“In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.” — Erik Erikson
Have you ever thought about what we use social media to do? What are we actually doing when we use social media? In the last essay, we explored our motives for using social media and saw how every human wants feedback on our lives, which motivates us to perform on social media in hopes of receiving our peers’ approval and applause. We do this because we base our self-worth on how other people view us.
In this essay, we’re going to look at the next crucial question in understanding social media: what are you using social media to do? This is such a basic question, but it’s so obvious no one ever thinks to ask it. But we need to think about how we actually use social media, and how this fits into our need to get other people’s approval and create a sense of self-worth.
When social media companies were trying to convince society to sign up for their apps, they used one refrain over and over: social media will let you share your life with others! While there are lots of services that social media offers, sharing your life is the core activity. That’s why it’s called social media after all; the content is made and shared by ordinary people, not journalists or other media professionals.
Whether you are on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok, every social media company is built around letting users share their lives. That’s what we’ve always been encouraged to do, and all of these apps are designed to make it easy to do so. It makes sense why, since if people didn’t share their lives online, the whole business model would break down and social media wouldn’t exist.1
But why are people so eager to create and post content about themselves for free on social media? As a culture, why do we spend so much time, energy, and money sharing our lives online and then give away the content for free? To understand this, we have to dig into our hearts and understand what’s going on when we post on social media.
You see, people don’t just randomly share about their lives online, but rather use their social media profiles and posts to do something more: to create an identity. Do you think the guy in the Instagram post above accidentally shared a picture of him enjoying a picnic and Champagne on a coastal cliff? Of course not. He’s trying to communicate a message about himself; he’s trying to create and share his identity.
what is an identity?
To understand why we share our lives online, we have to first define what we mean when we talk about identity. An identity, in its most basic form, is how you define yourself. Every person has to figure out how to answer the core question of human existence: “Who am I?”
You develop answers by citing different roles, abilities, traits, values, and opinions, which come together and turn into a certain way that you see yourself. This is your identity; the thing that makes you, you! As you grow up, figuring out your identity is the most important task in life, and we spend a lot of time in high school and college thinking about who we are.
For much of human history, people didn’t have to worry about forming an identity; they just received their identities from their parents and community. If your parents were Catholic, peasant farmers in rural France, guess what, so were you.
While many cultures in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East still operate like this, western young people are different. As the United States became more and more individualistic, culminating with the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, American young people refused to receive their identities from others, insisting instead on having the freedom to create their own. As a young Bob Dylan said in 1968, “Life isn’t about finding yourself or finding anything. Life is about creating yourself.”
While this statement shocked people at the time, today, it’s accepted as an unquestioned fact. For our generation, receiving your identity from your parents and community isn’t just undesirable, it’s also seen as dangerous and repressive. We believe that we should be free to create our own identities and define ourselves however we want.
Society cooperates with this desire and gives you so many options and choices to define who you are. Your hairstyle, career, clothes, religion, gender, diet, vacations, possessions, hobbies, and lifestyle are the raw materials from which you can create your unique identity.
The way we create our identities changed forever, though, with the introduction of social media. Social media companies understand human nature so well and designed their platforms to provide us with the exact tools young people need to create and share their identities online.
By sharing photos, stories, videos, tweets, and snaps we’re able to create our identities and distribute them to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. It’s no surprise that young people, trying to figure out who they are, latched on to social media, the greatest identity-creation tools in the history of the world.
As social media has taken over our culture, it has shifted how we think about our identities in three major ways:
Identity creation now happens online, not in person: since we interact with most people more often on social media than we do in real life, your social media identity has become more important than your real-life one.
Identity creation isn't based on who you are, but rather how you appear: Because social media apps are built around split-second interactions with posts, people now focus on identities that can be communicated instantly. This causes people to focus on external identities that can be quickly expressed through photos and videos.
Social media gives you the tools to separate your identity from reality: Because today's identity creation happens primarily online and through images and videos, your identity is no longer directly tied to reality, but rather can be edited and altered. Whether you use a filter, edit a video, or take a “spontaneous” picture 25 times, identity creation is less bound by the constraints of reality.
