In August 2023, The Free Press announced an essay contest for Gen Z: write about a problem facing American society and how to fix it. The new media outlet noted, “We are especially interested in problems facing young Americans that older generations have misunderstood, missed, or maybe even created.” Out of the four hundred high schoolers who submitted their work, three were chosen for publication. The main theme in each? The problems of technology, social media, and the lack of traditionally human living.
Isabel Hogben wrote about her accidental introduction to porn online at age 10, despite her mother’s “helicopter parenting.” The sixteen year old is honest about a teen’s ability to outsmart parental and other filters, calling for stricter government regulation. She is intensely critical of the adults who have normalized pornography, especially those who claim it as a feminist victory: “Meanwhile, models and female entrepreneurs—women who little girls look up to—are flocking to OnlyFans to sell naked photos of themselves. In short, most of my friends think this stuff is normal.”
Seventeen-year-old Caleb Silverberg found himself enslaved not to porn, but to videogames: “At 15 years old, I looked in the mirror and saw a shell of myself. My face was pale. My eyes were hollow. I needed a radical change.” He learned of a boarding school where students exchanged smart phones and computer screens for axes and mops. Learning to live off the land also came with social benefits: Instead of scrolling Tik-Tok, students engaged in conversation and made lifelong friendships.
Contest winner Ruby LaRocca also wrote about a shift in her education, opening her essay with an admission that many might find surprising. “When people ask me why I sacrificed the sociable, slightly surreal daily life at my local school for the solitary life of a homeschooled student in 2021, I almost never reveal the reason: an absence of books.” She goes on to offer her “counterintuitive guide for teenage happiness,” which includes recommendations to read old books, memorize poetry, learn ancient languages, adopt a monastic pace, and “do away with the ‘machine for feeling bad,’” otherwise known as a smartphone.
These teens may be exceptional writers, but their experiences in a world that renders pornography and online videogames ordinary is sadly all too common. As I detailed in my first essay, there are many reasons to be worried about the girls of this generation, not the least of which is the dominance of the online world in their young lives. We owe them a robust and true vision of what it is to be a woman, which can only begin with an understanding of what it means to be human. My previous essay explored that theological vision; in this one, I’d like to consider what that vision can look like in practice for the girls of this generation. (Much of this will be applicable to boys too.)
Data from a 2023 Gallup poll showed that “time spent on social media predicts significantly lower mental health and higher discomfort with one’s body.” One of the main challenges girls face is both a deep discomfort and dissociation, as well as a total obsession, with their bodies. But this comes as no surprise when we consider the dominant narratives in our culture surrounding the significance of the human body.
The girls of today are drawn by the siren song of constructing their own identity in a digital universe.
On the one hand, the human body is thought to be nothing more than an assemblage of parts: a collection of atoms or cells that have come together, ultimately, as the product of random evolutionary selection. Our bodies are mere matter with no loving design behind them, and therefore that material is ours with which to do whatever we want. The “real” self is in the mind, or the heart, or the passions. This way of thinking leads to a conviction: I am whatever I believe or feel that I am. I can alter my body accordingly, even by means of serious surgical mutilation of otherwise functioning, healthy body parts, ranging from cosmetic implants to total mastectomy and faux-penile construction.
On the other hand, a competing narrative about bodily significance holds that since there is no such thing as the soul or any spiritual element to being human, our bodies are all that we are. Experiences like love or even extraordinary heroism are explained by a kind of materialistic determinism. We’re simply highly intelligent mammals, and our material determines our selves. Of course, this line of thought leads to eugenic and even genocidal tendencies: If some people’s bodies are deficient, they ought to be treated accordingly. (Examples from recent history include Hitler’s insistence on Arian supremacy and the subsequent Holocaust of the Jewish people, the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsis, and Iceland’s near-elimination of people with Down syndrome through prenatal screening and abortion.)
These two opposing narratives tend to operate simultaneously, requiring a kind of cognitive and even practical dissonance on the part of the holder: My body is simultaneously not important at all, and yet it is so important that I must change it in order to be my “true self.” An average girl considers it normal to spend more time online creating avatars, personas, and brands than actually living as herself in the real world. She may pour exorbitant amounts of money into surgically reconstructing her body and think it fine to sell perfect strangers access to it.
But the Christian tradition’s firm understanding of the person—a body-soul unity, rational and free, made in the image and likeness of God as a female human person or a male human person—offers not only a corrective to these competing dissonant narratives, but a hope-filled vision of the significance of the human body, united intimately to an individual soul. Indeed, the Church’s sacramental life is a testament to such a theological anthropology. Lex orandi, lex credendi, as the old saying goes: As the Church prays, so she believes. The sacraments require both form and matter: water, bread, wine, specific words spoken by a specific person. Only a priest can confect the Eucharist; only a bride and groom can marry one another. Even the Church’s vision of herself is that of a body: the Body of Christ, from which come forth the powers that are the sacraments. Our bodies are not the most significant thing about us and yet they are truly significant. (John Paul II spent many years reflecting on these ideas in his Wednesday audiences.)
We and others are not real people, just words or images on a screen. We’re only as good as our personal brand and its matching content, designed for others to consume at an inhuman pace.
If human persons really are body-soul unities, then we must teach girls to care for themselves and others as body-soul unities. What if we started with the most basic of ideas? What if girls were encouraged to spend time in creation with no phones or mirrors in sight? The health benefits of time spent outdoors are well known, including healthy sleep patterns, strengthened immune systems, and lower levels of stress. Experiments with children and teens that require them to be smartphone free yield positive results, and communities that limit their device usage report similar benefits: increased attention and focus with the ability to be present to the world around them. Yet, as Caleb Silverberg found, it’s not only the removal of devices that’s important: We need a positive turn towards something better.
