Obsessive scrolling can heighten anxiety, strain relationships, and dull moral sensitivity – while pulling us away from the people God has placed in front of us.
Humanity has never had more access to the suffering of other people who live thousands of miles away. Yet many people have never cared less about the suffering of their neighbor next door.
There are many reasons why that’s the reality in 2026, but one of the chief reasons is that people are inundated with news (mostly bad), whether through traditional sources or social media.
Constant exposure to negative, frightening, infuriating, or even tragic news has helped to create a society that is anxious and depressed, superficial, and emotionally unavailable. A person may post the flag of another country on their social media page as a show of solidarity, but do nothing for a relative or a member of their community who is struggling.
C.S. Lewis saw the danger decades before smartphones existed. In a Dec. 20, 1946 letter to Dom Bede Griffiths, collected in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume II, he wrote:
“It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know.)
A great many people (not you) do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don’t think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others: but even while we’re doing it, I think we’re meant to enjoy Our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, our jokes, and the birds’ song, and the frosty sunrise.”
Numerous studies suggest that Lewis’s concerns were well-founded. Frequent consumption of social media and negative news is associated with increased anxiety and depression, polarization, and a sense of learned helplessness. Even more important for this article is that constant social media use and reading negative news damages relationships, causes desensitization, and creates a lack of empathy.
When Outrage Makes Us Numb
A 2023 study published in “Psychological Science,” for example, exposed participants to headlines of immoral or unethical actions, some true and some fictional. After a period of 15 days, the researchers gave participants a survey and found that when headlines were repeated, even once, the participants expressed less moral outrage over a criminal action and rated the act as less unethical.
The researchers claim that people are more desensitized to human suffering after repeated exposure to negative information. They also claim that some people use a coping mechanism when confronted with frequent immoral actions in which they rationalize the act as less severe in order to believe they live in a just world.
Daniel Effon, a social psychologist involved with the study, stated, “The first time we get exposed to an injustice, we may experience a sudden anger, which drives moral judgment. However, the next few times we encounter it, our emotional system won’t get very excited by it. When wrongdoings go viral, more people find out about it, but each person cares a little less.”
In other words, the constant parade of troubling headlines is literally dulling the moral sensitivity of the populace. Those frequently exposed to negative news experience stress and a range of emotions upon first seeing horrifying headlines. But the more those headlines appear, many users choose to disassociate rather than to continue going through the emotional turmoil.
They do not, however, stop scrolling.
Other studies suggest that social media platforms are designed to maximize engagement, often drawing users further into digital relationships rather than outward to the people they know.
A study published in “Social Science Computer Review” showed that Instagram use led to feelings of dissatisfaction in a user’s relationships. A separate “Frontiers in Psychology” study found that “phubbing” — or disengaging from an in-person conversation to check one’s phone — also harms relationships, as those ignored in favor of another’s phone reported that they felt ostracized, that their needs were not met, and that they experienced a higher rate of negative moods than those who were not ignored.
Ordered Loves
So how does a person combat the deleterious effects of too much news or social media? The first step is understanding priorities.
Ordo amoris, meaning ordered loves, holds that a person’s loves are ranked by precedent: their family first, then their neighbor, followed by their local community, then their nation, then the world.
Ordered loves entered public discussion last year when Vice President J.D. Vance contemporized it, but the concept itself is far from new. Christian thinkers, among them Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, have taught this principle for centuries as an outworking of the precepts of Scripture.
Lewis himself championed ordo amoris in works such as The Four Loves and frequently wrote on a love for one’s country as unique from the love for general mankind.
Lewis was influenced by author and philosopher G.K. Chesterton, who in works such as the fictional Napoleon of Notting Hill promoted a teaching that has come to be known as Localism. Localism is the idea that society, from its commercial enterprises to its government to its culture should be decentralized, meaning handled at the neighborhood level rather than the global or national level.
