There’s a hum beneath everything. You’ve grown so accustomed to it that you no longer hear it, the way a person living near a highway eventually stops noticing the traffic. It’s the sound of perpetual connection: the buzz of notifications, the soft glow of screens in darkened rooms, the endless scroll of information that never quite satisfies and never quite stops. We wake to it. We fall asleep to it. We reach for it in moments of boredom, in moments of anxiety, in moments of silence that we’ve learned to fear.
“We’re the most connected generation in human history and among the most exhausted.”
This is the texture of contemporary existence. We’re the most connected generation in human history and among the most exhausted. We’ve access to more information than ancient scholars could have dreamed of possessing, yet wisdom seems to recede the faster we chase it. We carry in our pockets devices of staggering power, portals to all human knowledge, instruments of instant communication across continents, and we use them, often, to watch strangers dance for fifteen seconds at a time.
Something has gone wrong. We sense it in our bones, in the frayed edges of our attention, in the strange emptiness that follows hours of scrolling, in the way we feel simultaneously overstimulated and undernourished. We’re drowning in content and starving for meaning.
The ancient monks who fled to the Egyptian desert in the third and fourth centuries couldn’t have imagined our world. They knew nothing of algorithms or smartphones, of social media or streaming services. Yet they understood something about the human soul that we’ve largely forgotten: that we become what we attend to, and that attention itself must be trained, protected, and sometimes radically withdrawn from the noise of the world to be restored.
They called it anachoresis, withdrawal. We might call it logging off.
The Desert as Spiritual Geography
In the early centuries of the Christian movement, something remarkable happened. As the faith moved from persecuted minority to imperial religion, as bishops gained political power and churches grew comfortable, a countermovement emerged. Thousands of men and women left the cities of Alexandria, Rome, and Antioch and walked into the wilderness. They sought caves and abandoned tombs, crude huts and rocky hermitages. They became the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the abbas and ammas whose sayings and practices would shape Christian spirituality for millennia.
Why the desert?
The desert was, first of all, a place of emptiness. It offered nothing to distract: no marketplaces, no theaters, no dinner parties, no endless social obligations. In the stripped-down landscape of sand and stone, these seekers encountered themselves and, in that encounter, encountered God. The desert was a furnace that burned away illusion, a silence that exposed every inner voice clamoring for attention.
“You can’t heal what you can’t see. You can’t offer to God what you refuse to acknowledge.”
But the desert was also a place of confrontation. The monks spoke freely of the demons they battled there, the demon of acedia (spiritual listlessness), the demon of vainglory, the demon of lust, and the demon of anger. Modern readers may interpret these figures psychologically or take them at face value; either way, the wisdom holds. In solitude, we meet the parts of ourselves we’ve been running from. The desert doesn’t create our inner chaos; it reveals it.
And this revelation is precisely the point. You can’t heal what you can’t see. You can’t offer to God what you refuse to acknowledge. The desert, in its terrible mercy, strips away our carefully constructed personas and leaves us naked before the One who loved us before we learned to perform.
The Digital Anti-Desert
If the desert is characterized by emptiness, silence, and confrontation with the self, our digital environment is its precise opposite. It offers endless fullness: an inexhaustible stream of images, words, sounds, opinions, updates, arguments, and entertainments. It fills every gap, colonizes every pause, rushes in to occupy any moment of potential stillness.
The silence that the desert monks cultivated as a garden in which the soul might grow, we’ve learned to experience as a threat. We call it boredom, and we’ve developed a thousand ways to avoid it. The average person now checks their phone dozens of times per day, often without conscious intention. We’ve developed reflexes, not choices. The hand reaches for the device before the mind has decided to reach.
And the confrontation with self that the desert demanded? Our devices offer escape routes in every direction. Feeling anxious? Scroll. Feeling sad? Stream something. Feeling the first stirrings of a complex emotion, a challenging thought, a question about the direction of your life? There’s always, always, always something else to click.
This isn’t an accident. The attention economy depends on capturing and holding our focus. Billions of dollars and some of the brightest minds of our generation have been deployed to make our devices as compelling, as sticky, as irresistible as possible. We aren’t weak-willed failures when we find it hard to put down our phones; we’re ordinary humans outmatched by sophisticated systems designed to exploit every vulnerability in our neurology.
The monks who fled to the desert were fleeing a world that made it difficult to attend to God. We face the same challenge, but in an intensified form. The noise has followed us everywhere, even into our beds, even into those first waking moments that once belonged to quietness, even into the final minutes before sleep. There’s no geographical desert left to flee to.
And so we must create one.
Sabbath as Resistance
The practice of Sabbath is woven into the very fabric of biblical faith. On the seventh day, God rested, not from exhaustion but from completion, not because the work had worn God out but because the work was good and deserved to be savored. The commandment to keep the Sabbath holy is nestled among the prohibitions against murder and theft, as if the refusal to rest were itself a kind of violence against the soul.
