Social Sanity Book Club Chapter 2: Embracing Your Limits

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Sarah Zylstra
Welcome to our book club that we are doing on social sanity. I am so thrilled. I’m Sara Zoster. And I’m so thrilled to be here today with Jen Wilkin, who wrote chapter two on identity. Jen, thank you so much for joining me today.

Jen Wilkin
Oh, thanks for having me.

Sarah Zylstra
It’s so good to see your face. Yeah. That’s so awesome. Can you tell me we’re gonna jump right in? And can you tell me a little bit about do you remember the first social media account that you ever got?

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, I remember, we had just moved to Dallas from Houston. And I was wanting to stay connected with friends, you know who I wasn’t around anymore. And that was right when Facebook was launching. And so I remember a friend was in town and said, well, let’s get you set up with an account on Facebook. And I put, like, so much information out there on my profile that I would never in a million years put out there today. But it was like, Oh, my gosh, this is a great way to stay connected with the people we had just moved away from. And also, you know, I was thinking, Gosh, extended family, this is gonna be fantastic.

Sarah Zylstra
Yeah, that’s awesome. What was your favorite thing about it at the beginning,

Jen Wilkin
it was that it was being able to well also, like it was being able to keep up with people, but it was also just experimenting with a medium, you know, and thinking, wow, what might be possible with this. And the whole idea of sort of broadcasting your daily life was, was new in everybody’s minds, I think. And so, you know, I think we would all say, looking back there were there were things that we posted in those days, that in a million years, we would never put up now. And I remember, I remember some of that just like things, it’s like, why would anybody even care to know this about my life, but at the time, it was like, I can tell someone, you know, that I just ate at this restaurant, or that I just was at Target. And so yeah, I, I remember, really enjoying in particular, being able to be connected to cousins, you know, that I hadn’t seen in years, or to grandparents, or aunts and uncles. And I would say I still enjoy that today. That’s something that is had turned out to be a long term upside to it.

Sarah Zylstra
Yeah, I can remember it made me feel less lonely. Because like, uh, you know, as a stay at home mom, that was the, the most isolated I’d ever been. Yeah. And so to just be able to, like, put the kids down and, and quick hop on Facebook and see somebody else’s face. Or be able to say like, this is a funny thing that happened to me this morning. And it just felt like just your friends saw it. So you’re just writing to the people who loved you. Yeah, so then they didn’t care if it was dumb. Or too much Association. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about? Did you get in pause? Did you get on Instagram when Instagram first came out to

Jen Wilkin
I don’t know if I didn’t get out when it first came out. Because at that point, I was on Facebook and Twitter and just kept thinking, I don’t need another place that I have to manage the content on at that point, it had become more of a job than a fun thing. So I don’t think I was an early adopter on on Instagram. And I can’t remember, I think I got on there because Twitter had become so terrible.

Sarah Zylstra
Yeah, talk a little bit about how you noticed. Or like kind of the progression from those early days of happy Utopia to like, Oh, I almost don’t even want to log on. Like, how did how did that progress?

Jen Wilkin
Well, I think for me with Facebook, it was like, it went from being just a small group of people who I actually knew to being a bunch of people who I maybe didn’t actually know and would never know. But you know, people who were interested in what I was doing from a ministry standpoint, are people who were a friend of a friend. And the more diluted my friendships my online friendships got, the less meaningful the interactions were. And then as the algorithms changed with Facebook to I think everybody kind of felt this, it was like, all of a sudden, you didn’t have control over whose stuff you were seeing, and that that even diminished my interest in it even more. I wouldn’t say that Facebook ever felt like it turned into an ugly place other than like, when I would blog, for example, for TGC, I would write an article and it would go up on TGC. And the comments got pretty nasty pretty quickly out there. I learned pretty quickly Oh, don’t go read, read what the comments say. But in terms of like my personal place on Facebook, for my for my for my real life friends, or the people I was associated with, in some form, it didn’t feel like it was an ugly or negative space. But Twitter did get that way really quickly. Yeah. And I have to wonder if it isn’t because like on Facebook, at least there is a more prominent face like you see the face that at least a picture profile picture of the person that you’re interacting with in a way that you don’t as much on Twitter, Twitter seems to me to be the one that’s the most distanced from an actual image of the person that you’re communicating with. I’ve often wondered if that doesn’t shape the way that those communications happen in a way that’s different than like Instagram or Facebook.

