We are creatures of a technological age. Technology, especially internet technology, is the air we breathe. And before you think I am saying something controversial, just consider how we travel, communicate, eat, and make our coffee. Oftentimes, technology is a good thing. It makes life easier and more efficient. It collapses strenuous limitations of distance, time, and location. But we take for granted how much it shapes us, how dependent we are on it.

In his book, Digital Liturgies, Samuel James discusses how the digital world, like other technologies before it (think cars, trains, and planes), has radically changed the way we live. He argues that with internet technologies, the message is the medium. Digital tech, by our very use of it, shapes our habits, desires, and ideas about relationships, what it means to be human, authority, learning, and even profound things like love itself. It creates systemic changes in society “so that people begin to think and feel and act in ways that are permanently shaped by those changes” (44). The internet is not a neutral world, he argues. You will become a certain kind of person by using it.

I was a very busy person in college. I committed to clubs, participated in student government, played intermural sports, took several credit-heavy semesters, ran a magazine, etc. I used my phone and computer for everything. Of course, this was a necessity. It wasn’t until after graduation, however, that I started to realize all the ways this dependence impacted my lifestyle.

It was in the little things. Social media would eat away at so much time—I had to know everything going on. This led to things a lot of normal people experience, like comparison, anxiety, stress, procrastination, and information overload. But it also led to a kind of franticness inherent to the medium itself. With constant information, constant reaction, movement, and busyness automatically follow. When you live in a digital world, sometimes it’s hard to find your way out—it’s a mind in a million places. Furthermore, the internet was personalized to me—algorithms influenced my feeds, media consumption, and consequently, my thoughts. There was a self-absorbing quality to it, where at times I had difficulty giving myself to others.

Living a disembodied existence online shaped a kind of selfishness that limited the richness of my relationships. It would isolate me from being with others. It would even isolate me from finding fulfillment in my work. Social media destroyed my attention span. I had less patience to dedicate myself to learning. What I did have was a subtle and unexplainable desire to constantly be distracted and entertained. It hurt my grades, but also my sense of self-worth. I knew I could have stronger friendships, better academic outcomes, and more mental clarity, but all these things felt elusive.

More importantly, however, I knew I was hurting spiritually. I knew there was a distance between myself and God. Instead of changing my habits to draw closer to him, I would use technology to escape. Living on the internet cultivated a numbness to the things of Christ.

When I talk about having regrets about how I use technology, I don’t mean that I regret using it. (I am not a “Luddite”—basically a curse word for irrational prudishness against tech.) What I do regret is how I’ve let technology unwittingly shape my habits, thoughts, and desires.

There is only so much you can change about the past. Sometimes it’s a thing you can sing again with a renewed knowledge of pitch and melody. But more often than not it’s an ethereal thing—a discordant array of notes you can never take back. The music is always there—you can never get the bad song out of your head. What you can do, however, is sing better and hope for a more beautiful song.

Upon retrospect, and to expand the musical metaphor, many of my life’s melodies—radically facilitated by tech use—are full of fragmented songs. They sing of wasted time, harmful words, lost friendships, loneliness, and other such themes. Of course, I cannot blame the technology itself for these things. I decided to use it. But there are real ways that my very use of technology cultivated and shaped me—often unknowingly, that contributed to a lot of real struggle.

Since graduating, I’ve had the space and time to step back and reevaluate my relationship with technology. I certainly don’t hate the internet, don’t get me wrong. However, I have been more and more drawn to examine the ways it has unconsciously shaped me. One of my biggest regrets is that I haven’t done this sooner. If I had, maybe the struggles I experienced in college would have looked different. But I will never know.

I’ve realized that despite all these regrets, I want to sing a more beautiful melody. One more real, lively, awake, curious, and joyful. I don’t want to be shaped by something that is actively undermining what should matter. I want to be formed by good things.

For me, this looks like taking a step back from social media. It means spending less time on my phone. It means being more aware of how I spend my time online. All of these things are important, I believe, because they impact the type of person I am becoming.

If any of this applies to you, I encourage taking a step back as well. You will be the better for it.