Talking to the Refrigerator: Adventures in Not-Doing

Giving up tech for a day and remembering that rest is not a life hack

Bus/Busy. Credit: Author.

Dear Designer,

I am training for a half marathon, my first, and last week, I came down with a bad cold of some sort. Not the ‘vid or the flu, but a renegade little virus that took me down for the count for a few days. I didn’t have the koyekh, a word in Yiddish that of course sounds just like what it is (hard energy), to put together a longer essay.

However, I did spend Saturday not being online, save for an occasional check of time and weather.

Post-pandemic, this was often called a digital sabbath, but, for me, it’s actually just a Sabbath. For Jews, the day comes with the commandment not to work, not to shop, not to drive, and not to carry around objects. Moreover, it is explained that are we not to “create”.

So, two things.

We should see these old, archaic, religious observances, rites and rituals not as rarified, pre-technological, discrete phenomena but as behaviours that legitimately held important sway for people and cultures for thousands of years. We’ve somehow taken the various schticks out of spiritual practices and upended them into modern-day conveniences, figuring that everything else is dross.

I recall reading Tiffany Shlain’s book 24/6 a few years ago, taking us on a “journey through time and technology, introducing a strategy for flourishing in our 24/7 world.” I also recall enjoying it and then forgetting everything she said the next week.

Without deep ritual, without real intent, without reliable milestones and markers, without an embodied practice, most technical innovations, including giving up on technical innovations, is bubkes (Yiddish word for sheep droppings). Remember life hacks? Getting up at 5 am, greying out your phone, doing HIIT workouts — let’s face it, we know they are gimmicks that get us to grey out what our world really looks like.

From now on, when there is a modern qualifier on a given behaviour, I am going to consider doing the behaviour alone. For instance:

Digital sabbath —> Sabbath

Multi-tasking —> Tasking

Daily journaling —> Journaling

Second, short digital detoxes are hard. By 3 pm, I was having a nap. By 4 pm, I was staring at my home screen. By 5 pm, I was starting to chew my wrists a little. By 6 pm, I was hoping that a friend would call me out of the blue. By 7 pm, I was looking for a reason to spend 8 minutes in front of the fridge.

I spent Saturday socializing, walking, reading, sleeping and, well, eating. Not looking at my phone or computer for a day made me feel a bit more like a person by 7:08 pm. I felt much less anxious, except towards those last few hours. And I slept well for the first time in a long time.

Give it a shot, dear designer — not a digital sabbath per se, but a real rest per me!

Yours,

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Image of the Week

U.S. Airmail stamp: Inverted Jenny Air Mail Issue of 1918, 24c. Credit: Wikimedia

Nerd that I was and am, I used to collect stamps. Lots of them. I recently got rid of my entire postage stamp collection. I had bought nearly every U.S. commemorative stamp edition between 1974 and 1998. Hundreds of stamps, neatly mounted in specially designed editions. Do you know much I got for them? $400. Canadian. These stamps are beautiful objects — but they also take up a lot of space, which I simply don’t have anymore. Why did I really get rid of them? Because I wanted to fly differently. The above stamp, the Inverted Jenny, is perhaps the most famous of all U.S. stamps — an error of great beauty. Only one pane of 100 inverted stamps were found, making a single stamp worth about $2 million. I am pretty sure I did not have one in my collection.

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Quote of the Month

I have this anti-commercialism about me — I work with clients and get involved with their commercial needs, but it plays against my grain when it comes to my own situation. I'm not into style; I'm against style.

~ Frank Gehry

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