While social media didn’t introduce these changes (video was already killing the radio star in the 1980s), it did cause identity creation to go through a digital revolution. Neil Gabler explains what happens when everyone has better tools to create their identity:
In an image-conscious society, where nearly everyone has access to the tools of self-invention and self-promotion — makeup, designer clothes, status symbols, and quirks of behavior, language, and attitude — people are forced to opt for a persona or else to find out who they really are. That is the modern condition.
While social media companies told us to use their products to share our lives, social media caught on because it gave a generation of young people everything they needed to create their identity and share it with others. So if social media is what our generation uses to create our identities, how does this actually happen?
so how do you use social media to create your identity?
While every human being is different, in general, there are three steps to creating an identity on social media.
Figure out which identity to create
Create the identity
Refine your creation
step 1: figure out what identity to create
The first step to creating an identity on social media is to choose which identity you should try to create. Since you have total freedom to define yourself however you want, you need to know what options are out there. But in reality, we’re not that free, since our deep need for applause pushes us toward the identities that receive the most attention and approval.
This causes us to study our peers on social media and observe which identities garner the most applause. Today, some of the most popular identities are the:
Fearless adventurer
Fitness guru
Successful achiever
Perfect parent
Effortlessly attractive
Social justice activist
Carefree digital nomad
Trendy interior designer
Fulfilled romantic
As we observe what identities are most popular, we develop a Venn diagram in our mind. One circle consists of the social media identities that get the most praise, while the other circle consists of the identities that you can pull off. You choose something from where the circles overlap and it becomes the foundation for your social media identity.2
As we figure out what identities we can pull off, we observe other people’s roles, traits, opinions, appearance, and lifestyle, adopting different aspects of their identities to create our own. The social psychologist Ken Gergen calls this a pastiche personality (pastiche is an artistic term that means to imitate or copy the style of another artist). Gergen writes:
"The pastiche personality is a social chameleon, constantly borrowing bits and pieces of identity from whatever sources are available and constructing them as useful or desirable in a given situation. The pastiche personality abandons all aspirations toward a true or 'essential' identity, instead view social interactions as opportunities to play out, and hence become, the roles they play."
While our culture tells us to be our authentic selves, in reality, we’re all social chameleons that choose which identities to create based on the environment around us. As Oscar Wilde said, “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
step 2: create your identity
Once you’ve figured out what identity you can pull off, then you need to create it. You do this by strategically sharing your life on social media. You craft your identity post-by-post, using careful self-disclosure to sculpt the way you want to be seen.
The foundation of every social media identity is your profile, the place where you can directly define yourself. Between your profile picture and your bio, you can show others how you want to be seen and highlight the roles, beliefs, and connections that make you who you are.
While profiles are helpful, the most powerful way to create your identity is through your posts. Why is this? Because you’re allowed to share your identity implicitly, which gives you plausible deniability as to what you’re doing. For example, it’d be tacky to say in your bio that you are attractive, rich, and happy. So instead, you share one perfect photo from your latest vacation that shows how good you look on a beach, how much disposable income you have, and how satisfying your life must be.
As you go through life, you use your phone to create bite-sized pieces of your identity for other people to consume. And so we carefully plan out how we self-disclose, highlighting the rare and prestigious parts of our lives while hiding whatever is common and mundane until we have created our ideal self-identity. With each piece of content, you draw out and reinforce different aspects of your chosen identity, gradually communicating how you define yourself to your audience.
Over time, these subtle messages become your identity, the way that you want other people to see you. If you’re good at social media, your profile will share an unspoken identity message that lets other people know who you are:
Fitness: "Look at how healthy my lifestyle is and how hard I work at it!"
Parent: "Look at how incredible my kids are!"
Traveler: "Look at how fun and whimsical my life is!"
Activist: "Look at how much I care about the injustices of the world!"
Popular: "Look at all of the high-status people I hang out with!"
Achiever: "Look at how passionate and driven I am."
Trendy: "Look at all of the cool restaurants, stores, and concerts I know about!"