What if girls had some form of challenging physical task that required them to be present, body and mind, to the thing at hand? Sports, exercise, cooking, sewing, gardening, woodworking: these and other similar activities that were once common demand a person’s full and active engagement in body and mind. For a generation that grew up scrolling from their high chairs, the introduction to traditionally human pursuits like learning a musical instrument, painting, or even reading a physical book can be the discovery of an oasis in an otherwise digital desert—as The Free Press essay contest winners attest.
Of course, living in the real world requires knowledge of how to interact with others. As Ruby LaRocca writes, “It all begins with knowing how to arrange your face when having conversations with real, living people. No one wants to talk to someone who has a slack jaw and glazed eyes, who yawns openly, who doesn’t laugh at jokes or nod in recognition. Too many Zoom school sessions involved speaking into a void of faceless boxes.” Connecting to others only or primarily online comes with a host of documented downsides, not the least of which is a kind of dehumanization. There’s a reason internet comment boxes are full of remarks that would only be made at the most horrific of dinner parties.
This dehumanization is tied to a posture of consumerism: We and others are not real people, just words or images on a screen. We’re only as good as our personal brand and its matching content, designed for others to consume at an inhuman pace. It’s no surprise that the rise in pornography use has grown like a mushroom cloud. The screen seems to separate us so much from others that it becomes easy to sit alone in a dark room and feel like “it isn’t hurting anyone.” Scrolling for the latest arousing sexual perversions becomes as commonplace as scrolling for the latest fashion trends.
But as human beings we are both rational and morally free. These powers enable us to have relationships with others in a way that other creatures cannot. We are designed to flourish by engaging in real-life community with others. Yet, says Gen Z journalist Freya India, that word holds little meaning for most. “I can’t get across how little familiarity Gen Z has with community. When some of us hear the word community we think of Instagram. We think of Reddit. Or abstract concepts like the LGBT community or mental health communities, nothing real or solid,” she writes, concluding, “Which is why whenever someone says something like online communities are a lifeline for young people! I feel like screaming because it’s just so bleak. What have we done?”
What if we began to invite this generation into true community? Not online, but in-person groups of people who care for and about one another, who are willing to sacrifice for others, and willing to receive the help that others offer? What if parishes or church groups were less concerned with demographic similarities (“youth” and “young adult” groups have their place, but by their very nature are transitory), and more concerned with unity in faith? What if intergenerational friendships were normal? What if the living helped this generation learn to “break bread with the dead,” drawing its members into a centuries-long conversation about what is good, true, and beautiful? Might it be possible to help these girls discover a true vision of themselves?
Identity is both given and actively received. We are born ourselves; we also become more fully ourselves over the course of a lifetime. But that process does not happen alone nor can it happen through an entirely pixilated world. In Disney’s 1967 (loose) adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Mowgli is drawn out of life with the animals into the human community through his curiosity about another human person (in his case, a girl). But the girls of today are drawn by the siren song of constructing their own identity in a digital universe. They constantly “share” photos and videos of themselves, but with what results?
Freya India explains that girls have “a sense now that something didn’t happen if you don’t share it. . . . I think if this generation is on track to regret anything it will be the time we wasted documenting and editing and filtering and marketing ourselves for social media.” Writers Peco and Ruth Gaskovski point out that this excessive digital documentation of life can exacerbate the passive, consumer posture fostered by the online world. “Reliance on a support system of machines to hold our collective memories is a formula for docility. When Steve Jobs brought us Apple computer we were promised bicycles for the mind, but many of us feel we’re ending up with cognitive wheelchairs.” And Big Tech’s involvement with education means “we create better and better cognitive wheelchairs for our kids. Can we blame them if they feel so comfortable they don’t want to get out of the chairs, or don’t trust the ground under their own feet?”
Let’s help this generation of girls learn to walk again. “The Church represents the memory of what it means to be human in the face of a civilization of forgetfulness, which knows only itself and its own criteria. Yet just as an individual without memory has lost his identity, so too a human race without memory would lose its identity,” proclaimed Benedict XVI. Jesus Christ is God incarnate, fully human, fully divine. We cannot truly understand ourselves apart from a relationship with Christ, lived not only in the mind or the spirit, but sacramentally in the body. Do we believe that the sacraments are in fact “spiritual medicine”? Do we witness to it with our lives? Are we inviting the girls of this generation into sacramental life in Christ? People are asking online whether anyone can light a candle in a Catholic Church—could this small, human act serve as the first “baby step” towards a deeper life with God?
Are we enabling girls to encounter God through his first revelation: creation itself? Are we giving them opportunities to exercise their rationality and freedom as stewards of this created world, rather than as mere consumers? Do we facilitate and encourage traditionally human work and hobbies for mind and body?
Is it possible that like the curious Mowgli, young women might be drawn beyond the comfort of their life online, out into the real world, through the presence of others? Are we introducing them to the great communion of saints: men and women who have lived their humanity to the fullest, not in a cookie-cutter fashion, but as unique individuals transformed by grace? Are we ourselves living lives that are attractive, embodying the best of what it means to be human, including acknowledgement of our own failures along the way?
There is no one-size-fits-all way to address the many challenges that the girls of today face. While the vast majority of girls can benefit from replacing screen time with real-world living, not every girl will thrive through learning to make sourdough or play soccer, any more than every girl will connect with the truthful observations in Pride and Prejudice or the beauty of Bach’s cello concertos. We can avoid stereotypes by cultivating the virtue of prudence which enables us to apply general principles to practice, so that we can help our daughters, granddaughters, goddaughters, nieces, students, mentees, and neighbors to live more virtuously human and fulfilling lives. If The Free Press essay contest winners are any indication, members of this generation know the problems they face; let’s help them begin to live the solutions.