Sarah Zylstra
I I think that’s a really good point. You also know far less about the tweeter, right? Like, yes. You only get this much room to say about yourself as a tweeter. Yeah. So you’re right. You don’t know them? Doesn’t they just all feel like faceless idiots whom you need to correct in a certain ways? Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. So you’re right, you wrote a chapter about identity. And one, the first thing you say is that we’re built to be social, we image God in the way that we are social with each other God, who is of course in the Trinity social with himself, but also social with us. And in some ways, we know technology helps with that. Because we can see like, I can see glimpses of somebody else in real life, I can see a picture of somebody at a wedding or I can have those social interactions with people online. However, social media also makes us profoundly lonely, which seems like the opposite. It’s of what it should it’s counterintuitive to what you would expect. What, what makes that why are we lonely on a place where people are gathering?

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, I don’t know. And I think some of it is related to personality and disposition, because I’ve heard people report that that has not been my experience of social media. And so I do think it has a lot to do with what stage of life you’re in, or how relationally connected you are in real life, you know, by the time that you log on to Facebook, where you are emotionally and socially, I think makes a big impact on the way that you perceive or receive social media interaction. And what you need from it, I think, is a big piece of that, too. And I don’t think that we always log on to it with that question in mind, like, what do I need from this today? I certainly not top of mind. And so then over time, you can have this build up of where you have, almost subconsciously been needing something from it, that it’s not capable of delivering to you and that amplifies over time. And then you find that where you thought you were getting into relatedness, you were actually just being distanced increasingly more, not just from the experience of experiences of other people, but also from real life interactions on your own, just by the amount of time that you’re giving to being on social media. Because you know, we only have so many hours in a day. And so the more time you give to online relationships, the more of an impact it’ll have on your in person relationships, which I think we got into a little in the chapter as well.

Sarah Zylstra
Yeah, I think that’s really good. And I think that’s something we haven’t really talked about a lot is, I think it matters how old you were when you got your first Yeah, which immediate account. And I think the older you were, the better off you are, because you probably have built those relationships, those offline relationships, I think about the kids who are getting on now I talked to some college, college ministry people and the amount of the online life that their kids are on college kids is, is tremendously huge, that building all of their identity through that and not, and all their relationships there. So and I think it’s harder not to be on it as well, for a younger person, because that’s kind of where their marketplace of ideas is and all their social interaction.

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, it’s really interesting. I think there’s a there’s a mix among younger generations. And so like, I see my, my peers interaction with social media, and then I see my children and their peers, their interactions with social media. And they’re very different. I actually tend to think that there was an initial learning curve around this that people my age, in some ways missed, we missed, like, what it was good for, and what it wasn’t good for. It may not hit us as personally, as it might hit a younger user. But at the same time, we also believe it can accomplish things that a younger user would be like, yeah, no, it’s not going to do that. And so like, the way that I would express this would be people my age and older think if I go out there and state a political view, people are going to hear it and be changed by it. Like my kids would never in a million years, go out on social media and say anything about politics or even, you know, probably their faith, depending on what the context was, what they were using. And so I think there’s like this over realized sense of what social media can do among people our age, because they’re my age, I’m older than you, because we just don’t understand platform. And so for me personally, you know, I already had platform experience with with with with real live platforms before social media platforms ever came along. And so I felt like I already had some awareness of what you could and couldn’t communicate holding a microphone. And that’s what social media is, it’s a microphone for ideas. But keep my kids are like, Heck no, I’m not putting out like, you know, I can use it for the things it is good for, and I can set it aside for the things that it’s not. So in terms of communication capacity, I think they have more of a native awareness of what it can and can’t do in terms of the operational power I think that people are my age are more aware potentially of the way it can form you, then then sometimes a younger person is because in general, younger people are not as aware of how their environment is forming them. And so this is just another learning curve in terms of of how it’s shaping them.

Sarah Zylstra
That is, that’s huge point. Can we rabbit trail a little bit into your kids like Avid?

Unknown Speaker
Do? I love rabbit trails? Yeah.

Sarah Zylstra
How did you handle as a person who knows that things? For me? As a parent who’s watching things from your child? How did you navigate social media with them? Are there things that you wish you had done differently with them? Do you have advice? What do you think about that?

