'A digitized, isolated, dehumanized existence'
Why I've been a little bit quiet lately. (Warning: Navel-gazing ensues.)
I’ve not been keeping up with my Substacking lately. There are a few reasons for this:
I’ve been sick this week with what I think is a non-COVID virus that flattened me for a few days.
When not sick and working, I’ve been pushing to meet some important deadlines. (Being sick has … flubbed that.)
And I read a really good piece at Christianity Today by Carrie McKean.
It’s about her pastor in Texas, a man who believes in Donald Trump’s border policies but who also — faced directly with the needs of so many migrants crossing said border — chooses to help the people who need help. It’s about the difference between generalized principle and the specificity of actual humans in one’s orbit.
Anyway, here is the passage that knocked me out:
In her farewell newsletter for The New York Times, CT contributor Tish Harrison Warren observed that we all have a tendency “to prioritize the distant over the proximate and the big over the small. We can seek to have all the right political opinions and still not really love our actual neighbors, those right around us, in our homes, in our workplaces or on our blocks.”
When we busy ourselves with political debates we cannot solve and shrink the flesh-and-blood call to love our neighbors into a mere philosophical exercise, we make our lives, as Warren wrote, into an “abstraction”—a digitized, isolated, dehumanized existence. The incarnational way of Jesus is different. As Eugene Peterson puts it in his Message translation of John 1:14, “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.”
I can’t speak to the theological part of those paragraphs. But the parts about a “digitized, isolated” experience, about fighting big fights while not doing what’s needed in our own neighborhoods?
Guys, that shit convicted me. (To use an old church term.)
The digitized existence has been good to me. It’s allowed me to live in Kansas while making a career in my chosen field (writing, journalism) in the broader world. It’s allowed me to have a voice that sometimes travels more widely than I ever thought possible. And most importantly, it allowed me to keep making that living — to greater and lesser extents — when my health was awful, and a 40-hour-a-week office job might literally have killed me.
But I do wonder if the amount of time I spend in that digitized world has rendered my life a little bit too … abstract.
McKean’s writing hit at a moment I’m feeling a bit unsettled in my online existence anyway. The death of what Twitter was — a platform that helped me build that aforementioned digitized career — has left me wondering what I do next, how to present myself, how to reach an audience … if, indeed, there are still audiences who want to hear me. I knew my mission on Twitter, more or less. On Bluesky? On Substack? I’m not so sure who I am there.
It’s weird.
I set out in this business with the intention of finding a Kansas town where I could make a career as a newspaper editor for a few decades, leave a legacy of sorts in the kinds of communities I grew up in. Life, technology and a changing industry took me other places. I meant to have a more specific, local career than I’ve had.
What I have instead isn’t bad. And I’m too old and broken to find something new to do. I’ll keep doing it, I suppose, until I run out of people who are willing to pay me. Knock on wood that doesn’t happen soon.
But I want to make sure that when I’m speaking here, I’m not just saying something to create content, or that’s been said a million times, or that’s piling on. I want it to be worthy. Which means there will be times I’m quiet here. And times when I’m not.
The world, after all, has a surplus of noise. I want mine to mean something.
Hi Joel - Carrie McKean here. I wanted to reach out across this digitized/dehumanized space and connect a bit more humanly. I'm grateful that you took the time to read my piece and that it made you wrestle with these questions. I'm perpetually wrestling with them myself -- and as a result, tend to me much quieter in these spaces than would be professionally advisable. But reading your perspective on that reminded me today that perhaps that's ok. Thanks for sharing your thoughts -- as I'm sure you know from writing yourself: it's extremely gratifying when people take the time to meaningfully grapple with your work, especially when they tell you about it.