Four years ago, when I was a college freshman, a dear friend and I agreed to delete TikTok from our phones for two weeks to see what might happen. I never downloaded the app again. It took those two weeks for me to start to realize how much I had been missing in the world around me. As someone who spent most of my spare time on social media, the fleeting moments of life that add meaning to the day—exchanging words with a stranger in the park, or chatting with my mom after work—started to reveal themselves to me. I was an atheist at the time, but already my relationships improved, and I felt more awe and wonder toward the little things.
It was not a straight line from deleting TikTok to religion. First, I found myself borrowing a collection of ideas from my philosophy classes to justify my increasing digital minimalism. When I learned about Nietzsche and Mill, turning off my phone and focusing on those I cared most deeply about felt like a rejection of twenty-first-century nihilistic and hedonic traps. Then I started borrowing haphazardly in Judaism, implementing the occasional digital sabbath—though I justified it as a sanitized and atheistic ritual, even if I happened to be familiar with it from a religious setting.
These experiments in disconnecting were revealing something I couldn’t quite articulate: the way I related to people through screens was fundamentally different from relating to them in person. In my last semester of college, I took a course on existentialism, which inspired me to seek out similar thought in my own religion’s rich tradition. It was during this period that I encountered Jewish thinkers who gave me language for what I was experiencing. Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Buber’s exploration of religion and modernity resonated with me deeply, even though they spoke of a different time. Buber’s I and Thou addressed the alienation I felt, introducing me to an idea sorely missing in my metaphysics course: that something divine might reside within human relations—that they cannot be simply explained by physical processes. Heschel’s The Sabbath disrupted the entrepreneurial, constantly grinding culture inculcated in my generation and pervading American life. It introduced me to the practice of sanctifying time as an end in itself, not as something worthy of my consideration to be a better worker.
These experiments in disconnecting were revealing something I couldn’t quite articulate: the way I related to people through screens was fundamentally different from relating to them in person.
As I’ve explored my religious commitments—observing Shabbat (albeit a limited Shabbat that involves no digital technology, spending money, or working), praying and attending weekly services, making an active effort to be aware of God during intimate moments with people and in nature, and feeling an answer to the question “why?” when submerging myself in the utter beauty of the small cosmic possibility of every moment I live—I’ve received unexpected lessons that only reinforce my religious cravings. What started as a search for answers about Truth and the universe has become a training in rewiring one of my most basic functions as a human: relating to others. I can’t say with certainty what drove the turn to religion for me, but I do know that statistics fail to capture the experiential reality of what it means for someone like me to seek God in an age of digital connection.
I grew up in a social-media culture that has created a perverse form of voyeurism, in which individuals become a god unto themselves when they enter the digital realm. I used to use apps such as Instagram and Snapchat to stay up-to-date on my friends’ lives, silently checking their stories and posts, accumulating information on them from the comfort of my solitude. Using social media to “maintain” connections ended up placing me at the center of a universe ultimately curated—partially by choice, partially by algorithm—precisely for me. I felt omniscient about the people in my life, as though I had become a god of my own siphoned-off world.
My social media use also, paradoxically, undid the steps I took to maintain friendships. The more information I viewed on Instagram about a friend, the less likely I was to text them or set aside time to see them in person. The very architecture of social media platforms trained me to surveil others’ lives, without placing any burden on myself for reciprocal vulnerability or presence. When I did meet up with my friends, I often found myself asking questions about information that I already knew, whether it was a recent vacation or a new internship.
I felt omniscient about the people in my life, as though I had become a god of my own siphoned-off world.
Sure, digital culture makes relationships easier, but at what cost? Switching between LinkedIn’s credentialized view, Instagram’s flashy view, and Snapchat’s face-in-half view of my friends made it easy for me to believe that I was receiving the whole picture. I have personally experienced emotional and psychological consequences of living a life filled with such relationships. Instead of learning how to be bored alone, I used to grow bored with those supposed to provide meaning to my life. Thirty percent of young people (Gen Z and millennials) “often or always ‘feel lonely,’” according to Psychology Today, despite being members of the first generations to have constant-connectivity machines in their pockets at all times. Choosing the path of least resistance also serves to decrease relationships’ sanctity. It becomes harder to truly value a person if you fail to put in the challenging work of showing up anywhere other than their social media feed.
