Do The Digital Daniel Diet

It might be time to consider doing a Digital Daniel Diet.

The book of Daniel famously opens with Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego being brought to King Nebuchadnezzar’s palace while in Babylonian exile. They are given Babylon’s best education and jobs in the king’s palace. They are also offered the king’s best food. 

But Daniel had the bold idea to do something different. Instead of accepting the best food from the king, Daniel refused and asked for mere vegetables and water instead.

Daniel determined that he would not defile himself with the king’s food or with the wine he drank. So he asked permission from the chief eunuch not to defile himself. God had granted Daniel kindness and compassion from the chief eunuch, yet he said to Daniel, “I fear my lord the king, who assigned your food and drink. What if he sees your faces looking thinner than the other young men your age? You would endanger my life with the king.”

So Daniel said to the guard whom the chief eunuch had assigned to Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, “Please test your servants for ten days. Let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink. Then examine our appearance and the appearance of the young men who are eating the king’s food, and deal with your servants based on what you see.” He agreed with them about this and tested them for ten days. At the end of ten days they looked better and healthier than all the young men who were eating the king’s food. So the guard continued to remove their food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables.

Daniel 1:8-16

What I find to be maybe the most striking detail of this passage is how Daniel challenges the guard to compare Daniel and his friends to the rest of the men who accepted the food at the end of the trial and then be the one who decides who is healthier. Of course, Daniel and his friends are healthier at the end of the trial.

The State of Digital Babylon

From the beginning, the contention of this newsletter has been that we are living in Digital Babylon. Digital Babylon entices its exiles with the best technology and entertainment. It tells them that to be online is to be “in the know.” It tells you that if you aren’t online, you don’t exist. And what harm is there in a little doomscrolling? 

Did you catch the fear of the guard in the story? What if it makes you worse? What if you aren’t as up to speed as everyone else? They want you to be afraid of not doing what everyone else is doing. They don’t tell you that these enticements are meant to numb you to the power Digital Babylon has over you.

The recent NPR report that revealed TikTok’s internal documents exemplifies this better than anything else. The below bullets are excerpts from the report. All of the following was learned from TikTok’s own internal data—meaning they knew this and didn’t tell anyone. 

• “In under 35 minutes, an average user is likely to become addicted to the platform.” 
• TikTok’s own research states that “compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety,” according to the suit.
• In addition, the documents show that TikTok was aware that “compulsive usage also interferes with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work/school responsibilities, and connecting with loved ones.”
• TikTok is well aware of “filter bubbles.” Internal documents show the company has defined them as when a user “encounters only information and opinions that conform to and reinforce their own beliefs, caused by algorithms that personalize an individual’s online experience.” The company knows the dangers of filter bubbles. During one internal safety presentation in 2020, employees warned the app “can serve potentially harmful content expeditiously.” 
• TikTok conducted internal experiments with test accounts to see how quickly they descend into negative filter bubbles. “After following several ‘painhub’ and ‘sadnotes’ accounts, it took me 20 mins to drop into ‘negative’ filter bubble,” one employee wrote. “The intensive density of negative content makes me lower down mood and increase my sadness feelings though I am in a high spirit in my recent life.” 
• Another employee said, “there are a lot of videos mentioning suicide,” including one asking, “If you could kill yourself without hurting anybody would you?” In another document, TikTok’s research found that content promoting eating disorders, often called “thinspiration,” is associated with issues such as body dissatisfaction, disordered eating, low self-esteem and depression Despite these heedings, TikTok’s algorithm still puts users into filter bubbles. 
• One internal document states that users are “placed into ‘filter bubbles’ after 30 minutes of use in one sitting.” The company wrote that having more human moderators to label content is possible, but “requires large human efforts.”

If you walked into a doctor’s office and told them you had this list of symptoms, and they said, “Oh yes, we know exactly what is causing that,” would you do what it takes to get healthy? Digital Babylon is offering you its best food, but it’s not doing it to help you. Digital Babylon has shifted from “Move fast and break things” to “Move fast and break you.” It might be time to do something different if we’re going to flourish in exile.

The Digital Daniel Diet

A while back I wrote about how I believe we now have two options regarding our posture toward social media: monk or missionary. The vast majority of Christians should consider becoming Digital Monks for the good of their overall health, their families, communities, and society at large. But going cold turkey and changing everything about your life and digital habits seems daunting at first. So what if there was a trial period that allowed someone to get a “taste” of what it’s like to eat foods other than what the king gives you to steal your allegiance?

This is where the Digital Daniel Diet comes into play. Yes, it’s essentially a social media fast. Nothing really revolutionary there. But I want to add a few additional layers to it to bring it more in line with the spirit Daniel displayed in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace.

