Ronan’s thumb stutters over the Gorilla Glass, the blue light of the screen catching the sweat on his palm as he paces the of the hospital waiting room. He is looking for a lifeline, or at least a sentence that doesn’t feel like it was written by a marketing intern trying to sound like a bodhisattva.
Two days ago, his father’s oncologist used the word “aggressive,” and suddenly, the digital world Ronan has curated for the last has turned into a landscape of pastel-colored insults.
He scrolls past a graphic about “manifesting your best reality” and feels a hot spike of rage in his throat. He scrolls past a video of a woman in a linen dress talking about how “everything is a gift from the universe” and considers throwing his phone into the industrial-sized trash can labeled Biohazard.
The Structural Mismatch
The mismatch is structural. It is not just that the content is bad; it is that the content is designed for a person who is not currently in a crisis. We have built a spiritual economy that thrives on the daily reader, the person looking for a hit of inspiration to get them through a Tuesday afternoon meeting.
But crisis-the real, bone-deep, world-ending crisis-is rare. It is an outlier. And because it is an outlier, the system is not incentivized to serve the person who is actually suffering. It is incentivized to serve the person who is bored.
Michael V.K., a digital citizenship teacher who has spent watching how interfaces reshape our inner lives, calls this the “frequency trap.” He points out that to maintain an audience in the current digital landscape, a creator must post with a regularity that is fundamentally at odds with the pace of real spiritual integration.
If you are posting 6 times a week, you are not speaking from the depths of a dark night of the soul. You are speaking from the surface of a very busy life.
Michael often tells his students that the algorithm provides a mirror when what you need is a window. We are being fed a version of the sacred that has been sanded down to fit into a feed-shaped format, leaving us structurally unaccompanied at the exact moment the floor falls out from under us.
The Etymology of Certainty
I realized recently that I have been mispronouncing the word “omniscient” for nearly . I’ve been saying it in my head-and occasionally aloud, which is worse-as “omni-scient,” with a hard “science” in the middle. I thought I was being clever, linking the divine to the empirical.
It turns out the word is “om-nish-ent.” I was holding the concept of all-knowingness in my mouth the wrong way for decades, and nobody corrected me because we’re all just nodding along to the sounds of things.
This feels like a metaphor for our current digital spirituality. We have the vocabulary of the infinite, but we are pronouncing it all wrong. We are using words like “surrender” and “grace” as if they are life hacks, rather than the terrifying, ego-destroying processes they actually are.
The Weight of Friction
The content that Ronan is scrolling through is optimized for engagement, which is the polite way of saying it is optimized for the avoidance of friction. Crisis, however, is pure friction.
The number of people sitting in the room at the cancer center-a density of crisis the algorithm cannot parse.
When you are sitting in a room with 236 other people in a cancer center, a quote about “attracting high vibes” isn’t just unhelpful-it’s a spiritual bypass that feels like a physical blow.
The creators Ronan followed for years haven’t changed, but the context of his life has. The “light” they provide is too dim to illuminate the specific, jagged edges of his father’s diagnosis.
Historically, spiritual traditions didn’t put the heavy stuff on the front porch. You didn’t walk into a temple and get the “everything is an illusion” speech on day one. That kind of medicine was kept in the back rooms, held by elders and rituals that were specifically designed to contain the weight of a human life breaking apart.
There was a hierarchy of depth. Today, the digital era has flattened that hierarchy. Everything is on the front porch. Everything is a headline. When you flatten a tradition into a feed, you lose the ability to distinguish between a “pick-me-up” and a “pick-up-your-cross.”
The Loneliness of the “Flow”
This creates a profound loneliness for the person in crisis. They look at their screen and see a world where everyone else seems to be “leveling up” or “finding their flow,” while they are simply trying to remember how to breathe in the face of a terminal prognosis.
The “spiritual” content they consume ends up reinforcing the idea that if they are suffering, they must be doing something wrong. They haven’t meditated enough. They haven’t “released” their trauma.
The price of a masterclass on “The Art of Letting Go.”
They haven’t bought the $106 masterclass on “The Art of Letting Go.”
Michael V.K. argues that we need to reclaim the “un-feed-able” parts of the spirit. He suggests that the most important spiritual work happens in the gaps where there is no data to harvest.
But how do you find those gaps when you are away from a panic attack and your only connection to the world is the device in your hand?
This is where the structural failure becomes a moral one. We have allowed the “content” to replace the “companion.” We have traded the elder for the influencer, and the influencer, by definition, must keep influencing.
They cannot afford to sit in silence with you for while you mourn. They have to post a reel about their morning coffee.