Of course, people turn to religion for countless reasons—community, meaning, rebellion, or simply genuine belief. But for me, religion offered something I didn’t know was missing: practice in relating without a digital safety net. I mean this literally. I learned to approach relationships without falling back on passively monitoring someone’s Instagram, relying on posts to tell me how they were doing, and using their online presence as a substitute for actual connection.
Religion forced me to put in the difficult work. Whether I am wrestling with questions presented in the Torah or Talmud, sitting with moral calamities in my rabbi’s sermon, or attempting to apply Jewish law to my life, religion exposed the dangers of a highly compartmentalized approach to life, one in which each compartment serves a purpose that should not overlap with adjacent compartments. In tearing down the walls that kept me from viewing people as entirely whole, my ability to engage with kindness and generosity has—I hope—increased. Whereas the life I presented and the lives I viewed on any given social media platform lasted only as long as my screen was turned on. A religious life has no boundaries.
In a world where it is easy to feel as though all algorithms prioritize me, it was difficult to show up for my friends during their times of need. In moments when I should have physically and emotionally shown up for a friend, sending a text or even making a phone call felt sufficient. I was relating to people with a lack of object permanence. Whoever was not in front of me faded from my mind, forcing others to put in the emotional work for our relationships. When friends at other colleges would text me, I could always find coherent questions to ask based on what I saw from their online profiles. My relationships slowly lost their mystery and became easy—for me—to maintain.
Holding the belief that actively participating in a relationship adds divinity to it makes treating my friends like tabs on a browser impossible. It requires being willing to move mountains to provide care to those close to me. It means volunteering with my synagogue—and not to impress colleges or employers.
I’ve found that a relationship with the divine offers everything a digital relationship does not. It is permanent, demanding, transcendent, and impossible to optimize for convenience. It requires struggling, questioning, and doubt. For many, myself included, religion is so appealing precisely because it is so different from the instant-everything, low-stakes bonds with which we grew up. Religion provides my generation not only with a belief in something greater than ourselves, but with a fundamental relational recalibration. For many of us, we are finally starting to practice how to relate.
Instead of engaging with people by sending them memes or funny TikToks, I now fill my Fridays with prayer and joyous train rides downtown (I’ve yet to commit fully to Shabbat, and frankly don’t see it in my future). Only at twenty-two have I started to understand what a rich sense of community adds to the world. It resets the expectations for what relationships can be. Instead of settling for an atomized life that provides me with a sense of comfort through illusory connection, I am pushing myself and my friends to put in the work for each other.
Religion is so appealing precisely because it is so different from the instant-everything, low-stakes bonds with which we grew up.
I did a particularly bad job at maintaining contact with one friend during college—the friend with whom I chose to delete TikTok—understanding that our friendship could sustain the weight of attending schools in different cities but not feeling the gravitas of my poor communication until we both graduated. She is now in an unfamiliar country, across the world, completing a fellowship. Whereas I scarcely visited her in college, despite being four states away, I bought a plane ticket as soon as I could, to finally start showing up and giving my love. No amount of texting could replace the holiness I feel when I soak in a person’s presence.
Even partial observance of Jewish traditions places demands on me that I never previously experienced. Prayer, for instance, requires approaching a conversation in which you cannot control the outcome, curate the response, or even guarantee you will receive one. No algorithm exists for optimizing engagement, nor does a notification confirming your message was received. Prayer forces me to show up repeatedly to a relationship that offers no tangible metrics, no feedback loop, and no way to measure your performance or progress. This is profoundly disorienting, yet incredibly exciting. Prayer allows me to determine my own priorities and cares, rather than relying on Instagram’s targeted ads and sponsored accounts to introduce me to ideas and goods that pique my interest.
My former TikTok-loving, God-denying self would not know where to begin to understand my life today. It took many years for me to learn what feels so fundamentally human, and I know I still have a lot to learn. I can’t say with certainty if my generation’s turn to religion will last. What I do know is deleting my accounts and learning how to relate to God has taught me how to relate to the people I love. And in a world that trained me to be a god of my own curated universe, that feels revolutionary enough.