social media and the search for purpose
“The search for self-fulfillment is the defining characteristic of our age.” — Christopher Lasch
I’m sitting at a coffee shop right now, as the woman next to me takes pictures of her half-strawberry, half-matcha iced latte, carefully sizing up her object’s best angles. While this behavior would seem bizarre to previous generations, by this point, taking photos of our lives and sharing them on social media is as American as apple pie.
But do you ever wonder why we do this? Why do we take millions of pictures of drinks, meals, vacations, and ourselves, to share the best ones on social media? To understand where this obsession comes from, we need to explore how we use social media to solve our search for purpose.
Deep down, every person is looking for a purpose in life, for a reason to get out of bed and push through the hard and monotonous moments of life. You need purpose, the sense that what you’re doing contributes to a greater end, to both give your life direction and motivation.
The reality, though, is that we all struggle with the question of purpose. Why am I here? The author Mark Manson describes our perplexing search for purpose, asking:
"What are we doing here? Is life really just all of us waking up every morning and going to a job, acting busy for eight hours so we can pay rent and maybe get drunk with our friends on the weekends? Then you retire and die, I guess?
Are we all just going through the motions? Endless emails, endless meetings, endless paperwork. Break it all up with some Netflix. Delicious food delivered right to your door. Endless social media feed. Online shopping. All so deliciously comforting. And all so empty."
And so this search for purpose forms the backdrop of our lives, causing us to look to social media to satisfy our desire for a purpose for our lives.
so how can you find a purpose?
What makes our search for purpose difficult is that our culture teaches us that there’s no ultimate end in life, which means there’s no ultimate purpose. Historically, our culture use to generally agree that serving God was the purpose of life, but ever since Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed that “God is dead” in the 1880s, this started to unravel.
Why was Nietzsche’s announcement of God’s death important? Because it cut humanity off from any transcendent end. Without a belief in God, Nietzsche knew that he’d no longer have an ultimate end to give his life purpose, leaving every human being in a state of cosmic purposelessness. He wrote that after we reject God’s existence, “the aim is lacking, and ‘why?’ finds no answer.”
As Nietzsche’s beliefs spread, most intellectuals assumed that human beings were all alone in the universe and that there was no ultimate purpose in life. Kurt Vonnegut captured this viewpoint through his parody of Genesis 1:
In the beginning God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness. And God said, “Let Us make creatures out of mud, so mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak.
God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely. “Everything must have a purpose?” asked God. “Certainly,” said man. “Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God. And he went away.
Vonnegut, an atheist, wants us to realize that without God we’re all alone in an impersonal universe, with nothing to tell us life’s purpose. There’s no destination or end to life and the universe just goes in circles until it all blows up. The implication of this belief is that since we’re living in a purposeless world, every human being is free to choose whatever purpose you want in life.
But rejecting God’s existence did more than just set us free to pursue our own purpose, it also erodes our ability to evaluate which self-created purposes are right or wrong. As Nietzsche wrote, “If the world is without order, then nothing is forbidden; to prohibit an action, there must be a standard of values and an aim.”
Without an agreed-upon end to pursue, then no one can say whether your purpose is good or bad. To use Nietzsche’s analogy, if there’s nothing in life to aim at, then you can never say whether you’ve hit or missed the target. And so our culture teaches us two core beliefs around purpose:
Since there’s no God, it’s up to you to figure out your purpose in life.
Since there’s no God, no one can tell you whether your purpose is right or wrong.
These beliefs have captured our culture, as we’re all told to follow our truth and find a purpose in life that feels most authentic to yourself. As Dostoyevsky says in The Brothers Karamazov: "Without God…everything is permitted. … If he does not exist, man is the chief end of the earth, of the universe."
This means that it’s now your job to fight through the purposelessness of life and figure out your purpose on your own. This is why there are so many books, articles, and talks that promise to help you find your purpose in life.
But while all of these resources can tell you what your purpose could be, they can never tell you what your purpose should be. And so we set out to create our purpose, trying to find an end that resonates with you and motivates you to keep going.
so what do you use as your purpose?
While in theory you are free to pursue whatever purpose you want, in reality, we all feel lost when choosing a purpose. And so we figure out our life’s purpose by observing and copying our friends and peers on social media, the hub of our cultural formation.
Absent any greater authority to tell us how to live, social media becomes our authority, showing us what life purposes are available and which ones are most popular. We don’t so much choose a life purpose, but rather receive it through osmosis, as we’re shaped by the hours we spend on social media.
