Ep. 295: Social Sanity in an Insta World

Daniel Markin:

Hey, this is Daniel Markin with indoubt. On today’s episode, I’m talking with Sarah Zylstra and we’re talking about social media. Now we talk about social media a lot with indoubt. We talk about these impacts, but Sarah has been doing a tremendous amount of research for an upcoming book with The Gospel Coalition on the effects of social media, in particular, the effects on women in their twenties. So this is right around my generation. Social media came out when I was a teenager, 10 years later, I’m 28, right in the thick of it. And in particular, young moms are the ones who are being impacted so heavily by this. So I hope you find this information helpful as we think about how to follow the Lord well, and also try and use social media well.

Hey welcome to indoubt, this is Daniel Markin and I’m joined today by Sarah Zylstra, from The Gospel Coalition. Sarah, it’s good to be with you. Thank you for joining us in the program today. Would you please just tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and your ministry with The Gospel Coalition?

Sarah Zylstra:

Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. This is really fun. I grew up in Iowa in the cornfields. After I went to school, I moved to Chicago with my husband, where we went to graduate school. I started working for Christianity Today a little bit and puzzle pieced together a lot of other little freelancing things. Then I about five or six years ago came on full-time at The Gospel Coalition where my job is to write stories of where God is at work in the world. So I’m trained as a journalist and my career is as a journalist, but these days I’m literally trying to follow around the spirit of God and find places where he’s doing something amazing through his people, stories where you’re like, “Wow, that has to be God at work. There’s no way that could happen otherwise.” And that’s the stuff I’m reporting usually these days.

Daniel Markin:

Well, right off the bat, I feel like we have a few connections there. I looked at a school in Iowa called Dordt College.

Sarah Zylstra:

That’s where I went.

Daniel Markin:

That’s where you went?

Sarah Zylstra:

We could have been roommates. Well, no, but we could have been friends.

Daniel Markin:

Yeah, we could have been homies.

Sarah Zylstra:

Cool.

Daniel Markin:

Yeah.

Sarah Zylstra:

Very cool.

Daniel Markin:

But listen, let’s talk a little bit about some of your work in your ministry, because you got all sorts of stories that you’ve been tracking down, but one of the big stories that you’ve been really honing in on and through your research, you’ve been looking a lot at social media and with indoubt, we’re not scared of talking about social media. I feel like we hit it a lot. It’s probably something we should hit more. Let’s jump into this work that you’re doing. You’re writing a full-on book on social media and its impact on us as Christians. I couldn’t agree more with your premises. I think there’s lot of good that can come from it, but we got to be careful because this is a tool that can quickly become obsessive. So maybe just to start, why this book? Why did you start writing this book? And it’s called Social Sanity in an Insta World. What began this deep dive?

Sarah Zylstra:

Yeah. Great question. So we do something that’s called Women’s Conference at The Gospel Coalition. So every other year we gather together a whole bunch of women who learn about the Bible together and worship together and spend time together thinking about issues. And last year, when we were at the conference, I was sitting around a table with a bunch of other speakers. One of them was talking passionately about how much we need a book. We need just to pay more attention to social media and women. She was doing women’s ministry and she especially was talking to young moms. So these are probably moms in their twenties or young women. And she said, you just can’t imagine how much social media is affecting them and affecting their spiritual lives, their physical lives, their marriages, how they parent all, everything more than you would ever imagine.

Sarah Zylstra:

So we decided to write a book together and what we did is there’s actually eight different authors. So I edited it and I wrote the first chapter and then each of the other authors, Jen Wilkin, Melissa Kruger, Laura Wifler, Emily Jensen, we got a whole bunch of these other girls. They each took a chapter on something, they were really strong in identity discernment, should I quit, influence, just family and friends time. How much time are you spending on there? And everybody took a chapter and dove into the good things social media offers because it does. The bad things we need to watch out for. And then biblical principles, like how can we approach this from a gospel-centered point of view?

Daniel Markin:

Do you know one of the things that you just brought up there that I thought was super interesting and you mentioned this before was that age? So you just mentioned that age, which is 20-something-year-old moms, which is, I guess my understanding of social media, you have a big social media boom in 2012, when most smartphones get Instagram, Facebook, and high-speed internet, put those things together, people are spending way more time on social media. So what are some of the pitfalls that you’re seeing in the social media experience with the 20-something-year-olds? With these young adult moms?

Sarah Zylstra:

Yeah.

Daniel Markin:

And not just moms but I’d love to hear how that impacts motherhood.

