Toolkit of Digital Boundaries for Healthy Living
How I Reclaimed My Life From the Machine
Aubrey is a senior in high school and has had an iPhone ever since she was thirteen. At first Aubrey hardly used her phone. Over the years, however, she began using it constantly. Although she would never say she was addicted, she found it hard to put her phone down. Even when not actively using it, Aubrey would find herself thinking about the phone, and restless to get back to Snapchat and TikTok.
Aubrey experimented with turning off notifications, only to find herself compelled to check her phone in case she was missing something. It got so bad that when Aubrey would wake up in the night, she’d check her phone. She even started keeping her notifications turned on at night, so she could hear if someone texted her.
Although friends tell her she’s attractive, Aubrey finds it hard to believe she’s pretty because she’s constantly comparing herself to models on TikTok and Instagram. Although she loves hanging out with friends, it’s increasingly hard for her to give them full attention because she’s distracted. Even when her boyfriend is talking to her, Aubrey finds herself getting restless and instinctively reaching for her phone if there is a lull in the conversation.
Six months ago, Aubrey went on a camping trip with her church youth group. They went into a wilderness where there was no connection. “At first it was disconcerting for my phone not to be working,” Aubrey explained when reflecting on the incident. But over the next few days in the wilderness, a sense of quiet came over her that she hadn’t experienced in years. “I found I could pay attention to friends with all my attention, because the phone wasn’t distracting me. I even found I could sit and do nothing without feeling restless, which is an experience I haven’t had in years.” Above all, Aubrey enjoyed the new connection she had with the other friends who had come along on the trip.
After returning to civilization, Aubrey determined to use her phone less. Yet she found herself powerless against its relentless pull on her attention. Aubrey longed to recover the peace she had in the wilderness. Eventually she made a hard decision and decided to get rid of her iPhone. She asked her parents to get her a minimalist phone known as the “Wisephone” This device provides phone and texting functionality and navigation; crucially, however, it provides no email, internet, or social media feeds.
When talking about her decision to embrace technological minimalism, Aubrey explained that “it isn’t about saying no to technology, or demonizing technology. I don’t judge people who have smartphones. For me, it’s about the joy of being present with people. If I need to do things online, I can use my parents’ PC. If I find myself bored, I lean into that and use it as an opportunity to embrace stillness, through prayer or through some mindful breathing.”
Aubrey is not a real person but is a composite of multiple people I interviewed in the course of writing Are We All Cyborgs Now?: Recovering Our Humanity From the Machine. In my research I found that throughout the world, men and women are finding ways to use technology without it using them. They are finding ways not to be controlled by their devices so they can connect with their loved ones and pursue meaningful activities, such as spending time in nature together. They are discovering ways to use digital boundaries to craft calm and thus to more fully connect with everything that is good, true, and beautiful in the world God has given us. But this process of crafting calm does not happen automatically; rather, it involves specific set of best practices and habits.
I first realized the need for digital boundaries in my own life after getting a tablet in 2014. This was my first experience with a portable smart-device. I was so proud of my tablet, which was an upgrade from my flip phone. I even had a custom-made green pouch for the tablet so it could dangle at my side. At first, I just used the tablet for audiobooks, but it didn’t take long before it began to invade my life with continual distractions. The device was constantly connected, enabling me to check my email on hikes or look up the answer to any question that might suddenly pop into my head. Even when I wasn’t using the device, I was still thinking about everything happening in the digital ecosystem. A year after getting the device, however, I was experiencing prolonged periods of mental burnout. In a very short space of time, my attention had been captured and scattered. This led me to my interviews and research on digital boundaries, as I began exploring the best practices for using our devices without them using us. Here are some of the things I learned.
Tip #1: Use Time to Compartmentalize…and How I Stopped Being a Cyborg
Throughout most of history, the cycles of day and night, and the limitations of geographical space, created natural boundaries that enabled labor to be compartmentalized from the rest of life, thus protecting us from a condition of total work. The smartphone has disrupted this natural pattern by creating a situation where everything bleeds into everything else. For example, work life intrudes into family life, even into the evening. Whether one is an office executive, pastor, teacher, or something else, there is the sense in which work is omnipresent. Gone are the days when you left your work at the university, church office, factory, or store. Gone are the days when a farmer left his field, or the hunter the forest, when it became too dark to see. It is still possible to compartmentalize, but now it requires extreme deliberation and vigilance.
I use a method where I have periods of each day where my phone and computer are connected online, and other times of the day when these devices are off or on airplane mode. Last year when I was working remotely as an editor, writer, and researcher for various clients, I had the freedom to create my own schedule, so I chose to use the mornings as my offline period. That was my time devoted to reading (including reading things I’ve printed during my online period), chores (cleaning, cooking, errands, etc.), listening to audiobooks I’ve downloaded, and leisure in the classical sense (activities like music, letter writing, mindfulness, playing the piano, memorizing poetry, going for walks, and, of course, spiritual devotions and prayer).
