The Lure of the Unreal

The less real something is, the more we tend to be drawn to it.  

In Eden, Adam and Eve were ultimately lured away from the most real being ever—their Creator and Father—by a created being. We are much the same. 

Our modern Tree of Knowledge is technology. And one of its most alluring fruits is social media. Many believers spend far more time with social media than with God…or even other real people. When questioned, they shrug. It’s just part of the game you have to play. They see today’s social media landscape as a modern, high-tech equivalent of the old town square. 

That’s a naïve view. For starters, a town square is an actual, physical place where one interacts with real people. Social media is a lot of things. But virtual isn’t the same as reality. And because social media doesn’t represent a tangible place, it’s hard to get our arms around it. We want followers and likes, but it’s shrouded in high-tech mystery that even the experts can’t explain. So it feels both essential and over our heads. In that moment, we can give it more power than it deserves by believing that the artificial trinity—algorithms , apps and A.I.—can fuel our creativity more than the Creator. Along the way, we gave social media the power to validate or invalidate us in ways we knew the town square never could. 

The less real something is, the more we tend to trust its version of reality. It’s shiny, new, and full of possibilities. So we try to use it to better our reality. Instead, it uses us. The artificial can never make us more real. Only more like itself—more unreal.

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