Jen Wilkin
Well, I’m a little bit of a, I’m kind of the wrong person to ask, because of the age of my kids, my kids were really on the front of the of the wave of this, to the point that there were there were like pros and cons to having kids at the stage of life that mine were at when all of this was was coming online. Because so like, 2007, my kids are middle school through early elementary. And that’s when I got my first Facebook account, or 2008, I think is what it was. And so they were too young to have been able to have a social media account when all of it was brand new. But they were having to learn about technology, just in general, you know, what was the learning curve on technology, so we didn’t have a lot of the controls, you know, then that you can place on a device that there are now. And so when people ask me, what did you do to control, you know, the the access, we had a lot of very just mechanical ways of controlling it, because there were not ways within the technologies themselves to control access. So rules, like you can’t have a phone anywhere outside of the downstairs living room, and no screens outside of the living room and stuff like that sort of those early first wave ways to accommodate the changes we were facing. So I don’t know that I’m a good person to recommend a report on the controls that are now available. Other than that, I would say, Gosh, you need to have them, right, because just children are learning self control. But we were having social media accounts we did. When a child turned the age where they were able to have the account. We we helped him set it up. We talked about best uses. But again, I would just say that I’ve actually learned a lot about how to use social media from watching the way my children use it. I think they’re way more conservative in their usage than I would have been without that reference point.

Sarah Zylstra
Yep, that’s really interesting, or almost the blushes off the rose array is how they are however you say it like Oh, I think we’re past the honeymoon stage of Yes. Yes, yeah. Okay. That’s really interesting. Good advice. Did you have any kids who didn’t want to be on social media?

Jen Wilkin
Oh, yeah. I mean, my I would say that my kids spend less time on social media than a lot of adults that I know. And again, but I would say it depends on personality, you know, some of them enjoy it or use it more than others. But they were the first ones to talk about, like, setting personal limits on their usage. I remember the first time that my daughter said, you know, I’ve got a limit on and this was before there were there were easy ways to do that. She’d say, I’ve put a limit on how much time I’m going to spend on it. And I only look at Instagram and black and white because it’s less visually appealing. If you look at it in black and white. And I’m like, ma’am, no, that was a setting, you know, so. But they had more top of mind awareness around just what it what it might be taking from their in person relationship. Like, that’s what’s fascinating to me. My kids want to write handwritten letters or have in person interactions. And it feels like I’m like, Are you just trying to be old fashion? And it’s like, I think there will be a little bit of a swing back toward Wait a minute, what are we given up when our communications are late through screens are at a distance?

Sarah Zylstra
super interesting. I mean, I think we’re seeing the same thing with books, right? Everybody? Oh, Kindles just burnt, like who even needs to print a book anymore? That’ll be so old, old school. And yet today, there’s more books being printed than ever? So? Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting how that pendulum swings back. And we always think it’ll just keep going. But then it swings back to the center. So you we know that wisdom begins at the fear of the Lord and you write about Eve losing sight of that in the garden when she wanted to be like God, and you talk about everybody should read this chapter. You talk beautifully about these. The ways that we use social media to try and be like God, right to be trying to be timeless to try and be immutable to try and be omnipresent everywhere. These are the things that social media promises to us. And like Eve we’re right there, taking up those promises. I want to ask you about a different thing though, because this is something I wrote about in my introduction and this is something that I’ve struggled with, which is, when you’re on social media, you are creating an identity for yourself, you’re creating, like my day, you’re creating kind of a reality for yourself. I don’t know if you ever did Creative Memories, but it feels like that to me, like you take your memories, and you put them on a page and you decorate it really cute. And then you look back at those memories, you’re like, oh, my gosh, what a cute, beautiful life I’ve had all these years. And you’re sort of doing that here too. Like you’re, you’re adjusting the way that you present yourself and the way that you see yourself almost. How is that dangerous for us?