It’s easy to criticize the creators, but they are just as trapped in the loop as we are. If they stop posting, they vanish.
If they talk about the raw, ugly, unmarketable parts of the human experience too often, their engagement drops. People don’t “like” a post about the smell of a hospital or the way a person’s face sags when they’ve lost hope.
So the creators keep it light. They keep it “inspiring.” They keep it profitable.
Scarcity is a Promise
We have forgotten that scarcity is a promise, not a setting. In the ancient world, the “word of God” was rare. It was something you traveled 236 miles to hear.
Now, it is something that interrupts your scrolling while you’re on the toilet. Because it is everywhere, it feels like it is nowhere. For Ronan, the abundance of spiritual content has become a form of starvation. He is surrounded by “answers,” but none of them address the question he is actually asking, which is: “How do I survive this?”
The failure of digital spirituality is most apparent in its inability to handle the “No.” Most content is built on “Yes”-yes to growth, yes to abundance, yes to healing.
But crisis is the ultimate “No.” It is the closing of a door. It is the end of a body. And our digital systems are not built to process a terminal “No.” They are built to keep the “Yes” loop going forever.
We need spaces that aren’t afraid of the “No,” spaces that recognize that some things cannot be manifested away or reframed into a blessing. We need an
of voices that are willing to be quiet, that don’t try to sell us a solution when we are standing in the middle of a wreckage.
The Soft “Sh” of Understanding
I think back to my mispronunciation of “omniscient.” The “science” I wanted to find in that word was a desire for certainty. I wanted a spiritual world that was measurable, predictable, and logical.
I wanted a God that functioned like an algorithm-if I put in the right inputs (prayer, meditation, “high vibes”), I would get the right outputs (health, wealth, happiness).
But the “sh” sound in “om-nish-ent” is softer. It is a whisper. It is the sound of something that cannot be calculated. It is the sound of the silence that Ronan actually needs right now.
Ronan finally turns his phone off. He puts it in his pocket and looks at the 16 ceiling tiles above him. One of them has a water stain that looks vaguely like a map of a country he’ll never visit.
For the first time in , he isn’t looking for an answer. He is just there, in the hospital, with his father’s “aggressive” reality.
The lack of content is a relief. The silence is the first thing that hasn’t offended him all day. It doesn’t tell him to be grateful. It doesn’t tell him to manifest a different outcome. It just holds him in the dark.
Too Thin for the Weight
We have to admit that we have been sold a version of the soul that is too thin for the weight of our lives. We have been told that we are “content creators” or “content consumers,” but you cannot consume your way through a catastrophe.
You cannot create your way out of grief. There is a point where the words have to stop, where the “feed” has to end, and where the actual work of being a human begins.
This work is rarely 1080 pixels wide. It is rarely shareable. It is usually quite messy and involves a lot of mispronounced words and $236 bills that you can’t afford to pay.
Michael V.K. once told me that the greatest act of digital citizenship is knowing when to leave the digital city entirely. For a spiritual person, this is even more critical.
If your faith is dependent on the “input” of your feed, then your faith is only as strong as the current trend. When the trend changes, or when your life becomes “un-trendable” because of tragedy, you will find yourself empty.
We need to build a spiritual life that is “offline” in the deepest sense-not just away from the internet, but away from the logic of the internet.
The Great Flattening
We are currently living through a great flattening, where the most sacred truths are being turned into “tips and tricks.” We are being told that the “Dark Night of the Soul” is just a phase you can hack with the right morning routine.
But Ronan, sitting in that plastic chair, knows better. He knows that some nights don’t have a morning. He knows that some pains are not “lessons.” He knows that he has been lied to by a system that promised him comfort but only gave him “content.”
Eventually, a nurse comes out. She doesn’t have a quote for him. She doesn’t have a high-vibe affirmation. She just has a hand that she puts on his shoulder, 6 inches of human contact that do more for his spirit than the 1618 posts he has liked in the last month.
Digital “Likes”
Human Contact
It is heavy. It is real. It is enough. We are being called to be that hand for each other, rather than another voice in the feed. We are being called to an alliance that doesn’t need a “follow” button to exist.
I still find myself wanting to say “omni-scient.” The habit of wanting things to make sense, to be “scientific” and orderly, is hard to break.
But I am learning to let the word be what it is-a quiet, soft acknowledgement that there is a knowing that exceeds my understanding. And perhaps that is what we all need to do with our spiritual lives: stop trying to make them “make sense” for the audience, and start letting them be the quiet, un-postable things that actually sustain us when the lights go out.
The feed will always be there, shouting its “Yes” into the void. But our survival depends on our ability to hear the “No” and still stay in the room.