A Personal Reckoning with the Algorithm
On 25 April 2026, I deleted my accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, BlueSky, X/Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Not deactivated. Deleted. The data, the followers, the years of curated digital existence: gone. I kept Substack for long-form writing and YouTube for my podcast and teaching videos. Everything else I let go.
This wasn’t an impulsive act. It was the long, slow ripening of a conviction I’d been writing my way toward for years. In the months leading up to this decision, I’d been finishing a book on what I call digital monasticism. The book diagnosed the spiritual condition of our scrolling age and proposed a way of contemplative resistance. As I wrote it, I came to see that I couldn’t keep diagnosing the disease while continuing to inhabit the conditions that produced it. The writing demanded a reckoning. So I made one.
This post is my attempt to explain what happened and why, drawing on the framework I’ve spent years developing. I’m sharing it not because my path is everyone’s path, but because I know I’m not alone in feeling that something has gone deeply wrong with how we’ve been forming our souls online.
The Diagnosis That Wouldn’t Let Me Go
Distraction is the spiritual ailment of our age. The problem isn’t that we’ve stopped believing in God. The problem is that we’ve stopped being able to attend to God, to one another, to the present moment, to our own interior lives. Our awareness has scattered like seed thrown on hard ground. The sacred is still here, but our attention has gone somewhere else.
The platforms I left were never neutral. They were architectures of attention designed for capture, outrage optimization, and the monetization of intimacy. The system rewards what shocks, seduces, and provokes. It punishes what’s slow, kind, contemplative, and true. Empathy doesn’t trend. Wisdom is too slow and compassionate for the feed. After enough years inside such systems, the soul takes the shape of its container.
I noticed it in myself. The reactive scroll first thing in the morning. The compulsive checking between sentences when I was trying to write. The way my emotional state had become tethered to notifications I’d never asked for. The slow erosion of my capacity for sustained attention. The attention to outrage and polarized positions and thoughts. The performative shadow that had begun to fall over my prayers, my meals, my conversations, my walks. Even the most ordinary moments had become potential content.
Social media platforms are engineered for compulsion, with infinite scrolls, variable rewards, and algorithmic feeds that hijack the same dopamine pathways targeted by slot machines. The numbers tell the story plainly: the average user now spends between two and four hours a day across these apps, and for many, that figure climbs to six or more.
We reach for our phones the moment we wake, fill every line at the grocery store with a refresh, and check notifications mid-conversation without registering the act.
The damage shows up everywhere. Attention spans have shortened, anxiety and depression rates among teens have climbed alongside platform adoption, sleep suffers, real-world relationships thin out, and our sense of self gets filtered through metrics of likes and views.
Breaking free is genuinely hard because the addiction is structural. The product is designed by thousands of engineers whose job is to keep us scrolling, and quitting means surrendering the social currency, news, group chats, and creative outlets the platforms have absorbed. Most of us know we’re hooked, and we keep scrolling anyway.
We become what we behold. This is one of the oldest spiritual insights in our tradition, and it cuts both ways. The eye fixed on Christ is conformed to Christ. The eye fixed on a feed conforms to the feed. There’s no neutral ground. Every glance is a small act of formation. Every scroll is a tiny liturgy. The question was never whether I was being shaped by what I was consuming. The question was who and what was doing the shaping.
The Verse That Carried Me
Throughout the writing of my book, one passage kept returning to me: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Paul wrote those words to a community living inside an empire that was doing its own catechizing. Rome had its own liturgies, its own gods, its own visions of the good life. Paul was telling the Romans that following Jesus required a refusal to be shaped by the imperial pattern, and a willingness to be re-formed by something deeper.
The pattern of our world is algorithmic. It’s the fragmented attention, the curated self-presentation, the dopamine economy, the infinite scroll, the comparison engine, the outrage machine, the cult of reach and visibility. Conforming to this pattern isn’t a moral failure. It’s the default trajectory for anyone who lives inside it without resistance. The soul drifts toward whatever it spends time with. The mind takes the shape of what it gazes upon.
To be transformed by the renewing of the mind is to insist, in the face of all this, that another formation is possible. That we’re not condemned to become whatever the algorithm wants us to be. That we can choose, however imperfectly, to put ourselves in the way of a different kind of shaping. For me, this April, that meant deleting the accounts that had been doing most of the deforming.
A Tech Rule of Life
What I’m building, in place of the old habits, is what I’ve called a tech rule of life. It’s a set of intentional commitments about how I’ll engage with technology going forward. It’s not a list of rules in the legalistic sense. It’s a trellis, a structure that helps the vine grow toward the light.
The rule includes things like: longform writing on Substack, teaching and conversation on YouTube, no return to the platforms I’ve left, daily Scripture and prayer before any screen in the morning, weekly Sabbath that includes a digital Sabbath, devices charged in another room overnight, presence with my family that isn’t interrupted by the pull of the feed. Small commitments. Daily commitments. Commitments that, kept faithfully over time, will form a life.
Building such a rule isn’t about achieving some perfect state of contemplative purity. It’s about giving the Spirit room to do the slow, healing work of formation. The rule creates space. The Spirit fills it. My job is to keep showing up to the rhythms I’ve committed to, trusting that grace is doing what I can’t do for myself.
An Invitation to the Honest Question
I’m not telling anyone what to do. I’m telling you what I did and why, in the hope that it might prompt your own honest reckoning with the platforms shaping your interior life. The question worth asking isn’t whether social media is good or bad in the abstract. The question is what it’s doing to you, in particular, in your one wild and finite life.
Is your attention being formed by the Spirit or by the algorithm? Is your sense of worth being shaped by belovedness or by metrics? Are your relationships deepening through these platforms or being slowly hollowed out by them? Is your prayer life flourishing or eroding under the weight of constant input? Is the person you’re becoming the person you most want to be?
Only you can answer these questions. They require honesty, and honesty is hard. But the alternative is to drift on, year after year, being slowly catechized by systems that don’t have your soul’s flourishing as their goal.
The invitation is to become a monastic in the world. The cloister is wherever you decide that love will be the loudest voice. The rule is whatever rhythm you commit to that turns you back, again and again, toward what’s real and what endures.
For me, on the 25th of April, the rule began with a deletion. Yours will look like something else. May we both walk this path with courage, with grace, and with one another in mind. The Way is narrow, the road is long, and the Companion who calls us walks beside us still, unhurried, attentive, and free.
Graham Joseph Hill is the Mission Catalyst – Church Planting and Missional Renewal for Uniting Mission and Education. This post is an edited version of a post from his his Substack here.
