Which Group Do You Belong To?

Are you one-dimensional? Or do you have a thousand personas?

Are you who social media says you are? Do you even get to decide?

I ended my last post with those questions, and I’ve been thinking about them since, because I think they take us somewhere important but uncomfortable.

When you actually get to know someone’s thousand personas, when you’ve done the hard work of vulnerability, of showing up during all the conflict and failure and all the messy in-between things, you realize something that changes the way you see the world.

You realize you’re not in one group with that person. You’re in a thousand groups with them. You overlap in so many different ways, across so many dimensions of who you both are, that the whole concept of “us and them” starts to collapse.

And that’s when you remember something we should have never forgotten: we’re all related anyway.

Through Adam and Eve. Through Noah after the flood when it all started over. No matter what you believe about how we got here, science and Scripture agree on this one. DNA evidence points to a common ancestor. We all come from the same source.

God and science are not at odds on this point. We are one family, and we have been from the beginning.

So why do we keep dividing ourselves into different groups?

Carl Trueman wrote a controversial book called Strange New World that traces something I think about a lot: how we arrived at a culture that defines identity by attributes rather than by wholeness. The elevation of self over community didn’t happen overnight. It’s been building for more than a hundred years, and it’s changed things in ways that would have been unthinkable even a generation ago.

We were never created to be alone. That’s the whole reason God created Eve for Adam. He made us in His image because He desires relationship with us, and to prove the depth of that desire, He went to the extraordinary length of creating a redemptive path that required Him to sacrifice Himself for us. That’s how much He values connection, community, togetherness.

But the spirit of the age says something different. It says you are enough on your own. It says your individual identity, defined by the attributes you choose to emphasize, is more important than the community you belong to. It says the creation is imperfect as it was born and needs to be redefined, reshaped, and sorted into categories that make sense to us rather than to the Creator.

Unfortunately that’s not the liberation we think it is, it’s an attack on the One who made us. Because it says that the thousand personas, the complexity of a whole human being, should be whittled down to the one or two attributes that fit neatly into a group.

Liberal or conservative. Black or white. This group or that group. Pick a side. Stay in your lane. And whatever you do, don’t cross over into their territory, because then you’re a traitor to your group.

I think about how we used to live in actual community, and what we traded it for.

Someone reminded me recently that back in the fifties, the only fences we had were chain-link. They weren’t barriers, they were boundaries you could see through, talk over, lean on while you had a conversation with your neighbor.

There are communities today that are intentionally designed with no rear-entry garages and no privacy fences, because the people who planned them understood something we’ve forgotten: proximity creates relationship. Visibility creates accountability. Being seen by your neighbors is what makes you a neighbor.

I can remember my mom sending me across the street to borrow a cup of sugar. That sounds like a cliché now, but it wasn’t at the time. It was community functioning the way it was designed to function: people needing each other, relying on each other, interacting with each other out of genuine daily necessity.

Then came the convenience store. Then Walmart. Then Amazon. And we stopped needing each other entirely.

When we had blue laws and nothing was open on Sundays, community wasn’t optional. You either had a relationship with your neighbor or you went without your sugar, or your ‘whatever you were out of.’ Convenience killed that. And I don’t think we’ve even begun to understand what we lost.

We traded the thousand personas we’d encounter in a real human relationship for the single-dimensional version of each other that the internet delivers to our screens. We traded the backyard fence for the algorithm. And the algorithm doesn’t want us to know each other. It wants us to sort each other.

Our cerebral cortex is the part of us that most imitates our Creator. It’s where we think creatively, logically, and compassionately. It’s the part of our brain that’s uniquely human.

But social media doesn’t target the cerebral cortex. It targets the brain stem: fight or flight. Emotion. Fear. It keeps hitting those receptors over and over, keeping us in a constant state of looking for an enemy rather than living in the creative, connective part of our mind that was designed to look for community.

My wife Lora experienced this in real time just recently. A former employee of her salon (someone who hadn’t worked there in over two years) was called out by an influencer from California. The influencer accused this former employee of making inappropriate comments about her eleven-year-old son and publicly called him a pedophile. She posted his photo, which still showed his association with the salon because his Instagram hadn’t been updated, and people started attacking Lora’s business. Calls to fire him. One-star reviews and even threats even though he hadn’t worked there in years.

Lora reached out to the influencer and explained the situation. She asked her, respectfully, to stop referencing the salon because there was no association. The influencer refused and said Lora should never have employed him in the first place. She gave the salon a one-star review on Google and refused to take it down even though she had never set foot in the salon. She did it because she was angry at someone who used to work there, and the dopamine hit of creating chaos was more satisfying than the truth.

That’s social media working exactly as designed. To create tribalism, sorting people into camps and giving someone a sense of righteous power by tearing down a stranger’s livelihood over an association that no longer existed.

Lora had to make the hardest choice a person can make in that situation: she had to let it go and refuse to feed it, because engaging would only create more fuel for a machine that runs on outrage.

That takes a kind of discipline that most people don’t understand until they’ve been in that position.

The irony in all of this is that we want community. Desperately. The loneliness epidemic isn’t a mystery. We’re starving for real connection, real relationship, real knowledge of each other’s thousand personas. But we’re going about it in the worst possible way.

Social media promises understanding and delivers the shallowest possible version of every person you encounter. Real belonging requires vulnerability, which requires letting people see more than one version of you. It requires the terrifying act of saying, “I don’t have this figured out, and I need you, and I’m willing to let you see the parts of me that I’m not proud of.”

That’s the opposite of what social media encourages. But it’s the only thing that actually works.

You have a thousand personas. So does the person you’ve decided is your enemy. So does your neighbor, your coworker, your spouse, and the stranger whose post just made your blood pressure spike.

The question isn’t which group you’re in, it’s whether you’re willing to step out of the group long enough to see the whole person standing in front of you, and to let them see the whole person standing in front of them. Because we’re all related anyway. And the sooner we remember that, the sooner we stop building fences we can’t see through.