But as both Lewis and Chesterton foresaw, economies, culture, and governance have all become increasingly globalized and nationalized. Instant communication and rapid transportation have connected the world in unprecedented ways, including the transmission of news. And as the news and society at large have become increasingly globalized, so has the individual and the community.
Nearly every second of every day humans are faced with content that originates thousands of miles away. Even harmless entertainment can pull attention away from people and responsibilities immediately before us. Likewise, a tragic news story occurring far away fills us with fear, anger, or sadness for a problem we can do little about. The concept of ordered loves helps shield individuals from this.
Ordered Responsibilities
Many progressives recoil at the idea that Christians bear greater responsibility toward family and neighbors than toward strangers across the globe, but it is biblical.
A person’s primary calling is to honor, love, and obey God. As part of that calling, their next task is to care for the needs of their own family. A parent’s duty to feed and love their children comes before any duty to take care of someone else’s children and a person’s duty to help their neighbor takes precedence over a duty to help a person who lives in another country.
God has placed each person in a time and a place. Each individual is a finite being who can do very little to solve the crises of the planet but can do very much to affect the lives of their friends and neighbors.
And this is why it is helpful to reframe ordered loves as ordered responsibilities.
Christians should certainly pray for those around the world who are struggling, whether they be Christians facing persecution, citizens harmed by war, or people facing famine or sickness. And yes, it is possible that God may lead a person to leave their current home and go to another place for whatever purpose He has for them there.
But individuals bear limited responsibility and limited capacity to alleviate the suffering of those living tens of thousands of miles away.
Put simply: You should focus on prospering the community God has placed you in, not fretting over the problems of a place you may never visit.
He is God, and we are not. Therefore, we can entrust the world to His sovereign care.
It’s Time for a Digital Detox
But how do Christians practically do that — entrust the world to God’s sovereign care?
The first step in combating the ills of too much bad news or too much worry over things out of our control is to put the phone down and embrace real life. Or in social media slang, go “touch grass”.
As the political world continues to find out time and again, X, Facebook, Reddit, and even traditional news outlets are not the “real world”. As Gandalf tells Bilbo in Peter Jackson’s film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, “The world isn’t in your books and maps. It’s out there.”
The world is neither as polished as social media influencers portray it nor as consumed by outrage as online discourse suggests. The truth is somewhere in between.
Evil and suffering are real, but so are goodness, beauty, and human kindness. Summer evenings filled with a warm breeze and lightning bugs, laughter between friends, and the willingness of strangers to help one another all testify that grace still permeates ordinary life.
God has allowed each person to live in a world of truly astounding wonder and beauty, and perhaps the greatest part of that is the love each person feels in relationship with Him and with others.
So maybe when you’re feeling like the world is nothing but darkness and injustice, put the phone down, say a prayer, go out into your community, and see who you can help instead of who you can’t.
At first glance, this may seem like an unusual topic for an organization devoted to informing and influencing readers, but the Standing for Freedom Center seeks to help Christians flourish in their walk with Christ while also promoting the flourishing of our nation.
Neither social media use nor the consumption of news is inherently bad; as Lewis himself observed, nearly every sin involves the misuse of, or an excess appetite for, good gifts.
And being knowledgeable about things going on around you is good — just not at the expense of your spiritual, mental, and physical well-being or the health of your relationships.
So, make it a conscious point to consume news and social media wisely. Choose trustworthy sources for information. Limit unnecessary scrolling. Take intentional, even days-long breaks from online engagement.
Above all, prioritize your relationship with God and the people He has placed in your life. You and everyone around you will be better off for it.
The future of America will not be secured by one more scroll – it will be strengthened when believers look up, return to God, invest in their families, serve their neighbors, and stand for truth in the public square. Your tax-deductible gift helps the Standing for Freedom Center cut through the noise, equip Christians with a biblical worldview, and defend the faith, family, and freedom that allow our nation to flourish.