Jen Wilkin
Well, I mean, before we talk about the dangers of it, I want to talk about the ways that it can not can be not dangerous, right? So like, you don’t want to have two versions of yourself. But Creative Memories is actually a somewhat triggering, but also accurate way for us to talk about this. I never did Creative Memories, because I was too lazy. Boy, we’re all looking for ways to curate memories, right? And I think that social media, I think specifically Instagram gives us that opportunity or anything that’s more visually, you know, shaped, is giving us an opportunity to curate memories. And I always think about how like, I don’t go back and look at the scrapbooks from my childhood and think, Oh, my mom was intentionally trying to hide the ugly parts of our life, right? Like, I don’t think that I think, Oh, look, you know, these are all these happy memories from my childhood. And so I do think it’s important in terms of like coming to social media, from the right perspective, to recognize that that is the social contract, right? When you log on to Instagram, you’re not asking it to show you everyday life, you understand that everyone it like right now I’m sitting in my room, from my perspective, so that you will not see that the desk next to me is absolutely covered in junk mail, and the coffee, the two coffee mugs that are on there from this morning. And yeah, because you know what, you don’t need that, if anything, it’s a distraction from what we’re trying to accomplish with this thing that we’re doing here. And so I think that as long as we recognize that, I think that’s something I would say that the younger digital natives are more able to do is they’re not asking social media to tell them the truth, they understand that it is giving them a perspective in any given moment. And so the problem is when you don’t recognize that, and then you have to either deal with this illusion, man, because you thought you were getting the whole picture of someone, or you end up utilizing it to make a version of yourself that you like better than the real version of yourself that it can’t be supported outside of a social media space. And, again, I think this is like for me, as someone who already had had real life platforms, not just virtual platforms, you know, I already had to run the math on this. It’s like, I’m not going to be two different people. That’s exhausting. It’s hard enough to be one of me, I don’t want to be two of me. And you know, the other interesting thing for me was that a lot of this starts to come into focus for me during middle age. And so I was already aware that me being adorable was not going to hold up like I can’t sustain that through 7080 years of life, right? I mean, you turn into a different version of adorable when you’re 80. Yeah, yeah. But it’s almost it’s almost condescending, adorable at that point. When people call it bothers me when people call people adorable. You know, it’s like, that’s a human. And so how, how do I? How do I inhabit a digital space in a way that is representative of who I really am, even if it’s not everything about who I really am. And so I think the problem is compounded with our desire to be authentic, which is a good desire. But authenticity doesn’t mean full exposure to every aspect of someone’s life. And we would understand that just in normal human interactions, but I think when it comes to social media, we feel like the rules have to change. And again, I think if everybody is looking at a social media platform, understanding this is what it is. And this is what it is not, then it’s not disingenuous, to post a picture of your coffee cup next to your Bible as though your whole day looks like that. We understand this was a moment in this person’s day. It’s not disingenuous for me to oh, let’s just say, put a sweater over the actual stretchy clothes that I’m wearing to do an interview with Sarah, because it’s serving a particular purpose, and everyone understands what that purpose is. So I think that’s where the education piece needs to grow. We need to understand it for what it can do and what it cannot do if we’re going to have healthy relationships with it. I think we’ve talked about this in the book, but like, social media is morally neutral. That it becomes either a negative or positive depending on the way that it’s utilized. So like a pair of scissors is morally neutral. I can use it to open a package or I can use it to murder somebody, right? And so it’s depends on on the user and the intent. And so that’s I think, where we need to grow in our education. It’s not whether to use social media, it’s how,

Sarah Zylstra
yeah, you know, it’s also interesting has made me think of like, it’s almost an emotional mental. It’s more an emotional, at least for me more emotional than a logical reaction to somebody’s coffee cup and their Bible. I know in my head, that’s a moment in their day, but emotionally, I’m like, Oh, look how awesome their morning time was right? And like, Oh, I bet they got I bet they sat down and had some super deep, awesome thoughts. And like, God really spoke to them and look, oh, man, you know that that’s. So I think the split for me is in my own between my head and my heart almost and how I’m receiving.

Jen Wilkin
But I think also, the user has a responsibility to not post the picture of the coffee cup and the Bible, if they in fact, had the most chaotic morning ever. Like, does the picture represent an actual interlude in your life? Or did you craft it just for the purpose of getting a response? Right?

Sarah Zylstra
How do we make our hearts understand the logic of our heads? Like how do you are there guardrails? Or like, how do you disciple your heart in such a manner that it doesn’t envy or judge somebody? Like somebody else’s Facebook page?

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, well, you’ve got 24 hours in the day, right? And we become what we behold. And so if your gaze is more on social media than it is on truth, the truth of the scriptures, then you’re going to slowly be pulled toward what you believe is the beautiful vision that Facebook or Instagram, I’m not gonna say Twitter, I don’t think there’s a beautiful vision to be had out there currently, but you’ll be pulled pulled toward a false story of beauty. And if it’s not, if you don’t have a grounding in the true story of beauty, and so you won’t be able to properly identify what is truly beautiful in social media, if you don’t know what true beauty looks like, as found in God’s Word. And so I’m not saying like, for every 15 minutes on social media, you have to have 45 minutes of Bible study. But I am saying there is some correlation between the amount of time that you spend meditating on biblical truth, and the way that you process what you’re seeing on social media. And if we want to be wise according to God’s wisdom, and not according to according to worldly wisdom, that the level of forgetfulness around around Godly wisdom that is painted for us in across this sweep of Scripture is deeply sobering. And for many of us, social media is a place where we go to forget on purpose, we want to forget whatever it is that we’re dealing with in our own lives, we want it to be you know, it’s the Lotus Eaters, we want to eat the lotus, we want to sort of time out. And that’s what we do with all entertainment. So it’s not, it’s not wrong, to have interludes where you time out, it is wrong to crave them, to require them. And I think you get into those patterns when you are feasting on the wrong thing, or feasting on one thing to an extent that it is. It is inhibiting your ability to feast on the thing that is feeding your mind that is shaping your heart into Christ’s likeness.

