life to God’s transcendent story.
To do that, you have to repent of trying to be the main character and savior of your life and instead admit your need for Jesus to be your redeemer and reconnect you to the Bible’s redemptive story for the world. You see, the Bible isn’t a rulebook that helps you fix your life, but rather the story of how the transcendent God of the universe entered into the world through His Son to redeem us from death and draw us back into His eternal story.
God, as the author of the universe's story, wrote Himself into humanity's story through Jesus and came to earth to change the ending of your story. Jesus, through His death and resurrection, took the ending we deserved, death and eternal separation from God, and gave us the happily ever after that He deserved, salvation and eternal life with God. As the Apostle Paul says in Romans 6: "For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his."
To be grafted back into God's story and the ending Jesus provides, you have to admit that you can't save yourself and repent of believing that:
You are the main character of the universe.
Your story is the most important one being told.
You can create lasting meaning by making sure your story is always progressing.
You can redeem your life by saving yourself and sharing your redemptive narrative.
You have to let go of trying to be your own savior and instead recognize that you can only be redeemed through Jesus' work. We weren't made to create meaning through our own stories, but rather to find meaning, coherence, and significance in the story of Jesus, the alpha and omega of the universe.
When you repent of trying to be the main character of your own story and surrender your life to Jesus’ story, you can find ultimate meaning even when your life isn’t going well, because you are interpreting your life through what Jesus has done.
It’s important to remember that the gospel doesn’t give our lives transcendent meaning by giving you an easy life with no suffering or setbacks, but rather because God’s promises give you a despair-fighting hope even among hardship. We see how this happens in David's life, as he dances on the edge of despair in Psalm 37, wondering whether his life matters:
O Lord, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am! Behold, you have made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is as nothing before you. Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath! Surely a man goes about as a shadow!
… And now, O Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you.
David could experience meaning even when his own story was falling apart, not because he could redeem his circumstances or spin the perfect story, but rather because he entrusts his life to God’s story, which gave him hope. As he wrote in Psalm 23:
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Surely your goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
David was able to find meaning even while he feared for his life because he knew God’s goodness and mercy would always be with him. He didn’t think that he’d never struggle, but rather that God would walk with him every step of the way.
We hear a similar message from Paul, who found hope even during immense suffering by entrusting his story to Jesus. He says in Philippians 1: "I am sure of this, that He who began a good work in your will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ." Paul’s confidence that God was working in his life until Jesus came back gave him the hope he needed to find meaning in his suffering and avoid despair. As he wrote in 2 Corinthians: "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair."
This is how the saints of the Bible, whether it was Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Ruth, or Esther, were able to maintain meaning in life even during difficult times of suffering and disappointment; they didn’t find meaning by trying to create a perfect life but rather by trusting God's promises and interpreting their personal story through His great redemptive story. They trusted that God was working every part of their story for good, even the hard parts. As Joseph said, "You meant it for evil but God meant it for good."
When you entrust your life to God's story, you can now interpret your story, even your death, through God’s promises, giving you a hope that will never fade away. While death still stings in God’s story, it’s not the end of our existence, but rather the beginning of our eternal “happily ever after” with God. God gives us a sneak peek at the end of His story in Revelation 21, where He promises that at the end of time, He will wipe away every tear from your eyes and that there will no longer be any mourning, crying, pain, and death.
When you connect your life to this story, you will gain a meaning that even death can't take away, as your life becomes the place where God is telling His story of redemption and working out His promises to you, one day at a time.
what would gospel-saturated social media look like?
So how does living a life saturated in the hope of the gospel change how we use social media? Does this mean we can't post anymore or tell stories about ourselves? Or that every post has to be a cliche gospel presentation?
To treat social media like that would be an overreaction. The problem with social media isn't that you view your life as a story, that's how God wired humans after all, but rather that you're trying to make your story into the most important one in the universe.
