Two weeks ago, I wrote a post about how for Lent—to orient myself toward God—I needed to scale back my time on Facebook. If you haven’t read that post, you can find it here.

Social media (which functions by trying to keep us engaged on its platform in order to show us more advertisements) can inadvertently lead us to think in a few very unhealthy ways. It can lead us to believe the world around us is beyond hope. It can cause us to see other people as one-dimensionally terrible. And it can cause us, when we think of the future, to be filled only with dread.

And while a good first step to combating this mindset is to scale back the amount of social media you ingest, constant exposure to this kind of worldview has a way of seeping into us, to the point that it doesn’t just go away when the source does. The impact of negative thought patterns tends to linger, after all, and sometimes that means it will take time and positive and conscious effort in order to change those patterns.

And so, if you find these kinds of negative thought patterns hanging over your head often, even after you have turned Facebook off, here are three suggestions that have helped me:

1. If you struggle with thinking that the world today is beyond hope, try getting involved locally.

It is hard going, feeling powerless in the face of problems that seem insurmountable. Yet this is exactly the kind of feeling social media excels at instilling into us. You may notice, if you think to look for it, that the kind of problems you see most often on your Facebook feed tend to be those on the larger side of the scale: wars, economic woes, federal or provincial politics, corruption. These big problems are plastered everywhere on social media, and while they are important to know about for when the next election rolls around, they are also the kind of problems that, on the individual level, there isn’t much to be done to confront them. As such, when they are the most common kind of issue you spend your time thinking about and engaging with, it is easy to come away with a feeling of powerlessness and hopelessness.

To this day I remember something an old High School teacher taught me in a World Issues class I took in the twelfth grade. ‘The closer to home you look, the more likely something is to impact your life directly.’ Onto this I would like to add that the closer to home a problem is, also the more likely you will be able to help address it. While the big problems of the world are important, the simple truth is that very rarely will any of them impact you half as much as will seemingly simple local things like, for example, how the municipality you live in decides to spend its budget for that year.

So, do you feel powerless and like the world is beyond hope? Get involved locally. There are always many community organizations, charities, not-for-profits, and the church looking for people to help out. Get involved locally and you will see that, far from being powerless, one person can actually do an awful lot when it comes to making their life, and the lives of the people they care about, better. There is little in this world that is more empowering than realizing you have the power to make the world around you into a better place.

2. If you think of all people as terrible, try hanging out more often with people you disagree with.

Let me ask you a question. What side of the political spectrum do you lean toward? Alright, now another question. What is your favourite season of the year? Another, what is your favourite song and movie? A final one. Who was the first person you had a crush on in grade school?

Chances are, you can answer all those questions without much of a problem about yourself; likely about many of your friends and family, as well. Now here is a fun game: picture someone that you absolutely cannot stand. Everything they say and do just gets under your skin. Now answer me this: how many of those same types of personal questions can you answer about them?

Chances are, if you primarily know this person from social media, apart from the things about them that really drive you crazy, you likely don’t actually know many of the other personal answers. This isn’t your fault. Social media does an excellent job of making us feel like we are getting to know the whole of someone, while in reality we are actually only getting to know the part of them that we engage with most.

But only interacting with someone in this kind of curated way creates in our minds a picture of a person whom we think of as whole, but is actually one-dimensional, hollow, flat. It is easier to dismiss this kind of a person. It is easier to hate this kind of a person. But this kind of a person also isn’t real. Everyone has a life filled with likes and dislikes and grade school crushes. Everyone is a fully rounded person if you care to get to know them. And it is a lot harder to think of someone you see in all their details as a truly terrible human being. Not impossible, but very difficult.

If you think of most people in this flat kind of way, as if they are only purely about whatever gets under your skin, that will warp and colour how you see humanity as a whole. Thankfully there is an easy solution to this. Go out of your way to talk to people you disagree with about things other than what you disagree about. Do that enough and first that person will begin to make sense to you, and then the more people you talk to in this way, the more likely humanity as a whole may also begin to seem not so terrible.

3. If the thought of the future itself fills you with dread, try spending more time with God.

Multiple times throughout scripture we are assured that our God has things under control. It is easy to lose sight of that when we spend our time focused on the things that infuriate us, the things that cause us to believe that there is no hope for tomorrow.

But especially now during this time of Lent when we are called to re-orient ourselves on Christ, I encourage you to try spending more time building your faith, orienting yourself to God. Pray, read the Bible, fellowship with other believers at church. Our God loves the creation that He made. He said it was good and, even though it is fallen now, He has never stopped reaching out to set it right. Our God also loves us human beings, loves us so much that he sent His own Son to be born as one of us.

As you work to build your relationship with God, what you will find happening is what always happens as we walk towards our Lord. You will come to see things more closely to how He does. As such, travel closer to God, and chances are the world will begin to not seem like such a write-off after all.

If you want to recover hope for the future, then may I suggest working to see the future through the same eyes as the One who assures us that, because He is ultimately in charge, in the end it is all going to be okay.

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