For many young people, this identity-creation process on social media becomes the sun that their entire life orbits around. One guy I know has built his entire life around sharing content from 2-3 incredible skiing trips each year. Sadly, he’s shared with me in the past that he hates his high-paying job in finance, but yet he can’t leave because it gives him the money he needs to pursue his skiing lifestyle. Whenever he’s on a ski trip he fills his Instagram with pictures of the Swiss Alps, but never posts about the rest of his life.
As we use social media like this, we strategically manipulate our online identity to create an ideal self. The ideal self is a carefully edited and polished version of our lives where we accentuate our strengths and bury our weaknesses. Your ideal self is not so much who you are, but rather who you wish you were if there weren’t this pesky thing called reality.
And so we create an identity out of our ideal self that’ll get other people’s applause. Given the desire for more and more applause, we begin to distort reality and slowly shift from being to appearing and from existing to performing. Everyone acts like they don’t do this, as if *shrug* this is what my life always life looks like. But behind each post, every detail is carefully planned to project the right identity to others.
step 3: refine your identity
After choosing your identity and creating it through your social media posts, the last step is to continue to refine your identity. We all negotiate our identities in dialogue with others, and as the feedback rolls in, you analyze your performance and compare yourself to others: How did I come across? Who liked my post? How can I change to get more applause next time?
This leads to a social media culture where your work is never done. You need to constantly reinvent and improve your identity to ensure that you’re still getting enough applause. You need to make sure that you're wearing the right brands, eating at the right restaurants, decorating your home in the right way, and holding the right opinions, for fear of falling behind and becoming out of date.
The result of all of this? Social media becomes a never-ending advertisement for your life. It runs as a personal marketing campaign, portraying yourself as someone who deserves lots of applause. As The Atlantic writer Tim Storrs says:
"We've turned our identity into a pawn that plays competitively on digital platforms for likes, feedback, and friends—the approval of the tribe. The game's winner can ultimately become extremely wealthy celebrities while the losers are often rejected by the group, at times with appalling personal consequences. Most people play away from these extremes, somewhere in the middle of the game, constantly being buffeted back and forth between feeling like a success or a failure."
If we can do this well, everyone around us will see how successful we are and will give us the applause that we're looking for. As New York City pastor Jon Tyson says, "Instagram is the curated documentation of our dominance."
why do you use social media like this?
So why is it so important for us to use our social media accounts to create an identity? Why do millions of young people spend so much time, energy, and money crafting this idealized social media identity?
Before we answer this question, we should clarify that there's nothing wrong with having an identity. Everybody has to have an identity. The problem is not that you have a social media identity, but rather that you are using this identity to try to prove to other people that you are acceptable.
When you use social media this way, you're doing more than just creating an identity; you're trying to establish a righteousness. In the Bible, righteousness is a relational term that refers to something that makes you acceptable to others. It’s whatever you’re trusting in to be right with someone else and get their approval. While it’s a word that we never use, every human being has a righteousness, the thing you're relying on to make yourself acceptable to yourself and your peers.
In our culture, our social media identities have become the thing we use to be our righteousness. This happens, according to Tim Keller, when you "take something that's good and make it your confidence, your glory, and your worth." This is the problem with our social media identities; we take good things like our roles and traits and use them to merit other people’s acceptance and applause.
Why do we do this? Because we know that people on social media are always passing verdicts on us, and we’re afraid that if they knew who we actually were, then they’d reject us. So we create an online identity that proves that we’re righteous; that we’re hitting society’s standards and deserve to be approved.
But you can’t declare yourself righteous, the positive verdict always has to come from someone else. This is why our need to create an identity pairs so well with the feedback systems on social media. We share the identity that we trust will make us acceptable to others and hope that they will validate us.
Deep down, this whole system exists because every person's looking for someone else to validate them. J.D. Greear, a pastor in North Carolina, reiterates this point, saying, "We're always looking for something to validate us, something to prove that we've earned our place in this world."