When I first woke up in the morning, I tended to be groggy and slow. Rather than trying to immediately energize myself with the dopamine rush that comes from turning on my phone or drinking caffeine, I would stay in bed for a while, leveraging the grogginess to read. Perhaps the main mistake we make when reading is to go too fast. Once the day gets going, we often find it difficult to read slowly and easily fall into a grab-and-go approach. The natural stillness right after waking up creates the perfect conditions for reading with a slow and leisured posture. Eventually I would get up and do my spiritual devotions, preferably outside where I can get exposure to direct sunlight.
I can relate to C.S. Lewis’s observation in Experiment in Criticism that “literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention. When they are denied such attentive and undisturbed reading even for a few days they feel impoverished.” What better time than the morning to embrace the quiet that is a prerequisite to both quality reading and prayer? In his book The Beauty Chasers: Recapturing the Wonder of the Divine, Timothy Willard has a section called “take back the morning,” in which he describes C.S. Lewis’s own habit of making the mornings a sanctified time.
The morning presents a perfect opportunity to turn my focus away from noise and distraction and toward the voice of God—toward a pace that invites reflections, prayer, and conversation with others, a pace that invites me to truly see the world in all its nuance, uniqueness, and splendor.
I love how George Sayer, one of C.S. Lewis’s close friends, described how Lewis nurtured his spiritual life with daily Scripture meditation couple with his “habit of communing with nature.” Lewis would walk in the garden before breakfast in order to drink in “the beauty of the morning, thanking God for the weather, the roses, the songs of the birds, and anything else he could find to enjoy.”
In my own case—again, reflecting on last year when I was still in control of my own schedule—I would use the afternoon and early evening to work and to perform tasks requiring the internet. During that period, I found it hard to read with a contemplative mindset; thus, if during the course of my work I come across something that I want to digest slowly (whether an email requiring extra attention, a thoughtful article, or a particularly engaging Facebook post), I will print these for perusal in my next offline period.
A few practical details may be useful for the sake of others wanting to try this method or a variation of it.
If I need to be available for phone calls from family members and friends, then during my offline periods I will have my phone on to receive calls, but with all notifications and messages turned off, and the option to check for messages not accessible from my home screen. Friends and family know that if there is an emergency, they can phone me instead of texting. If I begin to have a problem receiving too many calls, such as excessive work calls, then during my offline period I could simply program my phone to only ring when family members or close friends call.
If during my offline period I think of something I’d like to do online, whether posting a picture on Instagram, executing an information query, or replying to a message, I write it down in a list of things to do when online. The simple act of writing something down frees the frontal cortex not to feel like it needs to hold onto the item. But more than that, the delay between impulse and execution sometimes gives better perspective. For example, during my offline period in the morning I may have thought of four things I’d like to look up together with a couple argumentative messages to send to a co-worker. When my online period arrives a few hours later, I may realize that, realistically, only one of the information queries is important, and I don’t need to send any argumentative messages at all. This gap between impulse and execution has saved me from a lot of foolishness. The fact that my online period is also the time set aside for my work helps incentivize me not to waste time on trivial activities.
This system enables me to make the most of my offline period because I am not subject to electronic distractions during my times of prayer, reading, art, household chores, and the like. Yet I’m also able to make the most of my online period and leverage the internet, because I am not subject to the type of information fatigue that comes from being plugged in 24/7.
During my online period of the day, I still need to protect my attention. For example, if I am writing an email, I don’t want to be distracted by text messages; if I am replying to a text message, I don’t want to be distracted by someone commenting on one of my articles on Facebook; if I am discussing something with a friend on Telegram, I don’t want to be distracted by emails or news alerts. To eliminate such distractions, I turn everything off that I am not actively working on. This is especially important for things that beep. For me, simply knowing that at any moment my phone might make the sound of an incoming notification keeps me on the edge, with a nagging sense of anticipation. Sometimes I have to spend considerable time figuring out how to turn things off, because the tech companies don’t make it easy (indeed, their business model feeds on keeping us in a state of continuous partial attention). What I’ve practiced here is a variation on Cal Newport’s advice to “turn your devices into single-purpose computers,” which helps us realize “that the power of a general-purpose computer is in the total number of things it enables the user to do, not the total number of things it enables the user to do simultaneously.”
“This method is all very well for Robin,” someone might object, “because his children are grown and he has a job that enables him to create his own schedule.” True. But I encourage you to ask yourself the following question. In any 24-hour cycle, how much time do you need for sleep and how much time do you need for being plugged in? Write both these numbers down. (I realize that many people need to be plugged in for an entire eight-hour work day or longer. That’s fine; write the number down whatever it is.) Now subtract these two numbers from 24, and that is how much time you have left for peace and quiet. You may be surprised to find how much time you waste through continuous partial attention.
