Renegotiating our relationship with technology

on returning back to ourselves

Last weekend, for 24 hours, a group of us collectively put our technology down. No phones, no laptops, no internet — just hand drawn maps, pre-committed plans, and a whole lot of spaciousness.

In a world that feels devoid of community rituals and far too much stimulation, I’ve felt a pull to host a tech sabbath for some time now. But, it never seemed like a good time — too much to do on Saturdays, a string of travel plans, friends traveling the weekends we were in town.

Finally, a good enough weekend rolled around and, with that, a Partiful was made, friends were invited, and the planning began.

I’ve always felt grateful to have grown up in a generation that had the privilege of coming of age alongside our most ubiquitous modern technologies. We got to know the world around us intimately before being entrusted with mobile phones and laptops.

As we matured and our social groups expanded, so did the technology that enabled us. In the early days, social media and smart phones were striving to keep pace with our progression, not laying in wait and engineered to take advantage of our natural inclination towards dopamine hits.

We straddled two worlds: one where we created memories playing outside with friends like every other generation before us and another where we (im)patiently waited for the dial-up to load so we could log onto AIM, only to get kicked off a few minutes later because our parents needed to make a phone call.

It makes the experience of practicing tech sabbath that much more nostalgic. Rather than craft a new construct, it allows us to tap into our childlike wonder and visit the versions of ourselves that called friends on their home phones, read paperback books, ran around outside to our heart’s content with no idea what time it was, and relied on our friends to keep their word in showing up when they said they would.

the cultivation of community rituals

Like many things in life, my husband, Ryan, and I could have just done the sabbath on our own, but we felt drawn to share the experience in community with others. We wanted to capture the magic of knowing that for 24 hours, a group of us were up against the world, renegotiating our relationship with technology.

What might it look like to cultivate a ritual around slowing down and basking in the spaciousness of time with others? What might life feel like if we briefly transported ourselves back to the days of our youth when we lived and flourished under the inconveniences and constraints of the late 20th and early 21st century? What might emerge from within us when we disconnect from what keeps us on all week?

These questions are precisely what we intended to grapple with in the initiation of a community tech sabbath. Borrowing elements of the Sabbath from Judaism and Christianity, we put down our tech from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday and shifted our energy to observing rest, returning to our bodies, and becoming more human after the work week.

getting lost to build self-reliance

On Friday evening, we hosted a dinner and a shutdown ritual.

During the opening circle, one of our friends shared that his intention for the 24 hours was to remind himself what it feels like to have a series of fully formed thoughts with no input from the external world.

The comment spurred a discussion around the insidious nature of technology and its subtle nudges towards outsourcing any sense of intuition or knowledge that we must cultivate in its absence.

Take our reliance on directions as an example: for many of us, it’s rare to be able to navigate cross-town purely by instinct. Even when we’re traveling to places we’ve visited before, there’s an automatic impulse to plug the location into Maps and outsource the navigation to an app.

As Ryan and I drove to our local Target the next day, we found ourselves more present than usual, clocking landmarks and storefronts that we rarely pay attention to when we’re intently focused on Google telling us where to go.

Sometimes, we follow the most efficient route for good reason. Other times, in moments when we have time to spare, what if we allowed ourselves to form an opinion on where we are and where we’re going? What if we allowed ourselves to get lost and find our way back?

This notion that we can simply plug in and tune out highlights a broader, societal issue we face as we rely more and more heavily on technology to do the things that we could once do without it — reading books, thinking, catching up with friends. Rather than serve as an assistant, tech has become the thing that enables us, keeping us at a distance from ourselves and the world around us.

a return back to ourselves

Vacations and meditation retreats are so effective in bringing us back to ourselves because they afford us moments to pause and live our days minute by minute.

For 24 hours, we took our watches off and felt our way through the passage of time, asking others with watches or checking our stationary clocks to confirm our intuition.

Life slows when we unanchor from time and remove ourselves from a society that demands motion at internet speeds. We’re constantly fighting the notion of time scarcity, battling the feeling that there’s not enough time in the day to do everything we want. But, when we unplug and sit with the abundance of 24 hours in a day, elongating time, we begin to feel just how expansive life is rather than scarce. Time away clarifies and reorients our priorities, helping us see the not so obvious when we look at life from a new angle.

seeding cultures of introspection

Our modern culture is one that drives us away from introspection. With all that’s happening in the world around us, it feels harder and harder to be a human — technological distractions only exacerbate the distance between us and our humanity. When we create space between us and our fears, we prevent ourselves from being fully present with what’s arising within us. With all the world’s information and distractions at our fingertips, it’s far easier to pick up our phones and tune out what’s uncomfortable than feel into it.

Our lack of willingness to tolerate and be with what’s uncomfortable is precisely what keeps us looping and resorting to further numbing our inner world by using the external world as our crutch.

Redesigning our relationship with technology and tapping into our true unbridled selves begins with doing what feels unnatural in modern day. It’s in examining the narratives we tell ourselves and stretching the space between our stimulus and response where we begin returning back to ourselves, in more ways than one.

In an upcoming piece, I’ll share the playbook on how we designed and ran the tech sabbath.

If you’re based in the Bay Area and are interested in joining us for the next tech sabbath, sign up here!

Thanks for reading — if you enjoyed this piece, you may also resonate with:

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Thanks to Ryan for reviewing drafts of this essay.