As we stew in our social media-saturated culture we learn that self-fulfillment is life’s main purpose. As Mark Manson writes:
"Modern life exalts our individual desires and encourages us to act upon them. Free from any greater purpose, personal fulfillment becomes our purpose."
This personal fulfillment purpose can be best summarized by Joseph Campbell’s famous encouragement to, in the face of a purposeless world, “Follow your bliss.”
And so social media teaches us to follow the purpose of self-fulfillment through the pursuit of something called the aesthetic lifestyle. Without us realizing it, the aesthetic lifestyle, as the purpose of social media, has become the purpose of our entire lives.
So what is the aesthetic lifestyle? The aesthetic lifestyle flows out of aestheticism, a movement in Paris in the 1800s that focused on the appreciation of art. Aestheticism wasn’t concerned with fine art in museums, but rather with art in ordinary life. As one writer put it, aestheticism is “the realization of an artistic concept in everyday life.”
Aestheticism arose in reaction to the Industrial Revolution, as young people grew tired of a dull, drab world and started to create lives that imitated art. Playwright Oscar Wilde, one of the most famous aesthetes, captured the spirit of the movement when he said, "I want to make my life itself into a work of art."
This mindset caused young men to start wearing all kinds of colorful outfits, while young women started wearing makeup, as both sexes pursued beautiful clothes, food, and furnishings, all in an attempt to turn their lives into a work of art.
As more and more young people joined the aesthetic movement, it turned into a full-on lifestyle. No one described the aesthetic lifestyle better than Soren Kierkegaard, who wrote a book describing how young aesthetes made it their purpose to turn their lives into a work of art, cultivating beauty, taste, novelty, and an artistic ideal in every area of life.
Kierkegaard wrote that the goal of the aesthetic lifestyle was the hope that if you could turn your life into a work of art, then you could experience nonstop pleasure. Young people thought that if everything in life was aesthetically pleasing then they’d always feel happy and fulfilled.
This purpose caused young people to use their desire for pleasure and fun as the criteria for every decision. Aesthetes didn’t worry about whether something was right or wrong, but rather whether it was pleasurable or boring. Interesting and fun things were good, while dull things were bad. This is why pleasure was so important to young people; it was the only way to combat boredom.
And so the aesthete was constantly searching for new experiences, using travel and adventures to keep life exciting. Kierkegaard said that when an aesthete is tired of the country they move to the city, and when they’re tired of their home country they go abroad, indulging in the “fanatical hope of an endless journey from star to star." They would burn down half of Rome, he joked, just to re-experience what it looked like when the Roman Empire fell.
This desire for new experiences also extended to possessions, and Kierkegaard wrote that when aesthetes grew tired of eating on porcelain they switch to silver, and after they grew tired of that then they ate on gold. These young people weren’t shaped by a desire to rebel against society, but rather by a search for novelty and originality within the bounds of convention.
Through all of this, aesthetes made it their goal to make their lives look fun, interesting, and rewarding. They lived their lives as if they were always on stage, taking pride in their original style and refined tastes.
While the aesthetic movement of the 1800s has long been forgotten, Kierkegaard’s description of the aesthetic lifestyle perfectly fits our social media culture today. From the desire to turn your life into a work of art to the continual need for new possessions and pleasurable experiences, our social media-saturated lives are spent chasing aesthetic excellence.
so how does the aesthetic lifestyle impact how we use social media?
While no young person ever said, “Let’s copy Parisian youth culture from 150 years ago!”, our culture made the the pursuit of an aesthetic lifestyle on social media the main purpose of our lives. So how did this happen?
Our aesthetic movement has its roots in the post-WWII manufacturing revolution, as globalism flooded the U.S. with cheap consumer goods. People like Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart then popularized the idea of a conscious aesthetic, where you seek to maximize your life’s aesthetic value.1 As Martha Stewart told her audience, “We have come to realize that the creation of a fine family, a lovely lifestyle and a comfortable home is kind of a national art form in itself.”
Aesthetic consciousness exploded with the rise of social media, now that young people can share their “work of art” lives with just a few taps on their phone. This has caused the aesthetic movement to go mainstream, as young people now spend their lives pursuing an aesthetic lifestyle and sharing it on social media.
If you need proof that young people today have made the aesthetic lifestyle our purpose in life, here a just a few bios I’ve seen young people recently share on social media:
"We only get one life, so I plan to spend it eating as many tacos as possible and traveling as much as I can."