Sarah Zylstra
Yeah. Oh, I think that’s really good. And that’s sort of leads into my next question and thinking about it is the You talk a lot about our mutability. And like how we’re shaped and formed, we are not like God who is immutable. But we’re I mean, you can think about this through your whole life seasons of your life that shaped you, teachers who shaped you, friends who shaped you like events that shaped you. And certainly interactions on Facebook are also shaping you. How does interacting with other people’s Creative Memories? What is it, there’s something we should be aware of, they’re like, we know in our head, these are all other people’s Creative Memories we’re putting on our own. And yet we’re, we’re shaping other people. But that’s not really us. That’s shaping other people. It’s our creative memories that are and their creative memories. Like my interaction with you, as a friend offline, is taping in a real way. If we only interacted online all the time, we would think of each other completely differently and be shaped by each other differently.

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, I mean, I think you have to really think about who you’re going to follow or who you’re going to pay attention to. And I think you need to know your lane in social media spaces. So like it or not, I fall into the category of influencer. And and you know, some days I’m like, this is a privilege and other days. I’m like, how did we get here? But most of us don’t have to be influencers unless we choose to be unless we decide to angle to be that and angle sounds sinister just hear it for what I mean. And so it’s not wrong to go, Wow. This is a platform that I could utilize to draw people to my message that people have done that through various media for as long as there have been humans on the planet. And so that’s an again, it’s not morally wrong, but it’s something to pay attention to. And so if you’re a person who just wants to see home decor ideas or wants to know what someone thinks about a verse a day in the scriptures, then then you can enter into social media, the contract can be very clear for you. And it means that the things that you post don’t have to be things that are drawing people to pay attention to what you’re doing. And then if you’re someone who finds yourself out there, either intentional about how much time and in what ways you’re going to utilize social media. But I think some of it has to do with identifying what lane you’re in and then asking if this is my lane. How many? How many people am I going to turn my eyes to? And how am I going to utilize the space where I’m trying to turn people’s eyes to what I’m putting out here?

Sarah Zylstra
That’s really good. Did you ever think, oh, no, I’m being shaped in a way I don’t like by my social media?

Jen Wilkin
Oh, yeah. I mean, I think I have to regularly evaluate whether I feel like I have to put something on social media, or if I’m doing it because it was a natural expression of what was happening in my day, or as part of my ministry, did I feel obligated? Or? Or did I feel self serving? Did I do it because I needed a shot of feeling awesome, you know, and again, it’s, it’s, you gotta keep tabs on that, that’s, that’s what we would do with anything that has the potential to be addictive or damaging, but also has the potential to do a lot of good. So you gotta keep taking its temperature. And I think that’s, that’s the main thing that we don’t do is we don’t have check ins with ourselves to say it, and it’s not like, is this bad? Or is this good? Is this heading in a direction that’s getting worse or in a direction that’s getting life giving? And to just do that, you know, from time to time. And it’s interesting, because we’ve just entered in at the time that we’re recording this, it’s the second day of Lent. And that’s one of those easy built in times where you can go, oh, wait, do I need to do a gut check around some things? And a lot of people do it around social media. But I think if we had more of a year or year round sense of, you know, I’m going to take my temperature on this, what am I currently asking of this? Or what is it currently asking of me? And is that a healthy thing? I think leading toward health or thing leading toward unhealth?

Sarah Zylstra
Yeah. How do you take your temperature?

Jen Wilkin
I leave my phone somewhere where I can get to it for a while and see how I feel about it. You know, Oh, yeah. And they feel that compulsion of Oh, I really want to go check that, you know, that’s usually sort of a warning sign to me. And then I’m, you know, I’m a person who has people who want me to use my social media for their stuff, which is, that’s fair, I understand that people have done that for me. But that means I also have to weigh like, who am I saying? Yes? To? Who? Am I saying no, to? What’s my decision tree for how I make those decisions? And so it’s things like that, like, is it? Is it unconsidered? Or is it considered, I think, is the way that I have to keep talking to myself about it? And if I don’t, so in my case, like, we’ve had a lot going on with our family lately, and I have not put a lot of content out on Instagram. And I’ll have a moment where I’ll think, Oh, what if people lose interest? Because I haven’t posted anything and then I have to remind myself No, that’s, that’s not why you ever got into that space in the first place. You did it because you thought it was fun. And you’re gonna post pictures of your dogs there. And so if I still feel joy, the right kind of joy and doing it that I should do it. But if I’m not out there for a month and a half, and that makes people mad, then then they don’t understand the social contract. And maybe I don’t either if it bothers me