Historically, we’ve looked to God for validation. But as our culture has become more secular, we don’t think much about God, which means we have to look for it somewhere else. Arthur Miller, a famous playwright, describes the problem with this in his 1960s play After the Fall. Through a character named Quentin, he says:
"You know, more and more I think that for many years I looked at life like a case at law, a series of proofs. When you're young you prove how brave you are, or smart; then what a good lover; then, a good father; finally how wise, or powerful or whatever.
But underlying it all, I see now, there was a presumption. That I was moving on an upward path toward some elevation, where I would be justified, or even condemned—a verdict anyway. I think now that my disaster really began when I looked up one day—and the bench was empty. No judge in sight. And all that remained was the endless argument with oneself—this pointless litigation of existence before an empty bench.
Like Quentin, we’ve grown up feeling the pressure to prove that we’re successful or fun or good-looking, hopeful that we’ll receive a positive verdict and be justified.
The problem, Quentin realizes, is that there’s no judge to judge him, the bench is empty. This means that there’s no God to serve as an ultimate judge and give us the cosmic validation that we’re looking for. The result of this? We’re stuck in an endless argument with ourselves, trying to prove to somebody that we are acceptable.
This is why we use social media as we do. We treat it like an imaginary courtroom and present our lives as evidence of why we should be approved by our peers. We're all trying to create an identity that will serve as our righteousness, in hopes that our peers will validate us and make us feel like we're doing okay.
But no matter how hard we try, social media validation can never satisfy the yearnings of our hearts, and so we’re stuck in a never-ending argument with ourselves.
why doesn’t this work?
While using social media to create an identity might help us feel good at times, eventually, it always breaks down. Why? Because none of us are righteous, none of us are acceptable, no matter how hard we pretend on social media. As the Apostle Paul says in Romans 3: There is no one righteous, not even one. …there is no one who does good, not even one. Herman Bavinck described the problem like this:
"Every person has the deep and ineradicable conviction that they are not what they ought to be; there is a schism between duty and inclination that one cannot deny…and do away with. Humans are broken; unity and harmony are gone."
All of us have an unacknowledged belief that deep in our hearts, there’s something wrong with us. This is why we use social media to create and share our idealized identity. We’re afraid that if other people find out who we actually are, then we won’t get the validation we crave. That’s why we hope that a spotless social media identity will quell this inner unease and convince ourselves that we’re doing okay.
But no matter how hard we work at trying to establish our own righteousness, at a certain point everybody realizes that you're not making it. Under this increasing tension between how you need to appear and who you actually are, we distort our lives more and more, until our ideal self becomes a false self.
The false self is not who we are, but rather who we'd like to be. It's a self-serving fictional creation that we project to the world around us, out of a desire to hide our real selves and pretend that we are acceptable to others.
How does this come about? David Benner says that "our false self is built on an inordinate attachment to an image of our self that we think makes us special." But when we try to live out of a false self it doesn't work. Benner continues:
Basing identity on an illusion has profound consequences. Sensing its fundamental unreality, the false self wraps itself in experience—experiences of power, pleasure, and honor. Intuiting that it is but a shadow, it seeks to convince itself of its reality by equating itself with what it does and achieves.
“While this might seem quite benign, the dark side of pretending is that what begins as a role becomes an identity. Initially the masks we adopt reflect how we want others to see us. Over time, however, they come to reflect how we want to see our self. But by this point we have thoroughly confused the mask and our actual experience. Our masks have become our reality, and we have become our lies.”
As our false self solidifies, it becomes a mask that we hide behind. This is what our social media identities are, a mask that we wear in hopes of proving that we’re acceptable. The mask feels good at first since it helps you get the validation you crave, but it eventually becomes a prison, causing all kinds of problems. You’ll…
Be trapped behind your mask: While you start wearing a mask to help yourself feel more acceptable, you'll be forced to squeeze your personality down to a one-dimensional caricature of yourself. You'll never be able to take your mask off or show a less glamorous side of yourself.
Be forced to double-down on your false self mask: Since there's no taking the mask off, you'll have to keep improving your mask if you want to stay up with the latest trends and keep getting other people's approval. This creates a fear that no matter what you do, you won't measure up.
Never be able to be known: People may know your mask and give it lots of applause, but they'll never know the real you. This will make you anxious and insecure, afraid that if someone sees your real self, they'll reject you.