To be sure, I use a different system now that I work full time and I no longer create my own schedule, but the same basic system pertains: I compartmentalize my time plugged in so that the ecosystem of distractions does not become omnipresent.
Parents trying to create boundaries for children can adopt a similar system. If you have chosen to let your children use digital interfaces, then consider having times of the day when your kids know they can use these devices, and other times of the day when the children know they cannot. That might be once a day from 3:00 to 4:00 pm, or it might be every weekend for six hours, or it might be each day when their homework and chores are finished. The main thing is to be consistent.
Given that the quality of screen time is just as important as the amount, use your children’s online periods as an opportunity to help them develop good skills and virtues. One way you can do that is again through compartmentalizing: turning off everything on the phone or computer they are not actually using. Attention is just as important when you are online as when you are offline, since every moment spent behind a screen is training you in certain habits of mind.
If this type of compartmentalization seems too complicated, you might find it easier to avoid digital interfaces completely. If your kids need a phone when they’re at school or for emergency purposes, consider getting them a flip phone, a minimalist “light phone,” the Wisephone II, or a smart phone connected to a parental control system like Custodio that enables parents to turn off everything that isn’t essential. Although it may seem hard to do without digital gadgetry, you may find it actually makes life easier in the long run.
Tip #2: Use Space to Compartmentalize
Compartmentalizing isn’t just about time, but also place. Many people find it helpful to have one room set aside for online work, and another place for leisure (prayer, reading, music etc.) The simple act of limiting the digital activities to a separate space helps it not invade the rest of life.
I have one friend who keeps his phone in the trunk of his car. Another friend has a room for reading separate from the one he uses for electronics. And countless parents have drawn a line when it comes to technology in the bedroom. These are all excellent ways to strategically use space to compartmentalize technology and prevent it from becoming omnipresent.
One friend, Annie Crawford, told me that she and her husband, Thomas, kept all their children’s electronics in one room that was public. They allowed no video games until age 10, and then only Wii sports with dad in the living room. As they gradually added more entertainment, they made sure they were group games that they could play as a family in the evening, similar to how they also play boardgames.
Annie and Thomas also allowed TV to be enjoyed in a communal space where it was a shared activity, and where Annie could keep an eye on it while cooking, etc. The only TV consumed was extended narrative movies, which forms the imagination better than the episodic and chaotic nature of cartoons.
Now that Annie and Thomas’s children are young adults, all three of them thank their parents for these boundaries, for limiting screens and sending them outside to play instead.
Annie recently talked about limiting screens to free children for the outdoors in a conversation with Shanda Fulbright and Joshua Pauling.
Tip #3: Create Barriers to Entry
Another helpful tip is to create what Albert Borgmann (1937-2023) called “thresholds.” By thresholds, he meant barriers to entry. In other words, we should make it more difficult to access and engage with digital amusements and listless entertainment; and—perhaps more importantly—we should also make it easier to access and engage with deeper activities and richer relationships.
My friend and co-author, Joshua Pauling, has created a threshold by not having a normal internet service provider in his home. “If we want to access the internet on our computer,” Pauling told me, “we must turn on our computer, create an internet hotspot with our phone, and then have our computer connect to that hotspot. In other words, the default setting of the computer is that it is off, and that it is not connected to the internet. While only small barriers, even these additional micro-steps required to access the internet on our computer prevents us from some listless distractions, and encourages a more purposeful use dedicated to specific tasks.”
There are many other ways to create similar thresholds. It might mean removing social media apps from your home screen and burying them somewhere deeper on your phone, or removing them from your phone completely just to be used on your computer. It might be having to manually type in your username and password to access social media. It might be keeping digital devices in a certain location in your home that has a related threshold. Some families have even found it useful to lock their phones in “kitchen safe” devices popularized in the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. These cookie jar-style boxes, marketed under the name “kSafe,” enable the user to lock his or her phone in it for specified amounts of time, making it inaccessible until the timer unlocks the box. This can be a powerful tool in creating daily habits around being offline.
Some may be tempted to view these techniques as a concession to lack of willpower. Wouldn’t it be better to make ourselves strong enough so we don’t need regimens of barriers, boundaries, and routines? Well, no. The whole point about good routines, habits, and barriers is to free you from having to rely on willpower alone. Because willpower is a limited resource, huge exertions of willpower siphon cognitive and creative resources. Moreover, sooner or later, willpower always breaks down. While we should all work at expanding our willpower (or “self-control,” to use the biblical term), it is better to develop good habits so that responsible behavior can becomes natural and almost effortless. We know from research on addiction that good habits require not just the right inner resolve and attitude, but a properly curated external environment with barriers to access.