Sarah Zylstra
that’s so interesting that you say that because I am not an influencer. And yet, I can. I can feel the same way of like, Oh, no. You know, what, if people are waiting for me to put something up there, but I don’t, maybe people are waiting for you to put something up. But no one is ever waiting for me to put something out. So you know, and I like if I go there, and my friend hasn’t posted for a while. Yeah. Where’s Jen? I’ve been looking every day for a month and

Jen Wilkin
a half. You know, like that’s not that different for me. I mean, think how many people are putting content out there like nobody probably no one watching this is like yeah, that’s right. I hadn’t heard anything from Jen in a while if you did not know this. And that’s what I’m if there’s a lot of freedom in that, you know, that means that means we can all feel the freedom to say something we have something to say. And to be slow to speak when we don’t you know, the universe will keep going even the social media universe.

Sarah Zylstra
Yeah. Oh, I think that’s super interesting. How formal are your temperature checks for yourself? Or do you just do it when you start to feel like oh, it’s been a while since I thought about this are, you know, are there warning? Are there like red flags that you see in yourself that make you think, Oh, I better think about this a little bit. No, I

Jen Wilkin
can’t I would be I would be presenting a false version of myself. If I said that I was formal about it. I’m not very formal about many things like that, but I have a lot of accountability to surround myself with, because I know that about myself. Yeah. And, and I mean, I try to be, you know, I try to be self aware. And thankfully, the Lord has given me plenty of work to do. And so I don’t have typically long stretches of time to spend on social media. Now, let’s be honest, we all we all make time for the thing we love, right? I get in play on time, I’m not I don’t mean to sound like a saint on any of them. But I, you know, I’m, I’m I work full time at my church, I travel and speak, and I’m an author. So the Lord, I think, has filled up my days with plenty of things that should require my attention to the point that I, I just, you know, I have to, I can only be limited to certain amounts, which Praise God.

Sarah Zylstra
And now, I think that’s true, is to healthier, I think you’re right like to come to social media out of an overflow of something that you want to share and not out of a compulsion to escape is the way that we have to approach this. The tricky part is, of course, we know this. Nobody’s going to argue with that. And yet, our hearts are still are still doing that. easier, easier said than done. That’s

Jen Wilkin
right. I will say to you, I feel for people who are raising small children, I would not want to have to, like my kids are out of the home. And so and this is probably actually not great, because the modeling piece is not as top of mind for me as I would have needed it to be when my kids were small. And I think about just that poll that it has on you and how difficult it would be not just to keep yourself from wanting to look at it. But to be so aware that there were small people who are being I mean, deeply influenced by the habits that they see me practicing. I think maybe the Lord didn’t bring social media long until I was older because he knew I couldn’t handle it. I know,

Sarah Zylstra
I feel like I can’t either. It’s just maybe it’s my personality, it feels addictive right away for me, like I Yeah, and it’s hard for me to say like, Oh, I was gonna go in here. And, you know, say congratulations to somebody. And really all I did was come on here and scroll through what everybody was doing and and totally forgot and didn’t even say

Jen Wilkin
whatever they you know, I will mitigate that a little bit. That idea because I do firmly believe that the Bible is not lying when it says No temptation has overtaken us except for that which is common. So whatever this poll is that social media has on us and on our time, whatever that compulsive feeling is, that is not new, there have always been ways to distract ourselves. This is a this is one that is relatively Uncharted because it hasn’t been around very long. But it’s just a new way to commit an old sin. In the same way that it’s a new way to, to have a hat to have an old positive outcome like it’s it’s morally neutral. But the pole the temptation associated with it isn’t is not new. And therefore there is a way out that’s provided for us just as there has been a way out for those who have lived in any season of human history. That’s a comfort I love that so much.

Sarah Zylstra
And it’s and the answer is always like Jesus and go back to the Bible and whatever addiction or struggling that you’re with, like you have to start there and finding your identity there. That’s really good. Okay, I’m gonna rabbit trail one more time into your kids, what are things that you’ve learned from them about theirs? You know, like, looking at Instagram in black and white? Or are there other things like, ways that when you watch them use social media? That would be good?