Sarah Zylstra:

Yes. I would love to share that with you. I think the biggest problem, we also did an unofficial survey at The Gospel Coalition where we just emailed a bunch of women, all the women who signed up for our conferences. So we had their email this list of questions, of what they struggle with. The thing that those gospel coalition women told us primarily is that they struggle with time. The time that it takes. It takes time to look at social media. However, it takes more time than just that because after you log off of it to do something else, you’re still thinking about it. Then you’re thinking about it later on and you’re thinking, what should I post? And it takes up so much mental time that it makes us feel like we don’t have any time. So it’s just crunching the amount of minutes that you can spend thinking about anything else into a smaller and smaller and smaller box until it feels like you can never think about anything else.

Sarah Zylstra:

We’re not crunched for time. We have more time than we ever have before. We have all kinds of labor-saving devices. We have all kinds of technology that helps us get things done faster. We have more time than women did a hundred years ago, but it feels like we have less because we have less mental time. Now I’ll tell you something else when I talk to girls who are younger than 25. So this is the gen Z. They don’t worry about time. They have oodles of time. I don’t know if you remember being back in college, but having time wasn’t really such a big deal.

Daniel Markin:

Anyone who says they don’t have time in college is lying. They just have bad time management. Okay. So that’s the thing.

Sarah Zylstra:

Yeah, they’re not worried about time, but what they worry about especially the girls is body image. So they’re at a period in their time when they’re either the younger girls are going through puberty or they’re at the time in their life when they’re supposed to be at their most physically attractive age, when you’re in your young twenties, you’re supposed to be as good looking as you will ever get.

Sarah Zylstra:

And maybe you remember being that age and looking at other people in your class or other people in real life and you can kind of compare like, oh man, I don’t feel so great about my body. Everybody feels weird about their body when they’re going through those stages and kind of comparing them. However, if you are a young girl, who’s doing that now you’re not comparing yourself necessarily to the people in your class, but to the millions of beautiful girls online who are editing themselves before they put up pictures of themselves and they all do it. So it looks like everyone else looks perfect and you know that you don’t. So body image over and over again is what I hear from the younger generation. That’s what they just feel bad about themselves physically.

Daniel Markin:

Wow. So all of that makes sense and even if you think about, I mean, how does the algorithm of Instagram and Facebook play into that? Because I would imagine that based on likes the body types that fit the cultural standard of beauty and many of them are unrealistic and you can go behind all the stuff of are they starving themselves? What does that look like? How does the algorithm play into that sort of thing? Have you found that in your research?

Sarah Zylstra:

I think it’s huge. I think first of all, even though it seems like the nicest platform out there, Instagram is the most dangerous because it focuses so much on image. It’s all picture-based. It’s pictures of your life. It’s pictures of you looking cute over here or pictures of you looking cute on the beach or pictures of you looking cute on your way to class. That’s what you’re going for. So Instagram is the hardest you are absolutely right about the algorithms and the likes because another thing everybody wants, especially if you’re looking at gen Z, it’s more than 65% of middle schoolers. If you ask them what they want to be when they grow up, they’ll tell you an influencer. So an influencer is the new movie star or athlete. That’s just what you want to be but to become an influencer, you have to gain attention and you do that by building a brand.

Sarah Zylstra:

So if you are an 18-year-old girl, then you are thinking about what is my brand. If my brand is a healthy outdoorsy girl, then I need to keep doing healthy outdoorsy things, hoping that maybe some healthy outdoorsy people I’ll collect a lot of followers, and then I’ll collect some attention, and then maybe someone will pay me to wear their sneakers. And then I’m on my way to being famous and influential. That is so hard because it’s a trap, it’s a lie and the thing is, once you get into it, this is what they’re telling me.

Sarah Zylstra:

Once you sort of have created the brand and got a little attention, then you’re not the influencer. Your followers have the power. So you’re constantly thinking, what would my followers want me to post that they would like? What would my followers want to hear about now that they would like? So maybe you’re the influencer, but you’re only the influencer, as long as they hit you with those likes. So if you put up something they don’t like, then you’re just a girl who didn’t do her homework and is late for school and you’re not.

Daniel Markin:

Or if you post at the wrong time.

Sarah Zylstra:

Or you say the wrong thing.