The Sabbath was, for ancient Israel, an act of resistance against the empire of endless production. In Egypt, there had been no rest. Pharaoh demanded bricks without straw, quotas without mercy. The Sabbath declared that the people of God were no longer enslaved people, that their output didn’t measure their worth, that they belonged to a different economy altogether, an economy of grace.
We need this resistance now as urgently as Israel needed it then. The digital economy is, in its own way, Pharaoh’s Egypt. It demands constant productivity, constant availability, and constant engagement. It has colonized not only our working hours but our leisure, not only our offices but our living rooms and bedrooms. The boundary between work and rest has dissolved; we’re always, in some sense, on call.
“The practice of a Tech Sabbath is an act of spiritual defiance. It declares that our connectivity doesn’t define us, that our worth doesn’t depend on our responsiveness.”
The practice of a Tech Sabbath, a regular, rhythmic withdrawal from our devices, is an act of spiritual defiance. It declares that we aren’t defined by our connectivity, that our worth doesn’t depend on our responsiveness, that there’s a Presence more critical than any notification. It’s a way of enacting, in the body and in time, the truth that we belong to God.
Designing Your Desert Day
What might a Tech Sabbath actually look like? The specifics will vary according to vocation, family situation, and temperament, but several principles can guide the practice.
First, choose a rhythm. The traditional Sabbath is weekly, and there’s wisdom in this frequency. A day each week is long enough to rest genuinely, short enough to be sustainable, and regular enough to reshape our habits over time. For some, a full twenty-four hours may be possible. For others, parents of young children, caregivers, and those in certain professions, a shorter period may be more realistic. Begin where you can, not where you think you should.
Second, prepare practically. If your phone is your alarm clock, buy an alarm clock. If you need to be reachable for genuine emergencies, designate a single person who can contact you by landline or other means. Tell the people who might need you that you’ll be unavailable. Handle in advance whatever tasks might otherwise pull you back online. The goal is to remove the practical excuses that will inevitably present themselves.
Third, embrace the emptiness. This is the hardest part. The first hours without a device can feel disorienting, even distressing. You’ll reach for your phone, only to find it missing. You’ll feel urges to check, to scroll, to fill the silence. This is withdrawal, and it’s instructive. Notice how deeply the habit has rooted itself in your body. Notice how uncomfortable stillness has become. This noticing is itself spiritual work.
Fourth, fill the space with life. Sabbath isn’t simply about what we refrain from; it’s about what we turn toward. Walk outside and attend to the sky. Read a book made of paper. Prepare food slowly, savoring the textures and smells. Sit with people you love and have conversations without the interruption of buzzing pockets. Pray. Sleep. Play. Do the things that make you feel human in ways that scrolling never does.
Fifth, expect resistance. The demons the desert monks encountered will show up in modern dress. Acedia will whisper that this practice is pointless, that you’re wasting time, that everyone else is online, and you’re missing out. Anxiety will catastrophize about what emergencies might be unfolding without your knowledge. Vainglory will wonder what people will think of your unavailability. These voices are data; they reveal how deeply the digital world has formed your imagination. Thank them for the information, and stay in the desert anyway.
What Happens in the Silence
The desert monks were reluctant to speak of their inner experiences. They knew the dangers of spiritual pride, of making much of one’s own progress, of turning the journey toward God into a performance for others. Yet their writings gesture toward a transformation that occurred in those who persevered.
They spoke of hesychia, a profound stillness of heart, a quieting of the inner chaos, a peace that was not the absence of struggle but the presence of God in the midst of it. They spoke of apatheia, not apathy in our modern sense, but a freedom from the tyranny of disordered passions, a capacity to respond to life from a centered and grounded place. They spoke of purity of heart, the simplification of desire until one thing alone was wanted: God.
These gifts don’t come quickly. The desert demands time, and time is precisely what our culture is most reluctant to give. But even a single day of withdrawal can begin to loosen the grip of compulsion. Even a few hours of silence can reveal how noisy the soul has become. Even a brief fast from the digital flood can restore some sense of proportion, some capacity for wonder, some awareness of the sacred that the scroll has drowned out.
Many who practice Tech Sabbath report that the world seems different afterward, colors brighter, conversations deeper, food more flavorful, and prayer more possible. This isn’t magic; it’s the natural result of attention restored. When we stop fragmenting our focus across a thousand tiny stimuli, the focus that remains can penetrate more deeply into whatever is before us. We begin to see again. We begin to hear again. We begin, in some small way, to be present to our own lives.
The Communal Desert
The desert monks were solitary, but they were not alone. They lived in close proximity to one another, gathering for worship, seeking counsel from elders, and sharing the wisdom they had received. The desert was a society of its own kind, a community shaped by shared practices and common purpose.
A Tech Sabbath can be practiced in solitude, but it becomes richer when practiced in community. Families can unplug together and rediscover the lost arts of board games, long walks, and unhurried meals. Churches can encourage the practice, creating a culture of permission in which members support one another’s withdrawal from the digital noise. Friends can covenant together, knowing that mutual commitment strengthens individual resolve.