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, I think that they they don’t let it fill every nook and cranny, necessarily, you know, they they’re less likely to pick it up in a spare moment, they might have like a more set time of day where they allow themselves to sit down and, and look at it. And I’m not saying that all of this was a place that they landed out immediately. I think it’s a little bit like when you set out a bowl of candy in front of a small child, like my kids would have just devoured the whole thing. And then they learn oh, maybe just a handful is good. And so I’m not saying that these were ways that they began with their social media use. But the thing that’s fascinating for me is when they went off to college and they didn’t have me hovering around like a heartbeat to make sure that they were doing things exactly according to my expectations that they they did seem to you know, get schoolwork done they had they had more of it kept more of a log of how they were spending time in terms of like now I need to do classwork and I can’t take a study work on social media because that throws me into a different headspace. So, but ya know, maybe we should have them on an interview them, I don’t want to speak for them. But my general sense is that they are less interested in it, I think they have a much better sense of what it can and can’t give them. And they just aren’t as drawn. It doesn’t have the power over them that I think it sometimes has over people my age, and I think it doesn’t promise the same things to them that people my age tend to think that it does.

Sarah Zylstra
Yep, I think that’s really good. I think they’re, I think that’s really good. I think the important part of this always is, is as you write in your chapter, like remembering who you are remembering your own limits, remembering your own weaknesses, probably just knowing yourself, you know, Are you a person that’s going to be especially affected by seeing somebody else’s beautiful house are especially affected by seeing other friends out to eat? Or especially affected by seeing somebody else’s trophy? Or, you know, like, that’s maybe also something? I think like, the more you know, yeah, like

Jen Wilkin
all temptations, like there are some things that don’t tempt me at all. And then there are other things that are absolutely my kryptonite. And when it comes to social media, knowing where you fall on that scale, you know, how close is it to kryptonite. I just like anything, you know, sexual temptations is the same way. Like for some people, it’s a bigger problem than it is for others the temptation to use alcohol in abusive ways. It’s, you know, drugs or something like that, like you have to no drugs is a bad example, don’t don’t use drugs, everybody. But you know, there are things that can be harmless or even enjoyable in moderation that as soon as you realize you didn’t have the ability, someone else did to control your intake become mediately dangerous to you. And I do think social media can be that for some people. But it is not that for all people. And I think that’s something like even my husband and I, in our conversations about it. He he ended up getting off of Instagram, because he felt the comparison thing in a way that I just didn’t, so I can respect that, you know, but also, he didn’t say, hey, you know what we should get off of Instagram, because it’s a bad place for comparison. And so, you know, now impose that on a middle schooler or high schooler who already there. So given to comparison, just because that is the rite of passage of that age. And you can understand why this is something that we want to deal with cautiously among those who are younger or less socially mature. But for adults, we need to give each other permission to be able to weigh the strength or weakness of our time spent on social media, the impact that it’s having on us in it from a formative sense and to reach different conclusions. And to trust that it’s a wisdom issue, and that we want to apply wisdom and with our own lives, and we want to think graciously about the way others are doing so.

Sarah Zylstra
Yeah, I think that’s really good. And I also think, if you like, during a season, like lent or another season to take your own temperature on it, and to think clearly about what you’re, you know, what you want out of it. Why are you coming here is that super important? And maybe also to think, if I see people gathered together, and I, if I’m Enneagram, seven, and I see people gather together, I think oh, no, why? Why did those people have a good time, and I wasn’t there even though maybe they’re not even close to me, and I never could have gone, but I’m still feeling that about it. Like, just to be able to recognize in yourself like, Oh, that’s my let’s move on to something else. Or that’s I can see. See that bubbling? Well,

Jen Wilkin
and to give a little grace, like not to be super judgy about when someone is on their phone, because I have this running joke with my kids. They’ll go, you know, Mom, you know, hang up and hang out, like if I’m looking at something on my phone. But then their other narrative is Mom, if we’re in an emergency, we’re not calling you because you never you never see your phone. And so I’m like, well, which is it? You know, am I on my phone too much or not enough? And so, you know, you don’t know how someone is structured their day, you don’t know whether they’re using their phone for for useful reason, or a non useful reason. And, and so yeah, maybe just you know, withhold judgment until until you have more information.

Sarah Zylstra
Yeah. life advice right there. Jen, I think this is all the questions that I have for you. Unless you have any parting knowledge you would like to share or wisdom on either identity or social media? Yeah, I

