Can We Reform Our Souls by Going Analog?

ACROSS SOCIAL MEDIA you’ll find sped-up videos of people sitting and doing nothing. They settle in alone, with no phones, and simply sit with their thoughts. The figures in these videos are trying to retrain their attention spans. After years of mindlessly scrolling through social media, they now film themselves, clasping their hands, tapping their thumbs, closing their eyes.

In The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, author and political commentator Chris Hayes argues that technology firms are deliberately chipping away at our ability to focus. He details how our attention spans and value systems have been reoriented and commodified for financial gain. Attention “is the foundation for nearly all we do,” he writes, “from the relationships we build to the way we act as workers, consumers, and citizens.”

Our attention is precious and we need to protect it, to draw it close. As inherently curious individuals, the deep dive of doom-scrolling harms us. It cuts to the deepest part of us, the inquisitive part, which can’t contend with the infinite content overload of social media.

This trend of sitting with time reveals a deep hunger for something more than the blue light of our screens can offer. Beyond training their attention spans, the people who sit quietly with their thoughts have unintentionally brought back for themselves the practice of meditation.

French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil understood the deeper roots of attention. She believed that the objects of our attention shape what we love. Our compassion and encounters with the divine grow around our awareness. For Weil, attention was not merely a cognitive skill but a moral and spiritual discipline. In Waiting for God, her seminal collection of essays and letters, she affirms this belief: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.”

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As a social media editor at the Global Sisters Report, most of my day is spent online. I’m a silent observer of the rise and fall of microtrends. I’m also a witness to the digital fatigue that plagues social media users. It’s an honor to share stories about Catholic religious sisters’ ministries in the world from my corner of Instagram. It’s also easy to feel like the rage bait, AI, and bots starting fights in the comment section have the final say.

I know intimately the ways “we are built and formed by attention; destroyed by neglect,” as Hayes puts it.

Amid doomscrolling and discerning whether or not a video was made with artificial intelligence, a quiet voice echoes inside: It isn’t supposed to be this way.

In the age of high technological innovation, a group of individuals is quietly taking back their autonomy by going analog.

Simply put, going analog is about collecting physical media and shifting your understanding of the purpose of technology. Be it gardening, knitting on your commute, beefing up your vinyl record collection, snagging a few DVDs from the $5 section at Barnes & Noble, or checking out the public library for the first time since middle school, going analog is all about rejecting a media-saturated landscape and reorienting your life away from a dependence on digital technology and toward physical media and activities.

In 2025, cookbook sales increased by 80% and demand for CD players rose by 74%. This turn toward physical media is a gentle response to the ubiquity of social media and artificial intelligence. Where digital fatigue sets in, physical media offers an alternative.

Going analog doesn’t mean completely severing your use of technology. It means rebuking technology as a way of life and instead viewing it as a tool. This harkens back to the 1990s and early 2000s, when the internet was a location, not an all-encompassing cultural compass. We had computer rooms in our homes, with a single monitor on the desk. Many people are swapping out their iPhones for the “dumb phones” of this era, back when a phone could text and call, and not much else.

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”

Going analog also erases the fatigue that comes with subscribing to multiple streaming platforms and somehow still not finding anything to watch due to constantly shifting catalogs and algorithms telling you what to consume.

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Seven years ago, on a panel with the Child Mind Institute to discuss his film Eighth Grade, comedian Bo Burnham warned that tech companies are “now trying to colonize every minute of your life.”

He prophetically described the relationship that future generations will have with phones: “By the time your kid gets to that age, a phone is a completely different thing spiritually,” he said. “These things are interacting with our souls.”

Theologically, going analog helps to shift back to a space where slowness and creativity can direct us to God. I look to Weil for instructions.

The French mystic wrote, “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.” I won’t find these most precious gifts by scrolling through social media, but through intentional contemplative practices that have shaped Christians for centuries. During centering prayer, which is inspired by Christian mystic writings and the monastic practice of lectio divina, I sit quietly in God’s presence, gently releasing thoughts, distractions, and internal commentary as they arise. By using a word or phrase, I’m able to sink into a rhythm, both with my thoughts and with my Creator. My attention awakens to God within me.

In our digital age, “We flee from any moment of time in which our minds might be empty, but in so doing find the reward we seek—to be absorbed, to have our attention fully occupied—harder and harder and harder to find,” Hayes writes.

Going analog and engaging in contemplative practices pursue a different sort of reward. I’m not just trying to stay unplugged at dinner parties or watch a movie without checking Instagram—I’m reclaiming my soul. Our affliction in the face of the infinite scroll reveals our hunger for something more sustaining. Emptiness becomes not a state of being to avoid but a discipline to achieve. This emptiness gives way to the cosmic and unknowable. Here, God patiently waits for us to linger with emptiness, to make room.

Every person who clears out their digital and physical headspace will find something different, and that’s kind of the point.

“Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it,” as Weil writes.

Theologically, going analog helps me shift back to a space where slowness and creativity can direct me to God, where profound spiritual experiences can happen when I browse the used bookstore or the bins of a local Goodwill, or in the shelves of my local library. It’s a little inconvenient, it requires some creativity and breaking old habits, but I’m rediscovering myself. Here I can begin again.