Audio only:
In this episode Trent breaks down why he’s almost entirely stopped using social media and the good things that keep him marginally online.
Transcription:
Trent:
Today I’m going to talk about why I quit social media, but before I do that, please hit the, you know what? Maybe you should not hit the subscribe button. Maybe you should just go outside. Maybe you should just get offline. Maybe you and I should take a hard look at what the internet and social media have been doing to us for almost 20 years, and maybe we should reconsider how we spend the 1,440 minutes that God gives us every day. I say this because in the past few months, I’ve taken a hard look at my social media use and I’ve tried to change it to better glorify God and live out my primary vocation as a husband and father. Here’s what happened. A few years ago, I had multiple social media platforms, including a public Facebook page, a private Facebook page, private Instagram, and I was posting on X regularly.
Back then it was Twitter, but then I noticed two things about social media that made me realize I was addicted to a drug and it was time to go cold Turkey. Number one, it’s a gigantic time suck. As I said before, God gives us 1,440 minutes a day. A third of that should go to sleep. A third should go to work when it’s during the work week, and the remaining third should be restful, and for a merry guy like me, it should be in service to my family, but social media crept into all three of those areas. It stole from sleep, it stole from work, and worst of all, it stole from family and I was just sick of that happening. According to most research, the average social media user belongs to six different networks and spends two to three hours a day on social media.
For teens, it’s almost five hours a day, and the average user checks his mobile device once every six minutes during the waking part of the day. In order for the Council of Trent to be successful, I have to be on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, but I don’t personally manage those accounts. Honestly, the biggest time suck of all of these platforms is YouTube, or as Michael Scott put it, when I discovered YouTube I didn’t work for five days, I did nothing. I am torn about what social media does to people, and so I feel like a hypocrite if I create content on YouTube that contributes to this problem. I never want to take people away from important things in their life, which is why I script these episodes. I want to be respectful of your time and provide short edifying content that doesn’t take up more of your day than absolutely necessary.
For example, if I posted an hour and a half rant about what’s wrong in the church today, and it only served to give you a dopamine hit of anger that would eat up 10% of your waking day and not do anything to build up Christ’s kingdom, so it would be a waste. Why would I do that? And I also realized that there was nothing useful to me on my private social media pages, so I deactivated them. No more Facebook, no more Instagram. I got rid of my LinkedIn because why am I on LinkedIn? It was useful to me one time to track down an author of an obscure academic book, but otherwise I didn’t need to be there, so I shut them all down except for XAK, a Twitter. After a lot of soul searching, I decided there were good reasons to stay on that particular platform, which I’ll explain in a bit.
I didn’t want to waste time on X, so I made a promise to not post on my account and for about six months, my last post was just a cute picture of me and my kids. That picture was a reminder that when I choose to waste time on X, I’m often taking away time from the people that matter most to me. I still would reply to other people’s posts every now and then, and every now and then I’d waste time doing that, but I could also accomplish a lot of good, so I stayed. I kept that picture up for several months until a few anonymous users started saying hateful, malicious things about my children, so I deleted all my posts and I made a new promise that if I did post anything, it’d just be bible verses or quotations from things like the catechism or from people like the Pope, and I keep my replies to an absolute minimum.
If someone wants to write something hateful about the Bible or the catechism that I’ve posted on my page, Lord have mercy. I don’t need to get involved and I can let their folly just speak for itself. Which leads me to the second reason I quit social media. Number two, social media turns us into awful people. I remember when I used to post frequently on X, I would end up getting into debates with people on different subjects. Sometimes we go back and forth dozens of times I would go to sleep after posting rebuttal to them, and as soon as I woke up, we’d be back to fighting with each other again. That’s a horrible way to live. Why would I let a stranger or even a known commenter have this kind of access to my life? Why would I waste my time writing all of this out online when it’s just going to disappear into the virtual ether in a few months, weeks, or realistically a few days and no one’s going to remember it?
I have seen normal people turn into shrill, vindictive, obsessive, and malicious people when they spend too much time online, they end up posting hundreds of times a day, always trying to bait people into arguing with them. It’s sad, and I don’t want anything to do with that. When I go for a walk with my kids or spar on the match or just enjoy a movie with my wife, I’m free. Why in the world would I subject myself to the yoke of slavery that is social media that doesn’t just waste our time with idol scrolling, but it deforms our souls in the process? Jonathan het notes this in his book, the Anxious Generation. He talks about how social media has harmed people, especially children through things like sleep deprivation, loss of real world contacts, loss of attention spans, and addiction. A 2021 Yale University study showed that social media encourages us to express more outrage and reward for more engagement to our posts.