There’s something powerful about knowing that others are keeping the same rhythm, that you aren’t alone in the desert. The principalities and powers of the attention economy are vast and well-resourced; we need one another to resist them. The witness of a community that regularly unplugs becomes a sign to a frantic world that another way is possible.
The God Who Waits in the Emptiness
Beneath all the practical guidance, beneath the strategies for implementation and the warnings about resistance, there’s a more profound truth: the desert isn’t empty. It only appears so to eyes trained by the world.
“The desert isn’t empty. It only appears so to eyes trained by the world.”
The mystics have always known that God isn’t found primarily in the noise and activity but in the stillness and receptivity. “Be still,” the psalmist commands, “and know that I am God.” The prophet Elijah found God not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire but in the sound of sheer silence. The Gospel accounts show Jesus repeatedly withdrawing from crowds, seeking deserted places to pray, modeling for the church the necessity of strategic absence.
The practice of Tech Sabbath is, at its heart, an act of faith: faith that if we create space, Someone will fill it; faith that the silence we fear is actually pregnant with presence; faith that the One who made us knows what we need better than the algorithms that profile our behavior. We step away from the screen and into the arms of a God who has been waiting patiently for us to arrive.
This is the scandal of grace: that we don’t have to earn God’s attention, that we’re already loved, that the frantic activity we use to justify our existence is unnecessary to the One whose love is pure gift. The desert strips away the illusion that we must be productive to be worthy. It returns us to the fundamental truth of our identity as beloved creatures, held in being by a Love that won’t let us go.
A Prophetic Practice
In a world of compulsive connectivity, choosing to disconnect is a prophetic act. It embodies a different set of values, a different understanding of what makes life meaningful. It witnesses to a reality that transcends the metrics of engagement and the currencies of attention.
The Desert Fathers and Mothers fled to the wilderness in part because the institutional church had grown too comfortable, too compromised, too captive to the powers of their age. Their withdrawal was a form of social criticism enacted in the body. By leaving, they exposed what they were leaving: a society that had lost its bearings, a church that had forgotten its first love.
Our situation is different in its particulars but similar in its structure. The digital world offers genuine goods, connection, information, creativity, community, but it has also become a system of capture, a means by which our attention is harvested and sold. The tech companies aren’t evil, but their business model depends on monopolizing our focus. To withdraw, even periodically, is to declare that we won’t be so monopolized.
This isn’t Luddism. It’s not a rejection of technology as such. The monks who fled to the desert didn’t reject all human civilization; they took with them the Scriptures, the practices of prayer, and the wisdom of their elders. A Tech Sabbath is a selective, intentional withdrawal, a way of ensuring that we use our tools and they don’t use us.
Beginning the Journey
Perhaps you’ve read this far and felt a stirring, a recognition of something you’ve been missing, a longing for the stillness you’ve lost. Maybe you’ve also felt resistance, the voice that says you could never do this, that your situation is too demanding, that you’re too dependent on your devices to withdraw from them.
Both responses are valid. The longing is the voice of your soul, remembering what it was made for. The resistance is the voice of habit, defending its territory. Neither should be ignored.
Start small if you must. A single morning. A few hours. A walk without your phone. Light a candle. Sit in silence. Notice what arises. You may find demons; you may discover boredom; you may find grief for all the life you’ve missed while your eyes were fixed on a screen. Stay with it. On the other side of this discomfort lies a spaciousness you’ve forgotten was possible.
The desert is still there, waiting. It doesn’t require a plane ticket or a camel. It requires only the willingness to step away from the noise and into the silence where God has always been speaking.
The ancient seekers found life in the desert. So can you.
The Invitation
We stand at a crossroads. The path of compulsive connectivity stretches before us, well-worn and easy to follow, leading toward exhaustion, fragmentation, and the slow atrophy of our capacity for depth. Another path leads into the desert, harder to walk, less populated, requiring more of us.
“The invitation is simple, though not easy: choose one day. Unplug. Enter the desert. Discover what waits for you there.”
This second path is the way of the mystics and the monks, the prophets and the saints. It’s the way of Jesus, who knew when to withdraw and when to engage, who modeled for us the rhythm of action and contemplation, presence and absence, word and silence.
The invitation is simple, though not easy: choose one day. Unplug. Enter the desert. Discover what waits for you there.
Further Reading
For readers wishing to explore the themes of this reflection more deeply, the following works offer rich engagement with desert spirituality, Sabbath theology, and the challenge of attention in the digital age:
On the Desert Fathers and Mothers:
Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Collegeville: Cistercian, 1975.
Burton-Christie, Douglas. The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
On Sabbath Theology and Practice:
Heschel, Abraham Joshua. The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951.
Bass, Dorothy C. Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999.
On Attention, Technology, and the Spiritual Life:
Crawford, Matthew B. The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. New York: MacMillan, 2018.
