Why Your "Digital Shabbat" Will Fail

Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work. The inventors of the Sabbath understood that it was a much more complicated undertaking. You cannot downshift casually and easily, the way you might slip into bed at the end of a long day. As the Cat in the Hat says, “It is fun to have fun but you have to know how.”... See more

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described the weekly practice of Jews abstaining from work, Shabbat, as “a sanctuary in time.” I love the idea of building infrastructure around sacred time as one might build infrastructure around sacred space. Protecting nonwork time is particularly important because knowledge work can easily expand like a gas to fill... See more

It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future. Sometimes this pressure takes the form of the explicit argument that you ought to think of your leisure hours as an opportunity to become a better worker (“Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,” reads the hea... See more