Why are we Letting Unvetted Strangers into Our Minds?
it's crushingly insane that we just let everyone talk to us all the time
It’s 2025, social media has lobotomized a generous portion of us such that we can no longer focus on one message, one book, one person for very long before the monkey on our back starts going berserk for fresh dopamine. I have too often had three screens open with three separate forms of media at once, believing that I am reading/listening/paying attention to each one. I think Bilbo put it well, when he felt “thin, like butter, spread over too much bread.” My brain is a finite mouth being force-fed an infinite glut of goodies through the sluice of my devices. Some of it is nutritious, much is poison. After a while, it all tastes the same, and the poison is paralyzing my mental capacity for thinking. You know, that thing that I need to exercise in order to be a useful man, a happy man.
I have to reclaim my attention if I ever wish to have meaningful relationships with other people who are with me in the 3-dimensional world, rather than the virtual world of mind/word online. I have many friends with whom I have only ever interacted online, or at most over the phone. These are disembodied spirits in my mental attic, and I am one in theirs. That can be good, in limited cases, but is usually nowhere near as meaningful as the relationships I can or do have locally with the whole persons I can be with in the same location at the same time.
Don’t read me wrong here, every single book ever written and read is the disembodied voice of the author—the sounds from inside his mind now being played on the gramophone in yours—and thus we meld minds with other people. Have you ever thought about that for a minute? Even as you read this, my soul is being invited into contact with yours through my words. By reading me, you have permanently altered who you are, because to be in contact with another person’s mind is to be affected, changed, pushed down a slightly new path for the rest of your life, one that wouldn’t have existed without meeting and melding minds with that author, artist, speaker, etc. God intended this for us, but the gaping firehose of everyone’s thoughts coming into our minds unfiltered, unbidden even, is like living in a madhouse. Not only are we too mentally scattered, but we are like a city without walls or security. Oh hello, stranger making YouTube shorts, welcome to my mind, where you get to make money via my stuck-open mental mouth. No problem. Oh, no, I don’t have any questions for you before I become a receptacle for your audio-visual load. I once spent a night in county jail before I was born again, and I was forced to listen to a crazy man singing the most bizarre, disturbing strings of thoughts. I could not shut him off, and I thought I would catch his mental illness by listening to him. Now ponder that dynamic at scale as we listen to 10,000 crazy people ranting and singing inside our souls as we indiscriminately allow them all space in our life through social media.
We are inviting the world of men and women into our souls, unvetted. Oh, you may choose whom you follow on social media, and which posts you read, but you’re still getting a veritable dump truck of unchosen content into the old brain hole if you’re mindlessly scrolling. Notes on Substack, anything on X, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube—they are all geared toward reeling in your attention to new creators and writers and speakers so that you expand your time on their site. It’s a game of numbers and eyeballs, and you are the product being sold. Your mind is the sacrificial lamb, and no one will keep it from going to the slaughter of ten thousand knives (voices) if you don’t.
So, hello, you invited me into your mind for this moment, and now, I am more a part of you because of that choice. Isn’t that a big choice? You probably don’t know me much, or at all, but here you have given me access to your inner person, to touch your life, and to adjust your vision. Why do we give this sacred privilege to anyone and everyone who has ever uploaded something to the internet? It’s insanity. At least with paper books, the flow is slow, measured, and somewhat of a known quantity beforehand. By social media, we open ourselves to instant meeting of anyone who may be saying anything. It’s whiplash at hypersonic drive, shaking us in every direction.
Here’s what I wish to impress upon you, from my mind to yours—we have to pull back from the open vent of words pouring through social media, often uncensored, if we wish to have the full function of our minds. It seems obvious, even oft-stated, but the bulk of us are still not changing our habits here—there is an ingrained quality to indiscriminate scrolling. It’s like the casino reward system. We get enough excitement (finding out some cool new fact or an unexpected, well-stated morsel of wisdom) to keep the desire aflame. Just another minute here to scroll before I go to bed. Just another five or ten minutes or twenty, or thirty-five haha, that’s a good point yeah, haha I vibe with that let me re-post it for everyone else haha. Stop it, you dope fiend.