1.   Commit. Daniel and his friends made their trial with food 10 days long, but to their credit, they weren’t trying to break an addictive habit. While it’s difficult to say exactly how long it takes to break a habit—anywhere between 18 to 254 days—what’s clear is that we won’t be able to break ourselves free from digital addiction in a mere week plus a few days. It will take more time than that.

Here are my two suggestions. The first is to pick a fixed length of a significant amount of time—let’s say either six months or a full year. The second is to fast with the church calendar during either Lent or Advent (preferably both!). Commit to no social media at all. Delete everything off of your phone. Block yourself from accessing it in the browser and on your laptop. If you can deactivate an account without deleting it, do that. But commit to spending the whole time completely off of social media.

2. Replace. We also now understand that you cannot simply break a habit; you must replace a habit. Something has to fill the gap that the old habit left behind. Daniel and his friends didn’t simply stop eating; they ate better things. We are going to do the same thing on our Digital Daniel Diet. We’re going to replace scrolling with reading.

There are two ways to do this, and I think both of them should be done together. The first is to download the Kindle and Substack apps on your phone. When we’re bored in line or whatever, instead of scrolling social media, we’re going to read ebooks and thoughtful newsletters. The second is to commit to creating a reading practice with some of the greatest Christian books to retrain your mind and imagination away from the feed and toward the Lord. We are also going to read short books because the likelihood of our attention span being shot from social media is high. Of course, you can choose whatever you like, but here is a list of recommended reading:

• Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

• The Life of God in the Soul of Man by Henry Scougal

• On the Christian Life by John Calvin

• The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

• The Imitation of Christ by Thomas À Kempis

• (While not a Christian book, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius would also be a great read)

At first, reading these books might feel like eating vegetables. It might feel intimidating. I promise you, all of these books are extremely short (or are written in very short and digestible sections) and they will do more for your mind and imagination than that TikTok video ever will. You might even be surprised by just how readable some of them are. All of these books have been profoundly influential to me in one way or another. If you did the six-month time frame, you could read one of those per month and get through all of them. I guarantee your life would be radically altered forever if you did that.

Of course, we’ll also want to read scripture during this time. Consider picking up a prayer book like Life of Jesus in 30 Days, Be Thou My Vision, or The Book of Common Prayer to help guide you through cultivating a practice of prayer and scripture reading in your life.

3. Assess. Finally, when the time period is up, it’s time to assess. 

• • How are you doing? How are you spiritually? 

  • How is your mental health? 

  • How are your relationships? 

  • How’s work going? 

  • How is your focus? 

  • Has your self-perception changed at all? 

  • Have you learned anything new about God, life, or anyone you know? 

Take some time to sit and contemplate these things. But remember (and this is where the magic happens), Daniel and his friends didn’t assess themselves; they had the guard assess them. It’s one thing to self-assess; it’s another thing to ask someone you trust to assess you. Ask your spouse, friend, community group, pastor, parents, roommate, or whoever else to give you insight into how the fast has changed you. Let them know beforehand that this conversation is going to happen so they can keep an eye on your progress and be ready to talk about it.

After the assessment, it’s time to decide: Does social media have a place in your life or not? Honestly, I hope most people decide no. But maybe the answer is yes. Maybe there is something that social media provides that nothing else can provide. Alright then. But at least now you know what life looks like without social media and have developed new habits to help you withstand the internet’s spiritual distortion zone. If you get back on, you can at least commit to continuing the good habits you created and setting new boundaries around your social media use. You now have a vision of what life outside of the grip of the algorithm is like. That, in and of itself, is remarkable in our digital age.

I quickly want to note two apps that I don’t consider social media, even though they have social media-like qualities: Substack and YouTube. While it’s definitely possible to treat these as mind-numbingly as we treat TikTok and everything else, these platforms also possess a wealth of actually good content that can be helpful for our souls. So while I don’t think we should rush to these platforms for our information and wisdom, I believe they are helpful enough not to be included in the Digital Daniel Diet.

10x Better

Augustine wrote in his Confessions, “It is a disease of the mind, which does not wholly rise to the heights where it is lifted by the truth, because it is weighed down by habit.” He also wrote, “I must plan my time and arrange my day for the good of my soul.” We have to recognize that even if we say we believe the truth, our habits weigh us down and keep our souls from being lifted to the truth we confess. That is why it’s important for us to tackle this head-on if we are going to flourish in Digital Babylon.

The story ends with Daniel and his friend receiving from God “knowledge and understanding of all kinds of literature and learning. And Daniel could understand visions and dreams of all kinds.” When they talked with the king, “he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters in his whole kingdom.” Their commitment to resist the enticements of their Babylonian captors led to them being filled with wisdom and the power of God. It led to them being 10x better than the king’s best men. If we are going to flourish in Digital Babylon, we need to have this vision for our lives. Not to simply eat what our captors give us, but to seek God’s wisdom and power and, in doing so, be able to stand head and shoulders above whatever schemes of culture try to hold us down.