"My purpose in life is to explore, experience, and be happy!"
"I'm passionate about wine, traveling, and having fun!"
While these young people don’t realize the aesthetic lifestyle is their life’s purpose, it has become the end in their life that guides their actions and motivates their behavior. It’s important to note that we use passion, an overwhelming feeling towards something, as an individualized form of purpose, allowing you to chase your purpose in life, while also not condemning anyone else’s passion/purpose.
This explains why young people proclaim how passionate they are about going on trips, trying new restaurants, attending concerts, drinking coffee, getting cocktails, and watching TV. These "passions" show that deep down, their main purpose in life is to live the aesthetic lifestyle, in hopes of experiencing as much fun and pleasure as possible.
We pursue these purposes, hopeful that if we can turn our lives into a work of art, we’ll experience non-stop fun and pleasure, while also getting the attention and approval that we crave.
So how then does this pursuit of the aesthetic lifestyle as our main purpose in life affects social media? It causes us to follow three core steps:
step 1: turn your life into a work of art
The first step in living out the purpose of an aesthetic lifestyle is to turn every part of your life into a work of art. You begin to evaluate everything around you in terms of its aesthetic appearance, whether it’s the house you live in, the car you drive, or the clothes you wear. Professor Dominic Lopes shares how aesthetic considerations impact every part of our lives:
"You make aesthetic decisions every day. When you decide what to wear, you think about how it feels and fits, how it expresses your style. When you have friends over, you play music, light a candle, arrange the dinner table, set a mood. You exercise aesthetic creativity when you design your tattoo, put on makeup, pierce your ear or nose, spritz cologne or perfume, or pay close attention to your hair.
Almost everything you do has an aesthetic dimension—from the way you make your bed and prepare your coffee to the way you speak to others and adjust photos to post on social media. You have a complex and detailed aesthetic life that you orchestrate every day through your aesthetic decisions, reactions, feelings, and actions."
This means that we’re always making aesthetic choices as we go through life, using the things we eat, buy, and wear to help turn our lives into a work of art. We hope that by filling our lives with aesthetically pleasing possessions and experiences, we’ll create a life of constant pleasure, fun, and happiness.
Here a just a few of the areas where the pursuit of the aesthetic influences our lives:
Clothes: young people constantly buy new clothes to develop a more interesting and artistic look, whether that’s while you're working out at the gym or getting drinks with friends. You search out unique brands and vintage finds to develop the perfect look.
Appearance: young people view their bodies as a canvas, using tattoos, piercings, hair color, and plastic surgery/botox/fillers to turn their bodies into a work of art. We pursue exercises and workouts that promise to sculpt our bodies to look like Michelangelo’s David.
Cities: young people want to live in a place with the right vibe, so they flock to NYC, LA, Nashville, Austin, Miami, and Boulder; places that provide them with the right aesthetic backdrop. Cities work to improv their aesthetic through new modern art displays, high-end shopping, and luxury apartments to attract aesthetes.
Home decor: young people strive to find the perfect home and turn it into a work of art. You plan your decor around carefully chosen themes, filling your home with trendy colors, textures, materials, and furniture, all to create the perfect vibe. You’re always updating your home, not because things don’t work but rather because its aesthetic is “tired,” our word for when something stops giving us pleasure.
Restaurants/Coffee shops: young people only visit restaurants and coffee shops that have the right aesthetic vibe, expecting every latte to look beautiful and every brunch dish to be colorful and perfectly plated. Restaurants and coffee shops copy whatever aesthetic trends are popular on social media, competing to become the next hit spot.
Travel: young people are always taking trips to beautiful locations, choosing where to travel almost solely on its aesthetic. They overrun places like Paris, Iceland, Banff, Mexico City, Bali, Patagonia, and Croatia, trying to cram their vacations with as much food, alcohol, and pleasure as possible.
Experiences: Young people spend their free time on aesthetic experiences full of excitement, whether that's a climbing gym, art museum, workout classes, skiing, breweries/wineries, concerts, or parties. And if something has the right aesthetic, whether that's a grocery store or a gym, they'll gladly pay more.2
Relationships/Weddings: young people pursue relationships to find someone to consume aesthetic relationships with. Relationships are built around consuming things together, whether that's eating out, traveling, or watching Netflix. This culminates in the most important aesthetic day of your life, your wedding, where you spare no expense to create the most incredible aesthetic experience for your guests.3
If you’re in your 20s or 30s, you know that we’re all living like this. You’re doing everything to create a “work of art” life and have the right style, vibe, and feeling, while avoiding anything that’s “meh”, another word our culture uses for things that don’t spark joy.
