You know the rhythm. Post something. Check the notifications. Feel the little hit of dopamine when the likes roll in. Feel the little drop when they don’t.
Now imagine doing that with your spiritual identity.
Because that’s what’s happening for a lot of young people right now. They’re not just posting selfies for validation. They’re posting beliefs, values, spiritual takes, aesthetic presentations of who they are at the deepest level. And the algorithm is teaching them something specific: the version of you that gets the most engagement is the truest version of you.
I spend a lot of time studying adults who built their spiritual identities this way. I’ve analyzed nearly 400 surveys with over 24,000 total responses, tracking the patterns of what happens when the self becomes the ultimate arbiter of spiritual truth. And I want to tell you where that road leads. Not to scare you, but because I think knowing helps us respond thoughtfully.
The adults I study often describe an arc that sounds almost scripted. Empowering at first. Then exhausting. Then something like collapse. And the collapse isn’t random. It’s built into the foundation.
But before I get into where this leads, I need to be honest about something: if your teen read this, they might feel defensive. That’s not because the analysis is wrong. It’s because the construction phase feels genuinely empowering, and warning someone about a collapse they haven’t experienced yet sounds like criticism, not concern. So as you read this, I’m sharing what the trajectory looks like so you can understand where they are, not so you can hand them this article and expect them to change.
If you’re reading this, you probably care deeply about the young people in your life. You’ve noticed something shifting and you want to understand it, not to argue with them, but to help. That instinct is good. Hold onto it. What I’m offering here isn’t a critique of what you’ve been doing. It’s a map of terrain that none of us were prepared for, drawn by someone who walked it herself and wishes she’d had a guide.
The Oldest Promise in the Book
Something I find myself returning to: the validation economy isn’t new. The mechanism is new. But the promise underneath it? Ancient.
“You will be like God.” That’s what the serpent offers in Genesis 3. You won’t need an external authority telling you what’s true. You can determine good and evil for yourself. You can be your own source of meaning, your own definer of reality, your own center of the universe.
Social media didn’t invent this desire. It just built an infrastructure that makes it feel achievable.
Think about what the platform teaches: Your path is unique. Your truth is valid. What feels right to you is what’s true for you. You are the final authority on your own experience. When I surveyed thousands of adults about their spiritual beliefs, over ninety percent agreed that their spiritual path was something they “must find on their own.” The self as the ultimate arbiter of truth isn’t a fringe belief anymore. It’s the water we’re swimming in.
And this is where it gets theologically specific: 60% of these adults said they believe the Holy Spirit is their intuition. Their gut feeling. They’ve relocated divine guidance from an external being speaking to them to an internal feeling speaking through them. The platform’s promise of “your truth is valid” has become “your feelings are God.”
(I want to pause here because this is the part that matters for parents and church leaders. The teen curating their spiritual identity in the comments is practicing the exact framework that will eventually redefine divine guidance as internal feeling. They’re not just posting. They’re forming theology.)
Why the Construction Phase Feels So Good
What parents and church leaders need to understand: that initial phase isn’t fake. The empowerment isn’t an illusion they’re fooling themselves with.
When a teen discovers they can curate their own spiritual identity, take what speaks to them from Buddhism, mix in some psychology, add a dash of astrology, keep the parts of Christianity that feel comforting and set aside the parts that feel restrictive, they’re often experiencing genuine relief. Relief from feeling like they didn’t fit the script. Relief from the cognitive dissonance of believing things they never chose. Relief from the quiet suspicion that their inherited faith wasn’t really theirs at all.
For someone who felt spiritually invisible or spiritually suffocated, this freedom is real freedom. Which is exactly why telling them it will collapse sounds like you’re trying to take something precious away.
I know this because I was there. Not as a teen, but as an adult who should have known better.
I was raised in the faith. Had the foundation. Knew the stories and the doctrines. But somewhere along the way, that foundation became something I took for granted rather than something I built upon. When life didn’t go the way I thought it should, when I watched less qualified people succeed while I kept getting overlooked, I got angry. Not frustrated. Angry. At God. At the whole system.
And the New Age welcomed me with open arms. It told me I didn’t need to wait on a God who seemed to be ignoring me. I could trust my own inner wisdom. Create my own reality. Take what spoke to me and leave the rest. It was empowering. It was freedom to construct a spirituality that fit.