Experience the disintegration of your mask: Whatever you're trusting to be your identity, whether it's your looks, talents, friendships, status, or job, at some point, will fall apart or fade away, rocking the foundation of what you have based your life on.
So many young people slip on a false self mask once and like the attention it gives them, only to later find that they've become so attached to this self-image that they can't let it go. Over time, their false self becomes their reality and their online life becomes a lie.
Why do we create a false self on social media? Deep in our hearts, we’re terrified that if people saw our real selves they wouldn’t accept, and they wouldn’t give us any applause. This is why we're so careful about what we post on social media and so fragile, insecure, and touchy about our online selves. Jon Tyson describes our modern predicament with identity and social media well:
Our culture makes it hard to rightly order our identity so that we know, at a foundational level, who we truly are. This lack of a solid center results in our putting identities on and taking them off depending on whom we are around. We feel the need to continually reinvent ourselves to keep up. We want to appear successful in the ways our culture demands, and it can be exhausting.
Pretending to be doing well; posting only images of fun, glamor, and excitement on social media; and telling only the parts of our story that preserve our glowing image are a kind of modern armor, protecting our fragile hearts. We are terrified to be seen for who we are, where we are, and what we are actually struggling with.
This is where so many young people are on social media right now. They know that they've used a false self to try to get other people's validation and it isn't working, yet they've grown so attached to the societal rewards that they can't take their mask off.
So what's the root problem?
So why do we live like this? Why do we all feel unacceptable to other people and use social media to try to prove the opposite? The root problem started long ago in the Garden of Eden.
When God created Adam and Eve they had nothing to hide and walked around naked with nothing to hide. But after Adam and Eve sinned against God they were filled with the shame of sin and tried to hide, both from God and each other. Their knowledge of their sin drove them to make clothes out of fig leaves, desperate to hide who they were.
Today, each of us is just like Adam and Eve; we've sinned against God and are trying to hide from Him. The only difference is that instead of fig leaves, we're using our social media identities to cover ourselves, hoping that we can hide our problems, flaws, and the gnawing sense that there's something wrong with us. David Benner explains this well:
Ultimately, attachments are ways of coping with the feelings of vulnerability, shame, and inadequacy that lie at the core of our false ways of being. Like Adam and Eve, our first response to our awareness of nakedness is to grab whatever is closest and quickly cover our nakedness. We hide behind the fig leaves of our false self. This is the way we package our self to escape the painful awareness of our nakedness.
Deep down, we hide behind our false self, hoping that we can keep God and others from seeing the unsavory parts of who we are. But rather than admitting that we're estranged from God and corrupted by sin, we try to create a righteous on our own by stitching together our social media fig leaves.
But whenever you try to create your own righteousness, though, you'll eventually struggle with either guilt or anxiety. While your self-righteousness may be acceptable to social media, it won’t measure up to God’s standard. You’ll struggle with guilt when your self-righteousness doesn’t measure up and anxiety when it does, what if someone finds out who you actually are?
But God wants more for you than a life hiding behind the fig leaves of your social media identity. He wants to set you free from the mask you feel you need to wear. So what’s the solution to this problem? How can we give up our false selves without being rejected by everyone around us?
how does the gospel solve this problem?
Faced with this tension, our culture tells us that the answer is to work harder at creating a better social media identity. If you aren't getting the applause you need to quell your inner doubts, then dedicate more time, energy, and money to creating the ideal social media life.
But no matter how hard you try, your own attempts at creating a self-righteousness will never give you the feelings of peace, security, and being known that you crave. You'll never be able to take off your mask and admit who you really are.
The gospel gives us hope though, but the doesn’t feel good at first. Why? Because the gospel tells us that the only solution isn’t to try harder, but rather to repent of your attempts at creating your own righteousness and instead rest in the perfect righteousness that God provides through Jesus, who God made to be sin on our behalf, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.
While our culture believes that you have to prove yourself to be acceptable by creating the perfect social media identity, the gospel flips that entirely on its head: you have to admit that your righteousness can't save you and that you need Christ's righteousness.