And so we spend all kinds of money on curated cheese boards, craft cocktails, bespoke denim, artisan groceries, and boutique hotels (note the art-influenced adjectives), as we chase the aesthetic lifestyle. We prioritize good design and fun experiences, believing that if you surround yourself with things that please you then you’ll experience a happy and fulfilling life.
This creation of an aesthetic lifestyle is guided by one question that we’re always asking ourselves: “How will this look on social media?” The social media gaze causes us to constantly rearrange our food, possessions, decor, or travel stops to make our lives look better for social media.
Once you’ve hit this point, then you’re ready for the second step, documenting your life and sharing it on social media.
step 2: document your aesthetic life and share it on social media
Having worked so hard to create an aesthetically pleasing lifestyle, you might think the next step would be to enjoy it. Wrong! In our social media-saturated world, you don’t soak in pleasurable aesthetic experiences. Instead, you use your phone to document them and share on social media.
This is why you see phones everywhere when you’re at a concert, sporting event, nice restaurant, or national park. We take photos and videos to capture peak aesthetic experiences so we can share them on social media and prove to others that we’re living lives worthy of attention and approval.
This is why high-quality photos and videos are so important; your “work of art” life won’t look very good if you’re documenting it on an old phone. So we spend all kinds of money to improve our photos, whether that’s springing for a new phone or hiring expensive professional photographers.
Then, after you’ve captured your aesthetic lifestyle through your phone, you selectively and strategically share it on social media, using filters, photo editing, and apps to ensure that every post on your grid fits your social media aesthetic.
Your posts should also emphasize how happy and fulfilled your “work of art” life is making you. This means that you can’t just post a picture of a beautiful mountain or meal; you also have to communicate through your body language and caption that you are living an incredible life.
When you share the details of your aesthetic choices and lifestyle on social media, you’re asking other people to validate you, hoping that if you can pull off the right social media aesthetic, you’ll receive increasing amounts of approval and get the ultimate compliment in our social media age: “You have the most incredible life!”
Many people don’t share on social media for these reasons. Since they don’t have the time or ability to turn every social media post into a work of art, they’re afraid that they won’t receive validation. So as the aesthetic bar on social media has been raised, more and more people stop posting, content to consume the content of more polished creators.
This leads to the third step; after we create, document, and share our aesthetic lives on social media, we then use social media to consume other people’s aesthetic lives, both for pleasure and inspiration.
step 3: study the aesthetic experts to learn how to improve
As young people share their aesthetic lives, some will obviously be better at it than others. These aesthetes get attention for this, whether through word of mouth or an apps algorithm. More people see their aesthetic and follow them, and the social media influencer is born.
The social media influencer is the purest version of Kierkegaard’s aesthete, having created a lifestyle so artistic and attractive that the rest of us want to consume their aesthetic. We follow influencers, though, not only to experience their “work of art” lives but also to gain tips and tricks on how to improve our aesthetic lifestyle.
That’s why we call them influencers, because they influence our aesthetic tastes and choices, showing us how to dress better, eat better, and travel better, among other things. Once an influencer establishes themselves as an aesthetic expert, we’ll look to them for ways to improve our own aesthetic.
Influencers offer up their lives as social proof of the aesthetic lifestyle, showing how the full-blown pursuit of an aesthetic lifestyle can lead to spectacular happiness. They always share how much their aesthetic improvements fulfill them, saying things like, “I absolutely love how my bathroom refresh turned out!” and “I am living for this fit!” as they try on expensive new clothes.
This all helps create influencers’ deeper power over us; their ability to influence what we buy. Influencers operate as the high priests of our consumer culture, directing us toward the possessions and experiences we think we need to spend money on to live a happy and fulfilling life. They monetize this influence through brand deals and sponsorships, using their sway to convince us to buy specific products and experiences, all with the implicit promise of reaching their level of fulfillment.4
Young people buy the products, brands, and experiences influencers recommend, hoping that if they can improve their aesthetic lifestyle, then maybe someday they’ll be an influencer too.
And so as we go through this cycle, of creating, sharing, and refining our aesthetic lives on social media, we’re molded to believe that pursuing an aesthetic lifestyle is the most important purpose in your life. So what happens when a generation of young people makes living an aesthetic lifestyle on social media their life’s main purpose?
what’s the result of this purpose?