The adults I study describe this initial phase with words like “transformative,” “freeing,” “finally in control of my own spirituality.” When asked how it felt to open up to spirituality, 44% called it “Transformative.” But this is telling: another 21% found it “Confusing” and 11% found it “Overwhelming.” The empowerment and the disorientation are happening simultaneously, even in the construction phase. They just don’t realize the disorientation is a warning.
(I’m not being dismissive here. The desire for authenticity, for a spirituality that doesn’t feel imposed from outside, for permission to question what you’ve been handed, these are legitimate spiritual hungers. The problem isn’t the hunger. It’s what we’re feeding it.)
The Burden Nobody Warned Them About
This is where my research gets uncomfortable. That empowering construction phase? It doesn’t last.
The adults I study describe a transition. The burden of being your own spiritual authority starts to feel heavy. Because if you’re the final arbiter of truth, then you’re also responsible for everything. Your decisions. Your direction. Your mistakes. There’s no one to defer to when you’re lost. No external anchor when you start to doubt yourself.
One phrase shows up repeatedly in my research: “The burden of being my own god proved unsustainable.”
They describe cycles of feeling “so high and then so so bad.” The initial empowerment curdles into exhaustion. Some use stronger language: “ruined,” “destroyed,” “mental breakdown.” A significant number mention depression and even darker places.
And when I ask adults how they healed their soul and spirit, the most common answer isn’t a method or a breakthrough. It’s “Still working on it.” Thirty-six percent. After years on this path, the healing they sought is perpetually incomplete. The construction project never finishes because the self can’t complete itself.
This isn’t because they did spirituality wrong. It’s because the model itself places an impossible weight on the self. You were never designed to be your own center of gravity. When you try to make yourself the sun that everything orbits around, eventually you burn out.
The issue isn’t that mixing beliefs is morally wrong. The issue is structural: when you’re the curator, you’re also the authority. Every choice rests on your discernment. And when something goes wrong (as it will, because life), you have no external anchor to appeal to. The system that offered so much freedom becomes a closed loop where you can never fully trust your own judgment because you’re the one who made all the rules.
“Is It Intuition or Paranoia?”
There’s a question that shows up constantly in my research. Adults desperately trying to answer: “Is it intuition or paranoia?”
When you’ve made your feelings the primary way you discern truth, and then your feelings become unreliable, you have no backup system. The adults I study describe trying to distinguish “a calm, neutral knowing” from “an emotionally charged fear,” and often they can’t. The metric they were given simply doesn’t work when life gets hard.
The self they curated so carefully turns out to be built on sand. And when the validation slows down (because it always does eventually), the whole structure starts to feel hollow.
This is the hidden error: they were told that constructing your own truth makes you free. What nobody mentioned is that a truth you construct has no more authority than you do. And when you can’t trust yourself anymore, when your internal compass proves unreliable, you have nothing to fall back on.
The very thing that promised liberation becomes a trap. You rejected external authority because you wanted to be free. But now you’re trapped inside a self you’re not sure you can trust, with no external anchor to stabilize you.
What They’re Actually Looking For
What I’ve noticed in the adults who eventually find their way out of this cycle: they weren’t looking for control in the first place. They were looking for something else underneath.
Safety. To know they’re held by something bigger than their own ability to figure things out. Connection. To not be alone in the universe with the full weight of meaning-making on their shoulders. Truth that holds. Something solid that doesn’t shift based on their mood or the algorithm’s preferences.
(My research revealed a profound yearning for connection underneath all the self-sovereignty language. Not just connection to the divine, but connection to a self they can trust, and connection to a community where they belong. The three things the self-construction project promised but couldn’t deliver.)
The self-construction project was an attempt to meet these needs by taking control. But control isn’t what they wanted. It’s just what they reached for when they didn’t trust that anything else could hold them.
There’s a verse in Genesis that always makes me pause, the moment after everything falls apart. Adam and Eve have grasped for godhood, and they’re hiding, ashamed, exposed. And God’s first word to them is a question: “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9, NLT).
Not condemnation. Not “how dare you.” A question. An invitation back into relationship with the One they’d tried to replace.
That question stays with me. Because I think it’s the question underneath all the curating and constructing. Where are you? Who are you, really, under all the versions you’ve performed? And would you be willing to be found?
