We’ve all heard how poor the state of mental health in America. But the numbers are truly staggering. “Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose131 percent.”[i] We have a serious problem.
In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt argues that the smart phone is the cause of plummeting mental health. Forty years ago, Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death foresaw the devastating impact of screens on our lives. “People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think,” Postman says. Postman argues that in the age of the screen is marked by shallow thinking, by triviality.
In other words, if you put Postman and Haidt together, the chain goes like this: poor mental health is caused by impulsive, shallow thinking which is caused by world mediated to us through cell phones.
Haidt (and Postman) isn’t suggesting that all mental health issues will disappear if we reduce screens in our lives, but he does believe that such issues will diminish. Three thousand plus years earlier the sons of Korah who departed Egypt with Moses had the same insight. Only, their insight went deeper still. The sons of Korah believe that dark days are not mitigated merely by deep thinking, but by deep communion. They say,
Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my salvation[c] 6 and my God.
My soul is cast down within me;
therefore I remember you
from the land of Jordan and of Hermon,
from Mount Mizar.
7 Deep calls to deep
at the roar of your waterfalls;
all your breakers and your waves
have gone over me.
8 By day the Lord commands his steadfast love,
and at night his song is with me,
a prayer to the God of my life. (Ps. 42:5-8)
Social media tells us that we can make the sadness go away by swiping to the next story, by clicking on the next reel, by watching one more Tik Tok. We skim across the surface like a jet ski. The sons of Korah tell us that when sorrow comes we ought to slow down and press deep into God.
Do you find yourself struggling to go deep? I do. As a 45-year-old, my teenage years were pre-social media and I didn’t have a smart phone until after grad school. I struggled with meditation even before I owned a smart phone. My mind still wandered when I prayed or read scripture. But there is no doubt that a social media world entices me to go shallower every day.
“Deep calls to deep.” The sons of Korah give us a picture of a waterfall crashing into the plunge pool, carved deeper each day by the force of the falling water. This is life in the Spirit: a life that plunges into the heart of God. A life chained to screens is a life cut off from the sweet, quiet depths of God’s heart.
To achieve this depth, we have to be willing to step into suffering, to walk with others in pain. We have to be willing to pause and grieve our losses, weep over our sin, lament a lost world.
Deep calls to deep. Shallow calls to shallow. Do you long to experience something more than the puddle-like existence Gates, Bezos, and Zuckerberg have fashioned for us?
I want to go deep with the sons of Korah. Let’s dive in.
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[i] Jonathan Haidt, “End the Phone-Based Childhood Now,” The Atlantic, March 13, 2024, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-childhood-smartphone-use-mental-health-effects/677722/#.
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Photo by Cristian Palmer on Unsplash