What’s the result of our social-media-fueled aesthetic purpose? We live incredibly self-focused lives. Our lives are so packed with our attempts at improving our aesthetic lives that there’s no room for anything else.
The problem, to be clear, is not enjoying aesthetic experiences, but rather the way our pursuit of them dominates our lives. There’s nothing inherently immoral with a nice meal or vacation or home. Our error occurs when we mix our desire for aesthetic experiences with a culture that says you are free to live for whatever purpose you choose.
When you believe that there is no higher authority than your desires, you’ll always end up thinking that fulfilling your desires is the most important thing in the universe. Christopher Lasch pointed out how this was already happening in the 1960s:
"The modern propaganda of commodities and the good life has sanctioned impulse gratification and made it unnecessary for the id to apologize for its wishes or disguise their grandiose proportions."
When our consumeristic culture tells us that we should never say no to our aesthetic desires, we eventually end up with self-absorbed lives, believing there’s no greater purpose than me and my happiness. We grow increasingly obsessed with turning our lives into a work of art until it becomes the overwhelming passion of our lives.
This causes us to spend most of our time, energy, and money hyper-fixated on improving our aesthetic lifestyles. We daydream about upgrading our possessions and are constantly researching new things to buy. We spend hundreds of hours scrolling our phones each year, hoping to figure out the hottest trends and styles.
We develop long shopping lists, either in our heads or in virtual shopping carts, of all of the new things that we “need.” We lust after the perfect running shoes, refrigerator, workout clothes, beach vacation, coffee table, or restaurant experience, believing that this is the only thing that keeps us from being happy.
Once we decide what aesthetic items we must have, then we buy, buy, buy. We spend tens of thousands of dollars a year buying the possessions and experiences needed to replicate the popular aesthetics on social media. Our doorways are flooded with Amazon boxes, but no matter how much stuff we buy, there’s always more that we need.
When we’re not shopping, then we’re planning trips and vacations all over the world, constantly looking for cheap flights and stunning Airbnbs. We’re always reading reviews and guides to restaurants, trying to squeeze as much pleasure into life as possible.
This non-stop focus on improving our aesthetic lives takes over our lives until the only other thing we have time for is work. In the aesthetic lifestyle, though, work isn’t something you do to serve others and help meet their needs, but rather the way to get the disposable income you need to meet your own needs.
And so we choose our careers not based on what would be most beneficial to society, but rather what would be most beneficial to us. We find high-paying jobs with low levels of responsibility in tech, consulting, finance, and large corporations. We auction our hours off to the highest bidder, knowing that every dollar of extra income can be used to improve your lifestyle and live out our generation’s favorite motto: “Work hard. Play hard.”
You then use every hour outside of work to experience as much pleasure and beauty as possible. You pack your evenings and weekends full of aesthetic experiences until they’re filled with dinners, bars, concerts, and experiences. You never have time for anything that requires you to serve it, but rather use your money to pay people to serve you. And since there’s no higher cause than my happiness, there’s nothing worth denying my happiness for.
This preoccupation with our aesthetic lifestyles allows us to ignore everything else around us. There’s no such thing today as the common good, just my good. As Christopher Lasch writes, the goal of modern life "is to get through the course with a minimum amount of trouble and pain. Self-absorption insulates affluent Americans against the horrors around them—poverty, racism, injustice, and eases their troubled consciences."
While we never will admit it, we only really care about ourselves and meeting our appetites for pleasure. We might try to appear like we care about others, by sharing a post or liking something on social media, but we do these things primarily to provide moral cover for our self-indulging lives.
And so the aesthetic lifestyle becomes the passion project of our lives, soaking up all of our time, energy, and money as we try to turn our social media profiles into a work of art.
What is the end goal of this all? We hope that if we pursue the aesthetic lifestyle with nonstop fervor, we’ll create our own personal Garden of Eden, an eternal paradise filled with constant pleasure and fun. A place where white sofas never get dirty, subway tile will never go out of style, and beach vacations never end.
This brings us to the all-important question, does making the total pursuit of an aesthetic lifestyle actually satisfy your search for purpose?
does this kind of purpose work?
While making the pursuit of an aesthetic lifestyle your main purpose in life sounds enticing, in reality, it will never satisfy your search for a lasting purpose. Why is this the case? Because the aesthetic lifestyle can’t hold up as an ultimate end.