The Spirit of the Discriminating Man
Whoever has no rule over his own spirit
Is like a city broken down, without walls. Prov. 25:28 NKJV
I quit Twitter in February 2023, and there hasn’t been more than a day since that I regretted it. I spent 14 years on that site scrolling through tens of thousands of tweets, interacting with many thousands of strangers, often in hopes of spreading the gospel. Good motive, right? Well, what did it cost me? I was often assaulted by unsought-for violent thoughts, explicit content, anger, malice, and rage posting, and the influence of millions of theologically-erroneous opinions and interpretations. Was that a good use of my very finite time in this life? No, in the aggregate, no, it was not. But in the past two years, I’ve been far better off. I lost a couple thousand followers by quitting Twitter, and with it a lot of opportunities to influence people for the truth of Christ, but would the Lord want me to damage my soul through exposure to mind-numbing inanity, vapid self-glorification from hundreds of people per day, evil speech, heresies, and the rest of the virtual cesspool in order to be that light out there?
The answer is, if I do not have a tight control over how much I let into my eyes and mind, then no, I should not be on social media. If I am vulnerable to the casino brain stimulation, I am a prime victim for the corporate machine that feeds on user time-on-site. I must have rule over my own spirit (Prov. 25:28). Here on Substack, I spend substantially less time scrolling Notes, and am fairly selective over what posts I read. But if you are like me, it’s the memes that grab me. Any post that promises to be rich in memes, I’m in there, and truthfully, it’s mostly useless comedy. Some people post politically rich, thoughtful meme content (that guy Patrick.memes comes to mind), but much else is just meant to grab my eyes for their stats, and the content is a hodgepodge of the bizarre and crude, exactly what my soul does not need.
How many books of the Bible have I not re-read because I was chuckling at raccoon memes? How much of my life will be burned up in the fire of judgment day because I could not/would not say no to the monkey on my back screeching for just a few more minutes scroll hunting for something juicy and fun? Too much. Is there a limited value to using social media? You decide for you. I see a limited value here—I love writing, I love speaking with people through my expressions, and sometimes I love finding someone else’s writing worth my time online. Substack has been a standout for this dynamic so far.
And yet, we are alive still, and may have lots more time before our turn comes to meet Death. If you have read this post, you should be having some degree of conviction that you can turn into repentance. Let’s commit to being highly discriminating men and women, who see the only things of near-infinite value in this world, which are people and time, as not worth wasting for dopamine hits.
I will be online in order to execute a few well-defined goals, and then I will be with my family, my friends, and books out in the 3-dimensional world of glory and integrated body-soul life. I encourage you to restrict your time online, and to make the people you can touch, see, feel, and speak with by voice, without an intermediating technology, where their eardrums pick up your firsthand sound—to make their lives richer in meaning, in truth, and in your focused presence. Enter one another’s minds the old-fashioned way, with unrushed attention, thoughtful discussions and service, and devote yourself to reading paper books when you are alone. I will love you if you remind me of my own words here whenever you want.
"How much of my life will be burned up in the fire of judgment day because I could not/would not say no to the monkey on my back screeching for just a few more minutes scroll hunting for something juicy and fun? "
One of the things we Christians do not think about very often is that we, like everyone else "must die once, and after that be judged by God." We come to think only that we have been forgiven and that after being forgiven all of our sins have been forgotten. But everything that we do after conversion will be judged, and most of it is dross, to be burned. Very little, if any, will be rewarded. Jesus told us to lay up treasures in heaven. Yet we strive every moment of our lives trying to lay up treasures here of earth, "where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal." "foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth,"
I mean, it's crushingly insane that we love our enemies and do good to those who persecute us, too. I don't disagree with your general observation, I'm certainly not shy with the mute button myself. But I suspect Jesus reads everyone's substack.