I Post, Therefore I Am

I am having something of an existential crisis with social media. Everything I thought I knew about these platforms has changed, leaving me chasing the proverbial chicken in a pen to find out what is truly certain. As a creative, I have been trained to use social media as a tool to help people find my work and yet, I am finding it’s about as useful as taking a shovel to cement. So needless to say, I hit a wall and took a break from Instagram for a month and instead, read Descartes.

The well known line from Descartes, I think therefore I am, came from a place of despair. As Descartes began to doubt everything he knew, he eventually gave himself completely over to his doubt believing all things are either a projection of our unreliable senses or simply a deception of what we thought we knew. Do we even exist or is what we call reality just a dream? I know what it’s like for all that we thought we knew to become dismantled, many call this deconstruction and it can happen in any area of life, not just religious thought. But Descartes came to a hopeful conclusion that for something to be deceived, it had to be something in the first place; there has to be a point of existence. I guess that is something, right? A vague point of existence is better than no existence, offering the opportunity to build purpose, even if it is in obscurity. It’s our ability to think, being the thinking thing, that generates our existence. In one sense, we are the concrete object that all non-concrete objects flow.

So what does this have to do with Social Media? Let’s use Descartes’s rule: If thinking became Descartes’s way of believing in his own certainty of existence, what does posting our thoughts on social media enable us to believe?

Each time I open up Facebook, the platform asks me “What’s on your mind?” reinforcing a belief that posting makes us and our thoughts somehow concrete. Instead of simply enjoying the delicious breakfast at a trendy restaurant, the simple act of posting it adds another layer of certainty that my breakfast is, in fact, delicious! Since Descartes’s philosophy came from a place of despair, his ability to think in one sense elevated him out of the pits of doubt and onto the sturdy ground of his thinking existence. In a similar sense, social media can become a salve to soothe our ache for certainty by posting our thoughts, we are essentially posting our existence through words and pictures. Our then-published selves mirrored back to us an obscure promise of certainty.

In a world of grasping for certainty, social media seems the most popular space to find it. But is it a betrayal of reality? If I don’t post it, did it really happen? If I don’t align with right or left, do I have meaning? If people don’t like my posts, do I have worth? Has our search for certainty generated an eye-witness-based reality in which we must have an audience to validate our existence? Even more, our worth? *Cue existential crisis.*

In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells us a different way of existing by staying connected to a source of life that is within our grasp with his famous teaching concerning the vine and the branches.

Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. (Jn 15:4)

For Descartes, the “fruit” of our existence came from our ability to think and logically encounter the world around us. Yet, our ability to reason can become an endless loophole for generating our own meaning based on the feedback we receive. At the time Descartes was processing this theory, there were no Threads to throw out his ideas on to receive endless feedback or feel ghosted by an invisible audience. Instead, he pondered alone, discussed with trusted colleagues, and wrote out his thoughts in quiet contemplation. His thoughts became his primary source of feedback, I think therefore I am. Today, our feedback is bottomless, and circular, with the rational and the completely ridiculous all mixed into one behemoth engine of unreliable certitudal quips. What can we truly rely on these days that is real, grounding us into a place of reliable existence?

The rootedness of our lives in Jesus offers us the certainty we are all searching for. Everything else is fleeting. Our grids, posts, and even this simple essay will get swept up into the freenzy of content that endlessly swirls around us. It’s tempting to tether our existence to what we take in online, even more, what our screens want to tell us about who we are and how much we are worth. And the fruit of that is only anxiety, a chasing after the wind of the finite “likes” and “comments”’ our identity can be so easily rooted in. We are not I post, therefore I am as we are not I think, therefore I am. When we rest in the grounding of God to bear life in us, we are God is, therefore I am.  The contemplative teacher and author, James Finley puts it this way, “God is loving us into existence”. The true Reality is our only reality.

The existential crisis I was feeling is a habit much too easy to get swept up in, basing my reality on what is not real. The fleeting images across my screen draw me into an identity that can only bear the fruit of the collective grasping for meaning that generates the crisis in the first place. I scroll and scroll and scroll, check my stats, and attempt to engage humanity through the finiteness of fleeting images and words. It’s an endless thread that eventually yields its meaninglessness and yet we return to it day in and day out in search of a place to rest our weary branches. But what if we just cut off that branch? The one that bears the fruit of anxiety to feel the roots of the Vine draw us deeper into the Divine? We can and we should. This doesn’t mean never engaging in social media but taking on a new attitudinal stance. When we see it as finite and fleeting, we cut off the source of the crisis, allowing God to be the only one who can name our reality.