Praying to Our Screens

From a distance, it looks as though people are praying.

Their heads are bowed solemnly, their hands folded before them. But then I notice the phone. They are not praying—just looking at their screens.

Since the arrival of the smartphone, rates of mental illness have risen sharply: depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide, especially among the young. As Jonathan Haidt documents in The Anxious Generation, something fundamental has shifted in the psychic architecture of modern life. Our attention has been captured, our inner lives fragmented, and our sense of self quietly distorted.

This is where the philosopher Byung-Chul Han becomes indispensable. “The narcissistic-depressive subject hears only the echo of itself,” Han writes in his book In the Swarm. “Social media such as Twitter and Facebook intensify this development. They are narcissistic media.”

A Narcissistic Age

We live in a narcissistic age. And like Narcissus himself, many drown. Some burn out; others fall into depression. According to Han, depression is “a narcissistic illness.” Byung-Chul Han was born in South Korea in 1959 but moved to Germany as a young man to study metallurgy. This choice, however, was a smoke screen—an excuse to leave home. In reality, he abandoned metallurgy and began an entirely different path: philosophy. At the time, he could neither speak nor read German. Nevertheless, today he is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the Universität der Künste in Berlin.

Han achieved his commercial breakthrough in 2010 with The Burnout Society. As the title suggests, something in our age is deeply exhausting. Since then, he has published more than 10 books, including The Transparency Society, which has been translated into several languages. Most of Han’s works are short, sharply written volumes offering incisive readings of contemporary life. His philosophical inspirations include Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Arendt, Foucault, Barthes, and Blanchot—thinkers he applies not to abstract systems, but to everyday phenomena: the internet, information fatigue, the tyranny of positivity, existential exhaustion, destructive narcissism, transparency, communication, power, psychopolitics, and more.

The Swarm

All these themes converge in In the Swarm, which focuses primarily on the internet’s constant swarm of information, images, and “likes,” and how this affects the way we think and feel. “Digital communication generally abolishes all distances,” Han writes. He is not referring only to physical distance—such as when I communicate with a friend in Berlin—but also to mental distance. The absence of distance blurs the distinction between the public and the private. The private sphere—the place where I am not an object—disappears. Everything becomes an object in the digital swarm.

Anonymity slowly evaporates. And with it, respect disappears, which presupposes a certain degree of anonymity. Some might object that they are not anonymous, but part of a network of friends. Perhaps. But according to Han, such virtual relationships never develop into a genuine “we.” We remain narcissistic islands. The internet operates in the now, now, now. It promotes constant, faster communication, without depth. It invites us to create a profile, which we then endlessly optimize. The more likes or retweets, the better. We are continuously profiling ourselves, like dogs in heat.

This endless struggle to become someone generates “a compulsion toward performance, self-optimization, and self-exploitation… More freedom thus means more coercion,” as Han puts it. This is one of the great paradoxes of our time, since freedom and coercion have traditionally been seen as opposites. Yet the fact remains: “The achievement-oriented subject of today is both perpetrator and victim at once.” Instead of Marx’s idea of class exploitation, we increasingly exploit ourselves. This is more efficient because we do so under the illusion of freedom. “The new human being performs rather than acts. It only wants to play and enjoy.”

Spiritual Diminishment

The digital swarm does not merely undermine our naïve assumption of freedom—it makes us spiritually smaller. When nothing is selected, when everything is consumed, produced, and distributed simultaneously, the exclusive disappears. Language becomes flatter and flatter. Either thumbs up or thumbs down. A smiley face or five. The demand for transparency minimizes confidentiality. Complete transparency makes politicians and decision-makers less courageous. What matters is gathering likes—here and now—not changing the world. Those who place great faith in the internet’s democratic potential may lose some of their optimism after reading Han. For him, the internet is saturated with meaningless noise. “The medium of the spirit is silence,” he reminds us. In other words: There might be nothing spiritual on the internet, no real, unfiltered contact.

The moral is clear: the internet makes us stupider, not smarter—despite the false enchantment of smartphones. Digital communication distracts. It is additive, not narrative. It does not seek to explain how things are connected or why one thing is more likely than another. Instead, it counts: followers, friends, likes, retweets.

The internet gives us access to information, but it does not promote understanding. All genuine understanding is connected to something painful, something negative. In an age intoxicated by positivity, understanding becomes increasingly impossible. This does not mean that people must collapse under stress to realize what matters in life. But acquiring knowledge—genuine insight—requires courage, time, and often painful effort. If you doubt this, try reading Kierkegaard. Or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

Attention Essential Reads

How Can We Break Echo Chambers at Scale?

Why Analog Hobbies Are the New Self-Care Trend

A Quiet Resistance

I can only recommend Han. In In the Swarm, inspiration sparks critical thinking, but it also offers a form of release. It suggests that resistance is possible—resistance to a culture that increasingly reduces us to smiling, slightly dim consumers. Although the book is short, I recommend reading it slowly, in small portions. Test Han’s ideas. Argue with him. At one point, he writes: “It is not ‘love of one’s neighbor,’ but narcissism that governs digital communication.” How many likes would you give that sentence?