Daniel Markin:

Yeah. Say the wrong thing. I mean, how quickly, especially in our cancel culture today, you make the wrong take on something, post the wrong connection to something that could end really quickly for you. I also just, I used to be on Instagram. I don’t use it anymore. My wife has it. So she’s kind of my… I have Twitter. So I’ll go, I’ll use Twitter, I’ll show her things, connect on things on Twitter and she has Instagram. She can show me things, pull up things, whatever and we find that healthy. But I don’t believe that our brains are meant to see that many images that quickly. I just think it, and maybe there’s science behind it. But I think processing so many images is hard. So different than watching a movie where you’re connected in the same image, same people. You’re moving an hour and a half through that thing. You could see how many different people, things in that span of time. I just got to imagine that keeps our minds jumbled.

Sarah Zylstra:

I a hundred percent agree and I’ve even heard people say this about the news. We’re not meant to know that much news. We can know every bad thing that happens across the whole planet. We can’t even process that and what it turns is to, we start getting numb to anything, except if it’s way over the top terrible. And that’s sort of the we get kind of numb, we’re numbing ourselves to it really. You’re just seeing it over and over and you’re exactly right. So you can be scrolling and you’ll be like, “Wow, this is great news. I’m so happy that you got such and such happened. You went on a great vacation.” And right after that, like, “Oh man, you know your husband’s in the hospital.” And right after that, it could just be like, “Oh look advertisement.” Or, “Oh, here’s a Bible verse.” It’s just unconnected information hitting you over the head one after another. You’re right. We don’t have any time to process and so we just have to tune it out or we would go crazy.

Daniel Markin:

On the topic of influencers. I have two questions. One is do the costs outweigh the benefit? By in your experience, I mean, people who work hard at this and make it, I mean, what do they even… Are they able to make a living off of this sort of thing or is it just like, I got a bunch of free sweaters? Then the second part is, do they feel when people are trying to be influencers like they’re selling themselves? Because maybe they are, or maybe they don’t realize that getting into it, but after a while, do they feel used?

Sarah Zylstra:

Yeah, that’s really good. I think they feel fake. I think they feel fake because you have to keep being the brand and God created you to be such a complex, interesting multifaceted person. And if all you are is a healthy granola girl who goes for hikes and goes apple picking, that’s just one facet of the many parts of you. So to build a successful brand off of that one thing, I’m the young mom with the really cute kids. That’s just very limiting to keep thinking of stuff. So I think it feels like a trap because you feel like you have to constantly think of things, not that you want to post, but that your followers want to hear and want to look at. So that feels like a trap and I think you start to feel fake pretty quick and then you start to feel cynical.

Sarah Zylstra:

This isn’t even real. None of this is even real and then what can sometimes happen to you is that you can overshare. Some people I’ve heard of are trying to push back against that. So they are like, let’s get authentic and they overshare. They share too much. They’re too vulnerable and then you can get a vulnerability hangover in which you’re like, I can’t believe I just shared my innermost depressed thoughts and feelings. And Joe from middle school is reading it. Like, why did I just share that with everybody in the whole world?

Daniel Markin:

Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Zylstra:

I also think it’s really a couple people hit it big, but you have to think of it as that, just the smallest sliver. I know you want to get discovered like you go to Nashville and get discovered or you go to Hollywood and get discovered, but it is just so rare that someone is that talented. And there’s a lot of money that has to go behind that. And it just for 99.99% of people out there, it just won’t happen. So, no, I would say it’s not worth it. The people who have to get to that very top level, it almost feels like you have to sell your soul to get there. So I would caution against it

Daniel Markin:

As you’ve been talking with these young moms, young women, what breaks your heart the most, as you’re talking with them and hearing their struggles?

Sarah Zylstra:

They can’t get off. Yeah. That’s what kind of hurts. When I’m talking to these girls they’re smart, they’re pretty, they have degrees, they love Jesus. They recognize if you talk to somebody for a while, they recognize how harmful this is and they can see I feel lonely when I’m on here because I’m looking at somebody else having fun. And I’m thinking, oh no, am I having enough fun? I mean, you’re constantly comparing yourself to who’s ever up there. Oh no. Are my kids doing that thing that your kids are doing? Even if they’re maybe not talented that way, or even have a desire for that. But still, the first thing I think is like, oh no, am I being a good enough mom? Because my kid isn’t sleeping the way your kid is, or because I didn’t get that job offer that you did, or because I’m not wearing those cute clothes that you do.

Sarah Zylstra:

There’s just this constant comparison and it wears down your soul. Those also work against relationships because if I’m in your house with you and your church with you and on your sidewalk with you, I know you, we know each other and you can’t know somebody on social media holistically, all you can know is what they share and all they know is what you share. As we have talked about, that is one small facet of the way that God made you that is beautiful and huge. You are so complicated and interesting. So it kind of breaks, it makes those relationships more shallow and more competitive. So it makes you more lonely. But even still, when I talk to these girls, they can articulate that really well. And yet they can’t get off unless something happens. So if there’s a bad breakup with a boyfriend or a fight with a friend or something huge happens like that makes them upset enough, then they can break the ties with it.