Some day, Kierkegaard says, every young person will have grown old come face-to-face with the end of their lives, with no more pleasurable experiences to be had. They won’t be able to handle the inevitable end of aesthetic pleasure as they age, slowly realizing that they have done nothing with any lasting value.
The pleasure-seeking life, no matter how well you pursue it, will eventually collapse under the realities of suffering, difficulty, and ultimately death. Will Storr, a journalist who writes in The Atlantic, says that someday, we’ll all have to face these things:
"When we're happy, we feel good about ourselves, successfully pursuing our meaningful projects, making our lives and the world around us better. We're distracted from the truth of our situation, which is…that our lives are ultimately pointless, that we live in a realm of chaos and injustice, and that we and everyone we love are going to die."
This all means that the pursuit of an aesthetic lifestyle isn’t so much a life purpose, but rather a distraction from the fact that we have no lasting purpose that exists beyond us. We use the aesthetic lifestyle to avoid acknowledging this, since our culture has no answers to the ultimate “why?” questions. Victor Frankl made this point, saying that when a person can’t find any meaningful purpose in life, they will distract themselves with pleasure.
And this is what our modern lives have become. As Ernest Becker wrote in The Denial of Death, "Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing." Unable to answer the “Why?” questions of life, the only thing our culture can do is distract you from them.
But this distraction through the pursuit of pleasure will only work for so long. David Brooks writes, “Eventually most people realize that something is missing in the self-interested life. They achieve worldly success and find it unsatisfying.” He goes on to say that our culture “creates isolated, self-interested monads who sense that something is missing in their lives but cannot even name what it is.”
Despite knowing that something’s missing, young people think the problem is that they just need more aesthetic pleasure. But Mike Posner’s "I Took a Pill in Ibiza" shows how misguided this idea is. In this popular song, Posner sings about his luxurious lifestyle, partying with celebrities, making millions of dollars, and driving expensive cars around while surrounded by all of the women and shoes he could ever want.
Given his fancy lifestyle, he should have been happy, right? But by the time Posner gets to the chorus, his words ring with emptiness:
You don't wanna be high like me, never really knowing why like me.
You don't ever wanna step off that roller coaster and be all alone.
Posner achieved the dream lifestyle, yet when he came down from his high, he felt purposeless and alone. He was surrounded by everything he’d ever wanted but still felt empty and isolated because he had no answers to the ultimate “why?” questions of life.
Posner's experience echoes what Solomon realizes in Ecclesiastes 2. Solomon was the original influencer, using his wealth and position to pursue every kind of pleasure. He shares how he built great houses, planted large vineyards, and filled his life with parties, women, and wine. But after Solomon got every pleasure possible, his message was the same as Posner’s:
"Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had down and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun."
No matter how much you succeed, pursuing an aesthetic lifestyle won’t satisfy your search for purpose. Eventually, even the greatest experiences will become boring and unsatisfying, and you’ll realize that you’re living for an illusion.
Why is this? Because every person experiences the law of diminishing returns. Robert Greene explains that the pursuit of pleasure, through things like entertainment, stimulants, eating, shopping, and technological fads will never satisfy you. He says:
No matter the objects of the pursuit, they tend to lead to a dynamic of diminishing returns. The moments of pleasure we get tend to get duller through repetition. We need either more and more of the same or constantly new diversions. Our need often turns into an addiction, and…we become possessed by the object we crave and lose ourselves.
And so the quest is endless and exhausting. … Such people become alienated from themselves; the pursuit feels soulless; they are workaholics without a true calling.
This is where we are as a culture. Young people sit in their homes and plan out their aesthetic pursuits, dreaming of be an Instagram influencer, YouTube personality, or TikTok star, while they struggle with emptiness, pointlessness, and a lack of motivation to do anything.
The promises of the aesthetic lifestyle leave young people exhausted and empty, in debt and hungover. We work at jobs we don’t care about to buy possessions and experiences that won’t last. Isolated and alone, we doom-scroll our phones to get little hits of entertainment, but nothing seems to fix the cultural malaise that we feel. We “tranquilize ourselves with the trivial,” to use Kierkegaard’s phrase, until the high wears off and we’re forced to admit that we’re not as happy as we’re pretending to be on social media.
While temporary purposes feel good in the moment, if your life’s purpose doesn’t extend beyond your life, then it will always fall apart. Most people are so distracted by the tiny purposes of our culture that they don’t realize this until they’re old. You’ll have spent your whole life trying to climb the ladder of aesthetic pleasure, only to realize that it’s leaning up against the wrong wall.