Jen Wilkin
think well, I mean, I don’t know that this is, you know, the, the big punchline to the conversation or not, but identity is something we have to take seriously. And I do think that you know, we talked about identity and Christ. A friend recently commented to me about how that’s that’s a relatively new way of talking about things. In the church, you know that that the more common historical framework would be union with Christ. And I was like, gosh, that is a really profound idea I want to think more about. And it ties into that idea that we are not actually primarily supposed to be thinking about ourselves as individuals in a personal relationship with Christ, we are we are saved into personal relationships, certainly, but into the communion of saints. And we have union with Christ that that is what undergirds that. And I think that one of the things that social media does is offer us if we don’t have the right lenses, offers us a false union, then that can draw us away from not just it’s not just that it can present a false or a lesser idea of community, it’s that it can remove from us an awareness of the preciousness of the most important community of all, which is the fellowship of believers who are joined in union with Christ. And so I just had been thinking about that a lot. We are built for community. But we’re, while we’re built for community in a general sense, we are also built for community in a very specific sense. And so I think as we evaluate our social media usage, one of the measures that we should really pay attention to, is how does my time or my interactions with social media shaped the amount of time I have in actual face to face Christian community, but also shaped my perception of what that community is and does. So there’s a sense of how it shapes my personal identity. But there’s also a greater sense of how it shapes the identity of believers in Christ, as those who are Christians want to use social media wisely. So I wish I had more specific ways to talk about it. But as I said, it’s a it’s a new emphasis for me to think about, but it’s something I want to keep meditating on in this conversation.

Sarah Zylstra
I am, I am fascinated by that. And it’s making me think, you know, social media, is about community, but it’s really about you. Yes. Right. You make your own page and you say what you say about yourself and you put pictures, choose the pictures about yourself, and it’s very much you oriented certainly can be. Yeah, and so, you know, you can’t really it’s like you can go to a church or be even part of school or an organization and on Facebook, like your own personal can be part of it, but you can’t sort of it’s not the same as joining a body. Yeah, you’re not subsumed into something else, or you’re submitting to something else. And there, you’re maybe liking something or supporting something, but it’s it’s a collection of individuals more than a a

Jen Wilkin
community of people with shared values. Yeah, yes, absolutely. Yeah. And I wonder if the extent to which we are able to utilize social media to be both of those things, both a place of individual expression and community building, if it becomes a more healthy and useful approach? I don’t know. I gotta think about somebody that that does seem like it would be intuitive because that’s, that’s the that’s that is the dual emphasis, I think, that we see in the scriptures is, you know, God sees individuals, humans. He knows my name, he doesn’t just see a great cloud of witnesses he knows Jen Wilkin. But there is the gray cloud you know, there is the the church universal, historic and current and and so if I can utilize social media in a way that is honoring both aspects, it seems likely to me that I would be using it in a in a, in a healthier way and a more human way.

Sarah Zylstra
Yeah, I love that. I wonder what that would even look like.

Jen Wilkin
I mean, I think it’s are you are you as an influencer? I look at it as am I connecting people who wouldn’t otherwise be connected to shared ideas, too? I mean, it actually feels kind of almost easy as a as an influencer, who has access to orthodox ideas to give to people and say, hey, look, these are the things we share. These are the things we share. These are the things we share. But at the same time, I own Pugs and I’m ridiculous, and I like to garden and you know, and so and I think those are so I think there I hope that there are ways to do that that are edifying to to the big C church. But I hope that those those efforts don’t draw people away from understanding the beauty of the little c church. Or, or even gosh, now we’re down a rabbit trail, or even that they would be more drawn to messages of people like me who are outside there. Local Church to the point that they don’t seek out spiritual mentors or voices of influence who are embodied and in in their local congregation. I want to be an add on to that not a substitute for it, for sure.

Sarah Zylstra
Yep. And that’s such a tricky thing, because gosh, don’t we feel like we know those influencers because you know, your friends know that you love Pugs and your friends know that You’re ridiculous. But now like, other people, it’s like a friend level thing to know about somebody. Not that it’s bad at all to share, but it just makes I think, for a lot of people feels like, Oh, I’m fine. I trust her. And, you know, I like her so much. And if you’re giving an orthodox message, that’s one thing, although it also I follow Paul, I follow Apollos that danger, too. Oh,

Jen Wilkin
we solved it all. I think we raised more questions on this Congress.

Sarah Zylstra
We didn’t think we moved the ball at all, but at least we had, you know, raised a lot of questions. I do think it’s important even just to think about little things like how, what am I? What’s going on here? How am I being shaped by this? How is this making me think I’m somebody I’m not? Or how am I thinking other people are something other than they’re not? That’s important. Jen, thank you so much. This has been really really fun and interesting, really

Jen Wilkin
fun. And I’m super excited about this book getting out into the world. Thank you for all the work you’ve done to pull it together.

Sarah Zylstra
Yep, you are welcome. I’m I’m so thrilled for people to be able to read it and and hopefully somebody else will have lots of other good thoughts as they’re reading it and they can keep teaching and conversation going.

Jen Wilkin
Absolutely. That’s right.