Sarah Zylstra:

Then they can recognize in themselves the good the break does them. This one girl said to me, she was so smart about it. She’s like, I feel like I can think better because I’m not thinking in posts. I can think more complex thoughts when I’m off social media. I think longer, more complex thoughts and they don’t have to have everything wrapped up with a bow. I could have more complex conversations of course than you could just have really quick online with your friends if you’re sitting down over coffee and you really can dig into a topic.

Sarah Zylstra:

So I think what breaks my heart the most is that they can recognize that this does more harm than good and yet the addiction of it, even when they see it is so strong that it takes something significant to push them off. Then I think what’s also hard is to stay off. They want to just go right back on. It’s true for me too. I mean, I think it’s true for all of us, but I think it’s especially true for people who are younger. I didn’t get it until I had my kid. I was early mid-twenties maybe before I first got on and so your brain is a lot more formed by that point.

Daniel Markin:

Yeah. I mean, there’s an element of sitting down. I mean, people before us would sit down and read a whole book, or they if you’re on the bus, what do you do? Well, you just look out the window and your thoughts take you places. And again, it’s a weird thing where it’s not wrong to be looking at social media. It’s not wrong to be like because in many ways you can glean a lot of good information. We have good information at our fingertips, but social media you’re right. It’s a trap. It is. It’s kind of like eating McDonald’s I think. In moderation it could be great, but yeah, you do it too much and it does make you sluggish and it is just, I think unwise, and as you think about wisdom we know from Proverbs that the fear of God’s the beginning of wisdom. So what does it look like to fear God and to be wise about using social media? Can those things be done?

Sarah Zylstra:

I think they can. I think you have to, and we put a lot of this in the book, I’ll just touch on a couple things to be aware of. Jen Wilkin wrote the first chapter on identity and she was so good. She’s like, there are ways that social media makes us think that we’re like, God when we’re not. So for example, it makes us think we can create our own identity, but we can’t, God gave us an identity. We can’t just make our own. It makes us think that we are omnipresent. It makes us think that we can be everywhere and know everything about all of the people. That’s literally what we’re trying to consume is all the information. We can’t. God put us in a physical spot, in a physical body with a physical 24 hours a day. He is limitless. He can see everything and know everything and be able to respond to everything.

Sarah Zylstra:

You could just feel it right, the anxiety or the overwhelm because we’re just not built to be able to do that. The way that social media makes us feel like we’re unchanging. Only God is immutable and unchanging the same yesterday, today, and forever and we rub up against each other. We’re meant to change. We’re meant to grow, to look more and more like Jesus that’s the whole sanctification process is us growing and changing and rubbing against each other.

Sarah Zylstra:

So if we’re not really rubbing against each other, if I’m presenting a face to you and you’re presenting a face to me, but neither one of us is changing each other really except to make each other feel jealous, maybe in those moments, then that’s just working against how we’re created to be. There are good ways you can get on with discernment. I think the biggest and best advice I would have would be to take a step back to just try and stay off. Just take a break, even if it’s a small break, and assess your heart. John Piper says, “Christian fasting reveals the desires of your heart and the idols in your heart.” So just to feel those emotions of what is that emotion in me that wants to get on? Do I want to compare myself to somebody? Do I want to show how I’m better than somebody else? Do I feel like I’m getting a connection there that could be better served with a phone call or a walk with a friend?

Daniel Markin:

Yeah. I mean think about some of the accounts that you’ve seen do social media really well and follow the Lord well. What are kind of things are they doing? And maybe boundaries they have, but even things they post, what sort of things are you seeing?

Sarah Zylstra:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So it’s been a little while since I’ve seen because I got off social media altogether two months ago. So I’m two months social media free.

Daniel Markin:

Well, how’s that been? How’s that been?

Sarah Zylstra:

Yeah. It has been… I’m kind of cage stage about it. So I will probably overstate this, but it has been amazing. What those girls were telling me is absolutely true. You can think more clearly and I’m in my forties, early forties. So I can tell you I can’t imagine how much more clearly they can think, but I can think more clearly. I can plan better. I feel like I have been given back so much time and really the time I spent on there, wasn’t a lot. It’s just mental time I’m getting back. I feel like I’m more engaged in what’s happening.

