Notes on a Digital Sabbath
An act of cultural appropriation!
Today, it’s a truism to say that the digital world is killing people’s souls. Note: this isn’t a neo-Luddite manifesto advocating retreating to caves or bunkers, as some billionaire techies have suggested, nor is it religious trolling. I’m merely stating the obvious and suggesting a tried-and-true method of recovery: the Sabbath.
Like everyone else, I’m addicted to feeds. I love my Wim Hof and Down Dog apps — podcasts are a huge part of my education. I scroll the newsfeeds and social media like a junkie looking for a fix. I’m keenly aware of the irony of writing this. (Wim Hof, for example, promotes primitivism and naturalism on an app!) We’re in the Matrix, and there’s no way out.
What I’m suggesting should also be a truism by now: We need protocols for screen engagement more than ever. And unless we are monks, yogis, or Orthodox Jews, we must create those protocols ourselves. To begin with, we need to admit the truth: confess our intense screen addiction, which is universal. We need to notice the all-pervasive anxiety of the digital realm and see how it destroys our libidinous nature. It’s not just that 20 per cent of internet traffic is porn and that nobody is having real sex any more: it’s that it’s ALL porn, in one way or another, even if it’s about baby seals and butterflies.
I’m not a reactionary traditionalist (or the village atheist), but there is wisdom in the Sabbath, whether you are religious or not. It is the original protocol for reset. Do it on Tuesday if you like, but do it! You will thank me. If you don’t have religious festivals or protocols, make your own. Without religious festivals and ethical protocols, what’s left? Machines, moloch, culture war and the war of all against all. The human soul of the 21st century is both the most degraded and the most privileged in history.
The experiment:
I’m writing this article after a long sabbatical from blogging. I stopped wanting to comment on the culture. I wanted to go inside. But no matter how much I tried, I kept getting drawn in. To make a long story short, my wife and I decided to stop using screens and engaging with communication devices every Saturday. And the results have been radical—for us, at least.
Here is what happens on a digital sabbath day. Firstly, the nervous system begins to repair itself. The senses reawaken from slumber. The world outside becomes present once more. The silence of God — if you believe in such a thing — begins to make itself known. And everything is more vivid and real. Animals start to make show themselves; a cat slinks by. Everyday activities — cooking, cleaning, eating — take on more value.
Perhaps the most radical thing I noticed was that my relationship with my kids improved instantly — there was more eye contact, laughter, and sincerity between us. Difficult conversations that have been avoided arose and were navigated with intelligence and empathy. Kids are suffering today in a way that was unimaginable to us in the latter half of the twentieth century. Not from war or privation but from excess and nothingness.
Last Saturday, I taught my daughter to tune a guitar without an app; we used our memory to recall the Leonard Cohen songs we like to sing together. My memory is active again and is no longer outsourced. My daughter is a little bored without her phone, of course — there is a process of detox. But she makes an effort to go out and see her friend instead of chatting online as they usually do.
Boredom is actually a good thing for gestation and creativity, I point out to her. Have the courage to be bored for once, and you will find that there is pleasure in things just as they are, with nothing added. She doesn’t hear me now, but she might think of this in the future. The boredom of a world without constant titillation is actually more interesting than the excess of phony titillation. The real orgy is reality itself.
Years ago, Neil Postman wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. The great media guru also Marshall McLuhan suggested that we should take digital fasts. That was in the age of radio and television — before the global village and global Moloch had really gone into effect. Imagine what these theorists would see today! Have we understood the effects of overheated media as McLuhan said we should?
This matters more to our children than it does for us. Are we really going to offer our children to the digital Moloch, or shouldn’t we at least educate them and show them a world without the constant anxiety of social media? Should we not teach them the horrors of the simulacrum and the need to go outside sometimes?
Attention is our most valuable resource: we are what we pay attention to. What are we paying attention to? That should be the number one question for all of us. The “terror of the situation,” as Gurdjieff called it, should be obvious then, and we would probably die of horror if we could look into the soul of the average person in the digital age. No wonder we are so obsessed with safety and protection these days. Our souls are all in danger.
Of course, there is some sort of denial of humanity in every epoch, and I have no nostalgia for a previous age. This is our particular denial of humanity — it is our Moloch. We still make human sacrifices, but only in a seemingly very civilized manner. We have mastered Skinner’s box and intermittent positive reinforcement; and yet we are so fucking depressed, with all our soma, with all our various forms of masturbation. As Leonard Cohen pointed out in his song manifesto, everybody knows this is true.
Still, I’m not suggesting we should make every day a Sabbath. We have to confront the world as it is. We have to try to understand both the privilege and the horror of the present age.
The original Sabbath was created so that people could rest from hard work and renew their relationship with reality and each other (or the Divine, if you like). It still serves the same function. However, a digital Sabbath is not a reprieve from toil. It is from soma, from the waters of forgetfulness. Try it, no matter what your religion is. It will show you a bit of the real, if you can take it.