Being Known Before the Performance
What struck me about Psalm 139 is that David isn’t describing a God who sees his curated self, the version of David that would get the most engagement. God saw him “being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb” (Psalm 139:15, NLT). Known before he could post. Loved before he could perform.
I wonder what would happen if we helped young people experience that kind of seeing. Not “God loves you despite your flaws” (which still centers the flaws). Not “God loves the real you” (which still implies there’s an unreal version they’ve been showing). But “God knew you before you knew yourself, before the algorithm told you who you should be.”
For ministry leaders, this might mean finding ways to create “pre-performance” spaces. Moments where young people are encountered without evaluation. Where their presence is enough before their contribution is requested. Where they can be seen without first having to figure out which version of themselves to present.
The antidote to the validation economy isn’t just “stop seeking validation.” It’s experiencing a different kind of being-known that doesn’t require performance. And that might be harder for the Church to offer than we’d like to admit. How many of our spaces also reward the curated self? How many young people feel like they have to have their spiritual act together before they can fully belong?
What This Means for You
Before I share what I’ve learned, I want to acknowledge something: you’re already trying. The fact that you’re reading this, thinking about this, concerned about this, that matters more than you know. You’ve probably had conversations that didn’t go the way you hoped. You’ve probably felt the distance growing and wondered what you’re doing wrong. You might be second-guessing approaches that seemed to work for previous generations.
This isn’t about what you’ve done wrong. It’s about understanding a landscape that shifted underneath all of us. The algorithm changed the rules of identity formation, and nobody handed us a playbook. So give yourself some grace here. What follows isn’t a list of your failures. It’s what I’ve learned from adults who walked this path and eventually found their way back.
Don’t argue against the construction phase while they’re in it. The burden hasn’t arrived yet, and you’ll sound like you’re trying to control them, which is exactly what they’re trying to escape.
Don’t dismiss their spiritual experiences. When they say “this feels true to me,” they’re not making a philosophical claim they want debated. They’re describing a felt sense that is, at that moment, the most real thing they know.
Do model what you’re offering as an alternative. They’re watching whether your faith produces rest or just different rules. Whether your community sees people or just performs inclusion.
Do keep the door open. The adults who found their way back almost always describe someone who stayed present without pressure. Someone who was simply there when the collapse came.
If you’re looking for ways to open conversation rather than trigger defense, these questions tend to create space instead of closing it down:
“What’s been the most meaningful part of your spiritual journey lately?”
“How do you figure out which spiritual ideas to trust?”
“What do you do when your intuition is conflicted, when part of you feels one thing and part feels another?”
“Have you ever felt tired from holding it all together spiritually?”
These questions don’t argue. They create space for them to articulate their own experience, including the parts that might not be working as well as they expected.
What the Adults Wish Someone Had Told Them
The adults who made it through the collapse almost universally say some version of this: “I wish someone had told me that freedom to construct my own truth would eventually become a prison.”
Not because construction is bad. But because we’re not strong enough to be our own foundation. The self, it turns out, is not stable enough to bear the weight of ultimate authority. The internal compass can be compromised by anxiety, trauma, desire, the desperate need to be validated.
What holds isn’t what we build. What holds is what was there before us and will remain after us. Something external. Someone external.
I’m still working out what that means for helping young people navigate a world that constantly tells them to define themselves into existence. But I think it starts with showing them they’re already known. Already held. Already loved in ways that don’t depend on their performance or their construction project.
The self they’re curating in the comments isn’t the truest version of themselves. It might be the heaviest burden they’ll ever carry.
And there’s a lighter way. A way that’s been offered since the beginning, to everyone who got tired of trying to be their own god.
“Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28, NLT).
That invitation is still open. Even for those of us who spent years curating ourselves into exhaustion.
Especially for us.
And it’s open for the young people you’re watching right now, even if they can’t hear it yet. Your job isn’t to make them hear it. Your job is to be there when they finally get tired enough to listen.
If you want to start somewhere, try this: sometime this week, ask one young person in your life, “What’s been meaningful in your spiritual journey lately?” And then just listen. Don’t correct. Don’t redirect. Don’t start formulating your response while they’re still talking. Just let them tell you what’s real for them right now.
That’s it. One question. One conversation. See what opens.
You don’t have to have this figured out. None of us do. But you can be present. And sometimes that’s exactly what someone needs before they’re ready for anything else.