Gospel-saturated social media happens when you share about your life out of an understanding that you aren’t the hero of your story, but rather a supporting character in God’s drama: the reconciliation and renewal of all things to Him. A Christian is someone who realizes that life is not about developing and telling our own story, but rather surrendering to and participating in God’s eternal story.
It's when you do this that you will gain meaning and significance, as you recognize that your personal story is part of God's great story for the world. As Richard Rohr wrote:
"Our ordinary lives are given an extraordinary significance when we accept that our lives are about something much larger, our pain is a participation in a redemptive suffering of God, our creativity is the very passion of God for the world. No longer do we need to self-validate, self-congratulate, or self-doubt—our place in the cosmos is assured. I do not need to be the whole play or even understand the full script. It is enough to know that I have been chosen to be one actor on the stage. I need to only play my part as well as I can."
There are two key implications from all of this. The first is that the gospel sets you free from the pressure of needing to be the universe's main character. Your profile is no longer just about you, but rather your partnership with God as He tells His eternal story of making all things new. This gospel-saturated perspective on social media will help you to stop:
Obsessing over the trajectory of your personal story.
Oversharing the minutiae of your life in an attempt to gain more attention.
Fixating on how you spin your life to look like you are always winning.
Projecting an image where you never have any struggles, setbacks, or disappointments.
You are set free from trying to tell some story of trying to save yourself and instead admit what’s actually going on in your life, both in the good times and bad.
But the second implication of the gospel is equally valuable. Even though the gospel forces you to realize that your personal story isn't ultimate, it tells you that your story is still incredibly important. Your story is so valuable to the God of the universe that He sent His Son to redeem you and graft your story into God's. The gospel tells you that because you are created, loved, and redeemed by God, your story has infinite value.
Many people look at their lives and think that their story doesn't matter. But the gospel assures you that your story is valuable and that your life is on track. A gospel-saturated perspective on social media will empower you to:
Believe that your story matters since it is where God's carrying out His redemptive work.
Share parts of your life on social media, even if you aren’t telling the most amazing or successful story.
Shine the spotlight on other people around you who are doing great things for God, since life isn't based on whether your story is the most successful.
This is the delightful paradox of social media that happens when you bring these two implications together (that you are simultaneously not important and incredibly important). You can realize that since your story isn't ultimate, you don't have to obsess over how your life is going, but because you've been chosen and loved by God, your story is still important.
Living in God's story means that we are now called to something bigger than ourselves. The irony is that people who try to live the biggest story end up with the littlest, but the ones who throw themselves into God’s story will live forever. As we see over and over, God always works through the flawed stories of ordinary people to accomplish His plan.
When you interpret your life through God's redemptive story, you both find meaning and gain significance, even if by human standards you are living an insignificant life. Your life is part of the greatest story ever told, whether you have two hundred or two million followers.
This is the beauty of gospel-saturated social media: through the gospel, God doesn't erase your story, but instead connects it to His transcendent story for the world, giving you eternal meaning and worth. Your life is giving a deep well of meaning, not because you’re life is always easy and advancing, but because it’s the place where God is making all things new as He works out His redemptive plan for the universe.
Wow, what an insightful essay, Luke! I have been really enjoying this social media series. You have put into words how social media has become a tool for so many for finding identity and fulfillment in something that ultimately isn’t Christ. I used to post on and scroll through social media quite often, and last year the Holy Spirit led me to realize that I was turning to social media as a means of escape from life’s stress and as a source of approval, rather than turning to and relying on God. Social media had become a HUGE idol for me. I had tried many things over the years (app timers, breaks, etc.) to try to address my unhealthy social media habits, but nothing ever lasted. I felt the call to delete the apps altogether during the summer of last year, and for me life has felt much more peaceful without it. Social media's absence has left more room in my mind to stay focused on present moments and to ponder more deeply about the things of God. I don’t think everyone is called to or should delete their social media apps as I have, but I think it's worthwhile to take inventory of the effect social media is having on society at large and in our personal lives and walks with God. Gospel-saturated social media is such a wonderful cause to advocate for; keep up the good work!