What is the root problem?
So why do we insist on pursuing our own purpose, despite the problems it causes? Because we don't trust God's purpose for our lives; we look at God’s purpose for our lives and think that living for Him will be boring. And so we reject God to be free to do whatever we want with our lives.
This is what Adam and Eve did back in the Garden of Eden. They wanted to be free to choose their own purpose and eat anything that delighted them. So when Satan convinced them that God was a cosmic killjoy intent on keeping them from having fun, they jumped at the chance to pursue pleasure on their own terms.
But while rejecting God's purpose for their lives did give them freedom to do whatever they wanted, that freedom didn't lead to a sense of fulfillment, but rather alienation and emptiness. Adam and Eve found out the hard way that rejecting God’s purpose for their lives didn’t create a “school’s out for summer” sense of freedom, but rather an “I’m all alone in the universe” kind, left to themselves with no ultimate purpose or reason for existence.
This is why Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “If God is dead, then we are condemned to be free.” Sartre, although an atheist, recognized that absolute freedom wasn’t a good thing but rather a condemnation, since it sentenced humanity to life in a purposeless prison.
Prof. Dan McAdams describes what total freedom in a world without God looks like:
"Each of us is 'thrown' into the world with the daunting task of responding creatively to our freedom. We do not know who we are or why we are here. Our freedom is a condemnation because of the anxiety we go through in constructing our identities. The anxiety stems from the possibility that our life may mean nothing.
And so separated from God, we struggle with anxiety, aware that our self-chosen purposes don't ultimately matter and that our lives lack a worthwhile purpose. We learn the hard way, as Kierkegaard wrote, that “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
While freedom sounds fun, absolute freedom always leads to lives filled with listlessness, lethargy, boredom when we’re young, and increasing feelings of angst, loneliness, and despair as we age.
Despite these problems, we still keep our distance from God, afraid that if we submit our lives to His purposes we’ll never have any fun. Sin causes us to reject God, warps our desires, and take on personal missions that won't satisfy us. This is why Ignatius of Loyola said, "Sin is unwillingness to trust that what God wants for me is only my deepest happiness."
The sin of pursuing your own purpose apart from God won’t lead you to a free and fulfilling life but will leave you enslaved to your desires. We exchange the truth about God for a lie and worship and serve created things rather than the Creator, causing us to live little lives enslaved to our appetites, unable to say no, even as this destroys us.
is there any solution to this problem?
So is there any way to actually solve our search for purpose? This problem has perplexed humanity for thousands of years, all the way back to the Greek philosophers, who spent their lives consumed by this search for purpose.
They were looking for what they called the logos, or the reason behind all of life. Yet despite arguing against each other for hundreds of years, Greek philosophers could never figure out what life’s logos was. Until Jesus showed up.
When John begins his gospel with the words, "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men,” he’s announcing that the purpose of life isn’t a thing or a lifestyle, but Jesus himself.
This means that the solution to your search for purpose doesn’t come by creating one for yourself, but rather by answering Jesus’ call to “Come, follow me.” Jesus calls you to leave your self-centered purposes behind and make following Him your life’s purpose.
An encounter with Jesus wakes you up from your little purposes and sets you on a new cosmic mission: to follow Jesus as He unites us to God and invites us to join in God’s redemptive work in this world. This is the ultimate purpose that you crave. As Tim Keller says:
Some of you are wondering why your life is so tasteless and joyless, because you've been living for yourself for years. Because you have no higher ambition than to get a nicer apartment or to wait for Mr. or Mrs. Right. You are smothering under your small ambitions. Your heart and spirit were made for nobler things than that. You were made for a world-changing mission.
As we die to our old purposes and follow Jesus, we’re grafted into His redemptive mission: to love God and neighbor as God bring reconciliation and flourishing through His kingdom.
But how can we trust our lives to this purpose? Won’t following Jesus be boring, making us feel smothered and trapped? How can surrendering our lives to Jesus ever give us the joy and satisfaction we seek?
Jesus shows us that the most rewarding life isn’t found in pursuing your own purposes, but rather through surrendering yourself to God’s purpose. When God asked Jesus if He would be willing to do the least pleasurable act of all time, to take our punishment for sin on the cross, He answered, “Not my will be done, but yours.”
Jesus could surrender His life to God’s purpose because He knew that following God’s will is the only pathway to ultimate joy. Hebrews 12 says that Jesus, “for the joy set before Him, endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of God.” Jesus found his greatest joy, not by following what felt good in the moment, but rather by his desire to spend eternity with us in God’s presence.
