Why Your 'Digital Shabbat' Will Fail

When mainstream society wants to create a tool for resisting the creep of technology into daily life, it often simply appropriates religious traditions. One frequently cited spiritual "cure" is Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest during which Orthodox Jews like myself refrain from using anything powered by electricity, including computers, phones, and TVs (we also don't travel, cook, or tear toilet paper). It's not hard to see why social media-weary folks view the concept as a tantalizing panacea for the Instagram-ization of life; in the past decade, so many essays have been published proclaiming Shabbat as the answer -- not only to tech saturation but to work-life balance issues and the mental fraying caused by both -- that they nearly comprise their own subgenre. Here's Andrew Sullivan, in his 2016 New York Magazine essay "My Distraction Sickness": "We can, if we want, re-create a digital Sabbath each week -- just one day in which we live for 24 hours without checking our phones." And Samantha Mann, over at Romper: "I've always liked the notion of purposefully slowing down … [so] Why not try a social-media-free Shabbat?"