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

The paper, titled “Ecological traps as a failure mode of niche construction: A diagnostic for the polycrisis,” sits at the intersection of two well-established bodies of theory that have rarely been fused so explicitly. Ecological trap theory, developed through foundational work by researchers such as Pulliam on source and sink populations, Schlaepfer and colleagues on evolutionary traps, and Robertson and Hutto’s diagnostic framework, describes situations in which organisms prefer habitats or resources based on environmental cues that no longer predict actual outcomes. Niche construction theory, championed by F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin Laland and Marcus Feldman, describes how organisms actively modify their own environments, thereby altering the selection pressures that act back on them. Parsons’ central insight is that when these two processes combine, they can produce a distinctive and dangerous category of failure: the self-induced trap.

A self-induced trap arises when an organism’s own environment-modifying activity decouples the cues it uses for decision-making from the outcomes those decisions actually produce. In most cases, such traps should be rare and short-lived, and the paper is explicit about why. Natural selection normally provides a built-in correction mechanism: if a constructor’s modifications degrade its own viability, the costs rebound on the constructor, selection acts against the maladaptive construction, and the behavior is eliminated. A beaver that dams itself into a dried-out pond does not found a dynasty. The feedback loop between action and consequence is what keeps niche construction, over evolutionary time, broadly adaptive.

The analytical heart of the paper is a taxonomy of the conditions under which that corrective feedback fails. Traps persist, Parsons argues, when the costs of construction escape the correction mechanism in one of three ways. They can be delayed in time, so that the consequences of today’s actions arrive only after the behavior has become entrenched. They can be displaced onto others, or onto other geographies, so that the actors generating the costs are not the actors paying them. Or they can be hidden below thresholds, accumulating invisibly until a system crosses a tipping point, in the manner described by the literature on catastrophic regime shifts in ecosystems. Each of these escape routes severs the link between cause and consequence that selection requires in order to do its corrective work.

Humans, the paper contends, are distinctive not merely in the scale of their niche construction, which has now produced a technosphere whose mass exceeds all living biomass on Earth, but in the scope of what they construct. Human construction extends to the information environment itself. We build not only the material conditions that degrade our collective outcomes, from fossil-fuel infrastructure to industrial agriculture, but also the signal environment through which those outcomes would need to be detected in order for corrective feedback to operate. This is the paper’s most striking conceptual move: the argument that modern societies inhabit a stacked trap, in which one layer of construction generates the damage while a second layer blocks or distorts the feedback that would otherwise register the damage.

The stacked trap has a precise structure. On one side stands a proxy reward system that actively reinforces engagement with the very behaviors driving the damage. The paper draws on empirical work showing that emotionally charged and moralized content spreads fastest on social networks, that out-group animosity drives engagement, and that false news travels further and faster than true news online. Attention economics, as documented in scholarship on surveillance capitalism and the attention merchants, ensures that the signals reaching most people are optimized for engagement rather than accuracy. On the other side, the viability feedback, the slow, diffuse signals that planetary systems are degrading, is blocked, diluted or drowned out. The result is a perceptual mechanism that sustains lock-in: people respond rationally to the cues their constructed environment supplies, while the cues that would reveal the true consequences are systematically suppressed or displaced.

This framing gives the polycrisis, the term used by an international research group led by scholars including Thomas Homer-Dixon and Johan Rockström to describe the causal entanglement of global crises, a concrete perceptual mechanism. Previous work on Anthropocene traps by Søgaard Jørgensen and colleagues catalogued the ways in which crisis dynamics become self-reinforcing, from infrastructure lock-in to social-ecological traps documented in historical case studies. What Parsons adds is a diagnosis of why these traps are so stable: not because humans are irrational, but because the information environment has been constructed in a way that makes the damaging choices appear locally and immediately rewarding while rendering the costs invisible, delayed or displaced. The trap is not primarily a failure of willpower or knowledge; it is a failure of feedback integrity.

The diagnostic implications are considerable. If the polycrisis is sustained by broken cue–outcome relationships, then effective interventions are those that repair those relationships at the environmental level rather than at the level of individual exhortation. That means restructuring the signal environment so that viability feedback becomes salient, immediate and hard to displace: carbon pricing that makes delayed costs present, disclosure regimes that un-hide threshold dynamics, platform designs that stop amplifying proxy rewards at the expense of accurate signals. It also means recognizing that simply providing more information is insufficient when the surrounding architecture of attention is engineered to filter it out. The paper’s framework suggests that campaigns targeting individual behavior change will underperform relative to interventions that alter which cues are available and which consequences are felt by the actors who generate them.

The perspective also reframes older ideas in the literature. Social traps, described by Platt in 1973 and developed by Costanza in the context of environmental policy, and the tragedy of the commons, analyzed through the lens of evolutionary biology by Rankin and colleagues, have long described situations in which individually rational choices produce collectively ruinous outcomes. The evolutionary mismatch hypothesis, advanced by Li, van Vugt and Colarelli, explains why Stone Age minds struggle with modern environments. Parsons’ contribution is to unify these strands under the niche construction framework and to identify the specific failure mode, self-induced decoupling of cues from outcomes, that distinguishes the human predicament from ordinary maladaptation. Historical scholarship on societal collapse and on the manufacture of doubt around tobacco and climate science supplies the human evidence base for the mechanism.

Whether the framework proves productive will depend on whether researchers can operationalize it: measuring feedback integrity in specific social-ecological systems, identifying which costs are delayed, displaced or sub-threshold, and testing whether interventions that repair cue–outcome relationships outperform those that do not. But as a diagnostic, the paper offers something the sustainability debate has lacked: a single conceptual lens that connects a mayfly’s fatal attraction to asphalt, the attention economy’s amplification of outrage, and the planetary lock-in of the polycrisis. The uncomfortable implication is that humanity is not trapped by its environment. Humanity is trapped by environments of its own making, including the environment of signals through which it would otherwise have seen the trap coming.

Subject of Research: Self-induced ecological traps arising from human niche construction as a diagnostic mechanism for the global polycrisis

Article Title: Ecological traps as a failure mode of niche construction: A diagnostic for the polycrisis

Article References: Parsons, S. A. (2026). Ecological traps as a failure mode of niche construction: A diagnostic for the polycrisis. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02475-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02475-y

Keywords: ecological traps, niche construction, polycrisis, Anthropocene, feedback integrity, information environment, evolutionary traps, social traps, attention economy, sustainability, cue-outcome decoupling, lock-in