But how could spending eternity with God in heaven be any fun at all? To those deep in the aesthetic lifestyle, hanging out with God seems like the worst possible life. But Psalm 16 says that God’s presence is the place where ultimate pleasure and joy are found:
You make known to me the path of life; in your presence, there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
When we follow Jesus, we might miss out on some of the shallow pleasures of this life, but we are welcomed into the far greater pleasure that comes from spending eternity with God. As John writes in 1 John:
"For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever."
Following God’s will is the true purpose that will give your soul lasting fulfillment. As C.S. Lewis said, "I was not born to be free—I was born to adore and obey."
When we join Jesus on God’s world-changing mission to serve God’s kingdom, we’ll someday find ourselves welcomed into the greatest aesthetic wonder ever, the new Garden of Eden that springs up from around God’s throne. John gives us a sneak peek in Revelation 22:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month.
As you let these truths saturate your heart, you’ll recognize that lasting joy doesn't come from a self-serving life spent chasing your own purpose, but rather from a self-sacrificial one that’s surrendered to God’s eternal purpose.
so what does gospel-saturated social media look like?
So how does a life reoriented around God’s purpose change how you use social media? When you follow Jesus’ call, you are set free from your self-centered desires and can now follow God’s purpose for your life.
When you do this, you’ll find that God’s call on your life isn’t something that smothers you, but rather serves as a scaffolding to help you become who He meant you to be. As David Brenner writes:
“To live apart from a sense of calling by God is to live a life oriented simply to our own choices about who we want to be and what we want to do. Calling brings freedom and fulfillment because it orients us to something bigger than ourselves.”
As you live into God’s calling on your life, to love Him and love your neighbor, then your social media accounts won’t become about chasing and showing off some luscious lifestyle, but rather doing things that have eternal value. You’ll no long obsess over storing up temporary treasures on earth, but will turn your focus towards storing up treasures in heaven, a shift that will show up on your social media profiles.
Right now, most young people are obsessed with living their best life on social media. They spend so many hours each week contemplating their image, appearance, and lifestyle, making plans to try to improve them all. But in the end, these things just won't matter much; your possessions will become out of date and your experiences will just be fuzzy memories and grainy, forgotten pictures.
When you understand that your life’s purpose extends beyond your personal concerns, then you can use your time, talents, and money to help others, not to merely look out for yourself. As the missionary-martyr Jim Elliot wrote, "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."
So does this mean that we can’t ever enjoy life? That we can’t ever redecorate our homes, buy nice clothes, go on vacation, or eat at a nice restaurant? Of course not. God has given us all of those things as good gifts as a part of His creation, after all.5
In God’s kingdom, though, these things are no longer the ultimate end in life but rather avenues by which we glorify and enjoy God.6 As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10, “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” We can glorify God’s goodness and enjoy His creation when we:
Travel to a beautiful place and marvel at God's handiwork.
Relax in a well-designed home and appreciate God’s creativity.
Eat delicious food and enjoy God's provision.
When you pursue these things as your life’s purpose, you’ll turn into a self-obsessed life enslaved to your desires. But when you recognize these things as gifts from God, you can enjoy them and the pleasure they bring, without becoming enslaved to them. They’re great things to experience from time to time, but they’re no longer your life’s passion.
Gospel-saturated social media isn’t about showing off your aesthetic life to try to fill up the emptiness of a self-focused life, but rather is about sharing out of the overflowing joy that comes from a life spent serving, glorifying, and enjoying God.
Things like the Polo Ralph Lauren catalog taught Americans new ways to aestheticize their lives and homes.
One of the greatest ways this shows up is in churches. Historically, churches focused on instilling a sense of awe. Now, churches focus on creating aesthetic pleasure for their attendees to consume. The branding, fonts, music, lights, and vibe are carefully tailored to give people peak aesthetic experiences.
This is one of the main reasons why most couples avoid having children for as long as possible since kids are seen as the ultimate enemy of the aesthetic lifestyle, taking your time, energy, and money, while restricting your freedom.
Influencers encourage you to buy things through their ability to reinforce a sense of inadequacy in you towards your life. You thought your living room or wardrobe was nice until this influencer showed you the latest styles. Now you realize that your things are aesthetically out of date and need to be updated.
We should remember that Jesus said, “And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
The Westminster Shorter Catechism starts by stating: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”