Digital Natives Need Willingness, Not Willpower: How Contemplative Psychology Could Rewire Spiritual Care

A quietly provocative paper published in the journal Pastoral Psychology argues that the spiritual struggles of young people raised on smartphones should not be treated primarily as behavioral problems at all. Instead, Joo Hyung Lee of Yonsei University proposes that the restless, compulsive, endlessly curated digital lives of so-called digital natives are best understood as a technologically amplified version of an old spiritual ailment: what the psychiatrist and contemplative writer Gerald G. May called “willfulness.” The paper, published on 26 September 2026, builds a bridge between forty-year-old contemplative psychology and the newest debates about attention, artificial intelligence, and the formation of the self.

May, who died in 2005 and spent much of his career at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, drew a famous distinction in his 1982 book Will and Spirit between two postures of the human will. Willfulness, in his account, is the ego’s insistence on consenting to reality only on its own terms, a posture of control that resists surrender. Willingness is its opposite: an unforced, open consent to what is, including the presence of God, other people, and one’s own inner life. May, who also wrote influentially about addiction and grace, saw willfulness not as simple defiance but as a deep structure of attachment and avoidance. Lee’s central move is to argue that digital environments do not merely distract young people; they actively train willfulness, making the ego’s demand for control feel effortless and natural.

The article coins the term “digital willfulness” to name this pattern. Drawing on what Lee calls pastoral thick description, an approach indebted to anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s method of interpreting cultures from within, the paper describes three reinforcing mechanisms. First, digital environments encourage affect regulation through immediate mediation: uncomfortable feelings are met not by sitting with them but by opening an app, scrolling, gaming, or messaging until the emotion is buffered. Second, platforms reward self-curation on strictly egoic terms, since profiles, feeds, and algorithmic mirrors invite users to present and even perceive themselves only as they wish to be seen. Third, and most theologically significant, digital life trains avoidance of unmediated presence before God, self, and others, because every moment of silence, boredom, or face-to-face exposure can be escaped with a screen.

The technical vocabulary Lee deploys here comes from several converging literatures. Emotion-regulation research, notably the work summarized by psychologist James Gross, distinguishes strategies that modify an emotional situation from strategies that avoid it altogether, and experiential avoidance has long been implicated in behavioral disorders by acceptance and commitment therapy researchers such as Steven Hayes and colleagues. The digital world, Lee suggests, industrializes avoidance. The paper also situates itself amid the heated empirical debate over social media and youth mental health, citing systematic reviews linking heavy use to depression, anxiety, and disturbed sleep, cohort studies connecting online experience to loneliness among young adults, and high-profile interventions from the American Psychological Association and the U.S. Surgeon General. Lee is careful, however, not to reduce the problem to screen-time arithmetic; the point is formational, not merely quantitative.

That formational framing draws on a lineage of pastoral theology that treats digital technology as an environment shaping desire, not just a tool. Scholars such as Kylie Agnew-Bingaman have argued that neuroplasticity itself makes contemplative practice pastorally relevant, since repeated practices physically reshape attentional circuits, while James K. A. Smith’s account of habit and liturgy argues that humans are formed by what they repeatedly love. Sherry Turkle’s studies of conversation and solitude, Shoshana Zuboff’s analysis of the attention economy, and Tristan Harris’s critiques of platform design all appear in the paper’s evidentiary spine. What these sources share, in Lee’s reading, is the insight that digital systems are not neutral containers of content; they are training regimes for the will.

Against this diagnosis, Lee proposes willingness as the central aim of spiritual formation in the digital age, and he argues that two classical practices together form what he calls a pastoral ecology of counter-formation. The first is Centering Prayer, the silent, wordless prayer form renewed by Trappist monks Thomas Keating, M. Basil Pennington, and William Meninger from sources such as The Cloud of Unknowing. In Centering Prayer, a practitioner settles into silence, consents to God’s presence, and when thoughts arise, gently returns to a sacred word. Lee reads the practice technically: it retrains attention, decouples affective reactivity from immediate soothing, and rehearses embodied consent, the very capacity that digital willfulness erodes. Empirical work gives the proposal some grounding, including a pilot study by Andres Eros and Thomas Plante on Centering Prayer and well-being in undergraduates, an intervention study by Johannes Rohde and colleagues on contemplative practice and flourishing, and earlier process research by Jason Ferguson and colleagues on prayer and everyday stress.

The second practice is spiritual direction, the ancient accompaniment described by May himself in Care of Mind, Care of Spirit and by William Barry and William Connolly. Where Centering Prayer works on attention from the inside, Lee argues, spiritual direction provides relational containment and theological discernment from the outside: a regular, unhurried, human relationship in which a digitally saturated young adult can narrate experience, notice patterns of avoidance, and interpret them theologically rather than morally. The pairing matters because neither practice alone suffices; silent prayer without discernment can become private technique, and conversation without contemplative depth can dissolve into advice. Together, Lee contends, they counter-form the will that platforms have colonized.

A fictionalized composite vignette, a recognized method in pastoral theology as practiced by researchers such as Mary Clark Moschella, illustrates the movement from digital willfulness toward willingness in a plausible pastoral case. Lee also extends the argument into territory where technology and theology collide most dramatically: the discourse of “techno sapiens” and the suggestion, surfacing in works by Yuval Noah Harari, Max Tegmark, and others, that artificial intelligence might function as a kind of deity. Recent contributions from the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the theologian Noreen Herzfeld, Marius Dorobantu, and Benjamin Singler have explored whether AI can bear or mediate the divine. Lee responds by defining re-formation as the graced redirection of an ongoing formation process, and by interpreting willingness as an enacted expression of a relational imago Dei, the image of God understood not as a capacity that machines might replicate but as a mode of relation that only creatures capable of consent can live.

The paper’s constructive method means it advances proposals rather than testable hypotheses, and readers expecting new survey data will not find them; the author notes that no datasets were generated or analyzed. Yet the essay lands at a moment when both church and clinic are searching for language beyond the addiction frame. By relocating the problem from behavior to the will, Lee offers pastoral caregivers a non-shaming diagnosis: digital natives are not simply broken or addicted, but trained into a posture of control that contemplative practice can patiently unlearn. Whether the prescription of silence, consent, and unhurried spiritual friendship can compete with an economy engineered to capture attention remains the open question, and it is precisely the one this paper is designed to provoke.

Subject of Research: Gerald May's contemplative psychology applied to pastoral and spiritual care of digital natives

Article Title: From Digital Willfulness to Willingness: Gerald May’s Contemplative Psychology for Pastoral and Spiritual Care of Digital Natives

Article References: Lee, J. H. (2026). From Digital Willfulness to Willingness: Gerald May’s Contemplative Psychology for Pastoral and Spiritual Care of Digital Natives. Pastoral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01378-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01378-9

Keywords: pastoral psychology, digital natives, Gerald May, willfulness, willingness, Centering Prayer, spiritual direction, spiritual formation, digital willfulness, contemplative practice, imago Dei, attention economy