This echoes a warning Pope Francis gave in 2013 when he said, social media leads to quote the reduction of human relationships to mere algorithms, not to mention a false sense of belonging, especially among young people that can lead to isolation and loneliness. Social media can also lead us to join unhealthy communities that reinforce bad beliefs. People who hate, and I mean outright hate conservatives or liberals, women or men hating people of color or hating white people really hating any group, they retreat into an echo chamber of like-minded individuals where they fall deeper into their own hatred or if they have disordered desires, they retreat into a disordered echo chamber. This is summarized in a popular four chan post that describes how before the internet, if you had a weird desire like wanting to be intimate with a toaster, the people in your local community would tell you, stop it, get some help.
But after the internet was invented, people with weird desires can now just go on Google or a search engine, find a hundred other people in a world of 7 billion people who feel this way about toasters and then think that what they do or how they feel isn’t a big deal and everybody else has the problem. So social media makes us tired, sad, lonely, disordered and angry, and I decided I don’t want to be involved in any of that. If someone says something false or bizarre, I’m not going to repost them with a snappy rejoinder because that sucks up my time. That could be spent on better things building up this channel, building up the kingdom, or spending time as a husband and father for my family. Instead, I’ll directly message the person and I’ll have a private conversation with them, or if it’s a big enough deal, I’ll make an episode about their post and expand more on the topic than I could in a single online post.
Every now and then I’ll post a reply to someone to maybe correct an error about my personal life or even just to make a joke. But going forward, those are going to be few and far between. I’ve also decided to have a jubilee, if you will, and unblock everyone I’ve ever blocked except for the porn accounts. Once again, if you want to say awful hateful things in response to a scripture verse or a quote from the pope on my feed, fine. That will just show people why they should be wary of whatever movement you happen to represent. Although you might be thinking, if X is so bad, then why don’t I just delete my account like Matt Frat did a few years ago and one day I want to do that, but I prayed about it and I’ve discerned that there are still several goods that I can pursue on a platform like X that justify using it.
For example, people often tag me when they come across a user who says that they’re thinking of becoming Catholic, and the person asks, does anyone have a good book that they can read about being Catholic? I’ll then directly message the person and offer to email them a free copy of my book, why we’re Catholic, or The Case for Catholicism or one of my other books, and it’s not uncommon. I’ll hear from that same person maybe a few months or a year or two later and find out that he or she is now being received into the Catholic faith, and I don’t want to do this with a secret alt account because it’s still helpful to have a large platform connected with my real name if I need to respond to someone or if I want to offer someone my book and they can see that the person offering it is actually me the author, so it’s okay to give them an electronic copy.
Those opportunities alone make it worthwhile to stay on X, but I also use X as a helpful news platform and outlet to find out what’s going on in the world, and I frequently include X posts in my episodes. I’ve seen a lot of good fruit that comes from engaging current events and popular influencers, so it’s worth it to stay on the platform, at least for now. When it comes to your decision to be on social media, that’s one only you can make. Maybe you have cultivated a spirit of moderation and prudence. I pray you can use social media to glorify God through encounters with people you’d probably never have in the real world or the offline world. But if you feel like the internet has become a time suck and it’s turning you into an awful person, log off at least for a little while, it’ll be hard because you and I are in some ways addicted to a drug, and if my content or someone else’s content helps your faith, but you don’t want to be on the internet, just download the episodes onto a podcast app and listen to it offline.
This can help you plan how much time you devote to media consumption and prevent you from losing hours a day just mindlessly scrolling, but whatever you decide to do with your time on the internet, I hope you’ll pray for me and what we’re doing here at the Council of Trent, and if you want to do good on the internet without having to be on the internet yourself, consider joining our team and going over to trent horn podcast.com and supporting us so that we can keep creating content that if people are going to be on the internet to view it, at least edifies them instead of enraging them. Finally, I hope you’ll heed the words of Pope Francis who said that the misuse of virtual encounter can only be overcome by the culture of authentic encounter, which involves a radical call to respect and to listen to one another, including those with whom we may strongly disagree. Thank you so much for watching and hope you have a very blessed a day.