Babel

Last week, there was a school shooting at a campus not far from where I live. It was a school I once considered for my four-year-old’s preschool. I didn’t choose it. But even from the outside, it feels unbearably close. Two children—just eight and ten years old—were killed. Twenty more were injured.

That night, the grief pressed in on me. I thought of the parents who kissed their children goodbye that morning, never imagining that would be the last time. I thought of my own son, and how fragile and unpredictable safety feels. And then, quietly, I began to wonder:

Why are we all so anxious? Why are suicide rates the highest they’ve ever been? Why do mass shootings persist?

My sister recently told me about a book she read on anxiety. She recalled the author claiming that anxiety and suicide rates were “up to 100%.” At first I wasn’t sure if that was accurate, so I went looking. The truth is more complicated—and in some ways more devastating. Over the last decade, youth anxiety and depression rates have more than doubled. Among 10- to 14-year-old girls, suicide rates have risen by more than 130%. For teenage boys, nearly 100%. In 2022, the U.S. recorded the highest number of suicides ever in its history.

So while the exact numbers vary, the trend is undeniable: something is deeply broken.


That night I fell asleep, and I dreamed. In the dream, God whispered to me: “Babel, Katie. The story of Babel.”

In Genesis, the people once spoke a single language. With one voice and one purpose, they built a tower to reach heaven itself. They believed if they could stretch high enough, if they could make themselves mighty enough, they would be like God. But God came down, saw what they were building, and scattered them. He confused their language so they could no longer understand each other. Their hyper-connection was undone.

I woke up thinking: We are Babel.

Through cell phones, through social media, through a constant drip of notifications and updates, we are more connected than any generation before us. We are tethered to a tower of our own making, and we keep building it higher—chasing knowledge, status, affirmation, and control. We scroll through wars and weddings in the same breath. We know every detail of global tragedy within minutes, and every comment our friends or strangers make in response. We carry in our pockets the weight of the world.

And yet, though we are “connected,” we are lonely. Though we have more information than ever, we are more confused. Though our tower stretches higher, our foundations feel shakier than ever.

It is Babel, all over again.

Maybe we were never meant to live with this much input, this much noise. Maybe the human soul cannot bear the constant awareness of everything happening everywhere, all at once. Our nervous systems aren’t designed for a 24-hour flood of breaking news, endless comparisons, and the subtle pressure to always be present online.

The children feel it most sharply. Instead of wide stretches of play, face-to-face friendships, and room to grow, they live inside curated feeds and glowing screens. They are drowning in connection, but starving for presence. And their spirits are telling us what their mouths cannot: this is too much.

The shooting near me, like so many others, is one more echo of Babel’s curse. Violence amplified, fear magnified, anxiety multiplied. Each headline pulls us further into despair. Each ping drags our minds from the people right in front of us. And so we live at a constant hum of unease, searching for peace but unable to find it at the top of this tower.

But maybe—just maybe—there is hope in stepping away.

What if the way forward isn’t to keep building, but to put the phone down? To untether from the noise? To give ourselves permission to not know everything, not respond to everything, not absorb everything?

What if healing begins in quiet places—on walks without earbuds, at tables where phones are left in another room, in eye-to-eye conversations instead of comment threads? What if we learned to embrace limits again, and trusted that our worth doesn’t depend on building higher, scrolling longer, or knowing more?


We are the children of Babel. Not condemned, but confused. Scattered across feeds and timelines, speaking but rarely hearing.
And yet, God whispers still. Not in the noise of the tower, but in the silence at its base. Not in the flood of voices, but in the still small voice that says: “Be still, and know that I am God.”

Maybe the tower needs to fall. Maybe our hyper-connection needs to give way to something smaller, slower, simpler. Maybe what our anxious hearts long for isn’t more—but less.

Not Babel. Belonging.