Your Brain Called - It Wants the Algorithm to Stop Parenting It
Hot take: If every headline, comment section, and stranger yelling into a ring light is shaping your mind, the algorithm may be discipling you more than Jesus is. And unlike Jesus, it mostly wants you anxious, angry, and shopping.
“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—His good, pleasing, and perfect will.” —Romans 12:2
When I was in nail school, I was taught the unofficial commandments of customer service: be professional, ask about the client’s life instead of delivering your own unauthorized TED Talk, and absolutely do not touch finances, politics, or religion with a ten-foot acrylic brush.
Why? Because a happy client might tell one person. An offended client will tell everyone with Wi-Fi, three Facebook groups, and a cousin who “knows the owner” about the injustice they endured while choosing “Ballet Slipper Pink.”
Honestly, that feels like society now. We scroll past the good like it is a terms-and-conditions page, latch onto the worst, and feed it until one bad story becomes a full-grown rage monster with a podcast, merch, and a suspiciously expensive online course. Politics, fear, and hot takes compete for our attention—and apparently we handed them the family streaming password.
But Romans 12:2 gives us another option: stop letting the world hand us the script.
Renewing our minds is not pretending the world is fine while everything burns and we sip iced coffee through a reusable straw. It is refusing to become hateful while confronting what is broken. It is checking our convictions against Scripture before posting them in all caps with seventeen exclamation points. It is asking whether our words sound like Christ—or like we just escaped the comment section wearing spiritual brass knuckles.
And yes, millennials, it is our turn to carry the faith forward. We survived dial-up internet, side parts, skinny jeans, low-rise jeans attempting a comeback, and enough “once-in-a-lifetime” events to earn emotional reward points and a complimentary therapy session. Surely we can learn to pause before reposting outrage from an account called @TruthWarriorPatriotMom1987.
The change we want cannot begin only “out there,” because “out there” is not a magical land populated exclusively by people who are wrong. Rude, honestly. It begins in us: in what we consume, what we repeat, how we treat people, and whether Jesus is truly front and center—or just tagged at the end of our opinions like a reluctant collaborator.
Before you share the chaos, let God renew the mind reacting to it. Your repost can wait thirty seconds. Civilization will probably survive.