Sarah Zylstra:

So before if I had five minutes before my kids were coming home from school and I might scroll and then when they came home from school, I feel kind of irritated that they were interrupting me. Then I would just feel like, oh, now I have to make them a snack or something, but I’d still be thinking about what I’ve seen on social media. So I’m there with them, but I’m not, I’m really somewhere else. Now if they can come home from school and I have that five minutes beforehand, I can think, oh, they’ll probably want to snack. Should I get something? Get a snack ready for them. So when they come in, I’m ready for them. I’m there with them. I just feel like I’m more present in my own life and that has been a gift that’s been far better than I thought it would be.

Daniel Markin:

Yeah. We’re running out of time here. You used that before the show. It’s like we could go two hours on this. We probably could. I would love to just hear a final thought from you, maybe a final encouragement for young men, but in particular young women, as they’re looking forward at their life, at the Christian woman that they want to become, what kind of practical and loving, godly wisdom can you just give to them about how to think about social media?

Sarah Zylstra:

Yes. I would say my best advice is to take that little bit of a break and examine your own heart and then make a plan because if you do not, I know what will happen because it happened to me and to other people I talk to as you will get back on and it will just be the same as it was before. So make two plans, one, make a plan for your time off. So be like, okay, in my time off, I’m going to write in a journal and I’m going to make some cookies and I’m going to read this chapter in a book and I’m going to go for a walk or whatever it’s going to be, make a plan so that when you’re off, you’re not just reaching for that again and again, and again. Also, another tip is if it’s too hard for you to get off, I just had to have my husband get me off because every time I went on, I scrolled.

Sarah Zylstra:

So it’s okay to ask somebody else, your boyfriend, your best friend, your mom, whoever to lock you out for a temporary amount of time, or if you want to get rid of it altogether. Then while you’re taking your break and journaling and walking and baking and thinking, make a plan for when you come back on and think, what is it? Why am I on here?

Sarah Zylstra:

What am I getting from social media that I can’t get somewhere else? Because we did live without social media for many thousands of years. So it is possible to do so, but are there things, are there ministries that I really like to follow or could I narrow down my list of people I follow? Could I limit when I look at this? How do I want this to look? Be intentional, be purposeful. It can be a beautiful thing if you’re thinking, hey, I like to go on and I’ve got a friend from far away and I just want to really check in on these three people once a week. Well, you can disable your newsfeed or so I’m told with some kind of app. So Google that and set that up and then just go check those three people once in a while and just plan it. Be purposeful. That’s my advice.

Daniel Markin:

With that, actually, I have been ruthlessly unfollowing people on Facebook and it’s not that some of these people I’m like when did, who was this? And it’s someone that high school, 10 years ago, they were in my class. And I’m like, I don’t know who I just… Not that I don’t care about you as a person. I just don’t really care. And so you unfollow them. They still think you’re friends or whatever, but you can actually curate the people who you want to see. So it’s like, you can unfollow the pages that you liked years ago because you thought it was funny to like rubber ducks and there’s all these cute and now they’re bought by some company, you get random ads. You can unfollow that. You can just unfollow all sorts of things. So then you’re seeing just your family. I know people who do that. They just literally, they have Facebook friends, so people can get a hold of them on messenger, but then they just follow family and stuff. I think that’s a great and healthy way to go about it as well. You know?

Sarah Zylstra:

Yeah.

Daniel Markin:

Sarah, thank you for your time. Thank you for jumping on here and this discussion and your expertise and just looking forward to that book coming out, reading it, it getting in the hands of people. If they want to find this book or any resources that you have, where do we go?

Sarah Zylstra:

Yep. So if you want to see anything that I write, you can go to thegospelcoalition.org. The book is at the TGC Bookstore. It’s also on Amazon or anywhere else that you would want to get a book. It’s short. It’s a quick read. It is an easy read. There’s lots of little stories in it. It would be a good beach read. It also would be good. It’s great to read with friends because a lot of times we don’t realize our own social media use, but your spouse or your kids or your best friends or your colleagues are able to speak into that with you. I would definitely reach out for wisdom from them and if you wanted to do read it with some friends or even just take a little fast and be like, I’m just going to take two or three days off, read this book, think through what I want this to look like and then design something that I want.

Daniel Markin:

Cool. Well, thank you, Sarah. It’s been a pleasure.

Sarah Zylstra:

Yeah.

Daniel Markin:

And I’m sure we’ll have you back on the program again, and maybe it’ll be interesting to hear what this looks like a few months from now and how the book is received and feedback and things. So again thank you.

Sarah Zylstra:

Thank you so much this was really fun.