Why do you have to repent of your righteousness and receive Christ's righteousness by faith? Because as the prophet Isaiah says, all of our righteousness is like filthy rags. Even your best deeds are polluted by sin because you are using them to be your own savior and to make yourself acceptable without the help of God.
Why is this hard news? Because to receive Christ’s perfect righteousness, you need to repent not only of your bad deeds but also your good ones. This is what makes the gospel so unique. Every person on earth repents of their bad deeds, but only a Christian repents of their good deeds as well, the things they are using as their righteousness.
You see, what's keeping you from Christ isn't your bad deeds, but rather your good deeds, the things that you're using to create your social media identity. You’ll never be able to receive Christ’s righteousness until you admit to God and yourself that your self-righteousness isn’t enough.
Paul shows us what this looked like in his life in Philippians 3. He lists off all of the things that he used to trust to make him acceptable, including his family, class, job, and ability to follow the rules. Like us with social media, Paul dedicated his life to accumulating the things that would serve as his righteousness and make him acceptable to others. But then Paul was confronted by Jesus and changed:
But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.
After Paul met Christ, he realized that all of those attempts at creating his own righteousness were worthless. They couldn’t fix his real problem, that his sin had made him unacceptable to God. But through faith in Christ he received Jesus’ perfect righteousness, making him acceptable to God.
Now, when God looks at him, He doesn't see Paul's sinful attempts at self-righteousness, but rather the perfect righteousness of Christ. As Tim Keller says, "To be a Christian is to transfer your trust from the things you are doing to the things that Jesus did."
If you want to be healed of performing on social media, you have to swallow your pride and admit that you are unacceptable, regardless of how many Instagram likes or followers you have. We all naturally hate giving up our false mask, because we hate the idea that we need grace. But grace is the only thing that will heal your heart from trying to create your own righteousness.
When you're resting in Christ's righteousness, you can know that God loves your real self, not the fake self you're portraying on social media. As you realize that because of Christ that God loves you as you are, not as you should be, your heart will finally experience the healing touch of His love. As Brennan Manning reminds us:
“God longs for us to deeply believe and know that He loves us and accepts us as we are. He calls us to remove our mask and establish an honest and deep relationship with Him. When we are our true selves, we can finally claim our identity as His own—Abba’s child. … Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is an illusion."
Resting in Christ's righteousness lets you take off your false mask and admit who you are to God and others. When you do that, it lets God's love shine in on the deepest corners of your heart, giving you complete assurance that in Christ, you are simultaneously fully known and fully loved.
Now, because of Christ's righteousness, you can be confident that the God of the universe validates you and will someday welcome you into His presence by saying, "Well done, good and faithful servant.”
what does gospel-saturated social media look like?
When you trust in Jesus' righteousness to make you acceptable to God, it completely changes how you use social media. You no longer have to go onto social media trying to earn everyone else's validation, but can bask in God’s eternal validation of you. This lets you take your mask off and admit who you really are.
When you are free to live out of who God created you to be, then you can tell the truth about who you actually are. As one pastor said, "It is only when you know you are deeply loved and seen as holy in Christ that you can admit who you actually are."
As you let God's love fill your heart, you'll naturally begin to use social media less, not because you're on some social media detox, but rather because your heart will be healed of the need to get other people's validation. And when you do use social media, you'll be able to post in a way that connects with others through humility and openness, since you'll no longer be trying to manipulate your life to impress others.
This doesn't mean that you have to share every detail of your life, but it will set you free to share about your real self without obsessing over whether your peers will accept you or not. You'll no longer have to use your social media profiles to try to prove that you are worthy of applause, but rather can rest in Jesus' perfect performance. "Come to me,” Jesus says, “All of you who are thirsty and heavy-laden and I will give you rest."
The whole business model being… 1. Create a platform that allows people to share content they create for free. 2. Get other people to watch the content. 3. Mix in enough ads so that you can make money.
This Venn diagram is a major reason that many people never post on social media; because they don't see any overlap between the two circles, they choose to avoid posting, afraid that they will receive more rejection than acceptance on social media.