“One of the biggest risk factors for getting addicted to any drug,” writes Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke, “is easy access to that drug. When it’s easier to get a drug, we’re more likely to try it. In trying it, we’re more likely to get addicted to it.” The same is true with digital drugs. Even small barriers to access can be all that’s needed to develop new habits. Lembke continues,
If we wait until we feel the compulsion to use, the reflexive pull of seeking pleasure and/or avoiding pain is nearly impossible to resist. In the throes of desire, there’s no deciding.
But by creating tangible barriers between ourselves and our drug of choice, we press the pause button between desire and action.
If you press the pause button between desire and action often enough, then new habits are formed. I spoke to one friend, Alicia Taylor, who used barriers to entry to create new habits. Alicia, who gave me permission to share her story, told me that for years she used her iPhone to enrich her life by listening to podcasts, audiobooks, and prayers. But once her children started talking, she noticed herself getting annoyed when they would interrupt her listening activity.
“That was the first sign that I needed boundaries,” Alicia explained. “I realized that the phone was not operating in family life in a way that was helpful anymore.”
Initially, Alicia simply turned off her phone when the children needed her, so she could devote all her attention to them. “Although that was an improvement,” she said, “It wasn’t sufficient to simply tell myself, ‘This is a bad time to listen to podcast or audiobook.’ Because I had grown used to constant stimulation, I found myself getting bored very quickly. If there were periods when my children didn’t need me, I found myself instinctively reaching for my phone to scroll through the latest news or Instagram feeds. Moreover, the constant potential to go on my phone created a kind of ever-present distraction in the background.”
That was when Alicia began experimenting with ways to block applications on her phone. Although the iPhone provides screen time controls, these can be overridden simply by putting in a passcode, which defeats the purpose. Eventually she found that by using a random number as a screentime passcode that she had not memorized, the only way to override it was to go through a five-to-ten-minute process to reset everything. Because that is a cumbersome process, it provided a sufficient barrier to entry that was just what she needed.
“Now I have my screentime controls set up so that I can only access its features from 8:00 pm to 5:00 am. The only apps I allow during the day are phone, texts, and apps I might need to use like banking, car insurance, etc.”
I asked Alicia if she noticed a difference in her life.
“After instituting these boundaries, I noticed a marked decrease in how challenging I found parenting. I would never have thought the phone created a barrier between me and my children. Yet after I moved to this new system, the difference was like night and day. For example, because I am much more tuned into my children’s needs, I find myself noticing much earlier if a fight is about to break out, which enables me to redirect their energy before something escalates. But above all, I transitioned from their questions being annoying to their questions being really fun. My brain had been somewhere else, but when I brought my mind to the present, it turned out the present was a really nice place to be.”
I like Alicia’s story because it shows how barriers to entry with devices can be correlated with lower thresholds for engaging with meaningful activities, such as family. Other parents have shared how they intentionally lower barriers to cultivate habits and activities ordered towards higher goods and virtues. For example, instead of having devices out and easily accessible, they will make books and board games easily accessible. Instead of the TV or computer always standing at the ready, on and internet-connected, they place a guitar or piano standing at the ready. There are many ways to experiment with this, but the principle is simple: what is ready at hand will be our default activity; thus, we might as well make the default point us in the right direction. Andy Crouch adds some further practical suggestions in his book The Tech-Wise Family:
Find the one room where your family spends the most time and ruthlessly eliminate the things that ask little of you and develop little in you. Move the TV to a less central location—and ideally a less comfortable one. And begin filling the space that is left over with opportunities for creativity and skill, beauty and risk….This simple nudge, all by itself, is a powerful antidote to consumer culture, the way of life that finds satisfaction mostly in enjoying what other people have made. It’s an invitation instead to creating culture—finding joy in shaping something useful or beautiful out of the raw material of the world.
I think Crouch is onto something important, and it coheres with James Clear’s framework for habit-formation from his best-selling book Atomic Habits. To create a good habit, Clear writes, “make it obvious, make it attractive, make it satisfying.” To break a bad habit, “make it invisible, make it unattractive, make it difficult, make it unsatisfying.” As an example, Clear points toward practicing the guitar: “it’s easy not to practice the guitar when it’s tucked away in the closet. It’s easy not to read a book when the bookshelf if in the corner of the guest room.” Thus, you should “redesign your environment and make the cues for your preferred habits more obvious.”
Tip #4: Cultivate Silence
In my previous post, “The Power of the Pause: Gregorian Chant, Leisure, and the Joy of Going Slow,” I suggested that silence and solitude are vital for human flourishing, yet are nearly extinct in the age of digital distractions. Instead of existing against a backdrop of silence, the hum of the machine is the soundtrack of our lives. For our own sanity and self-development, each day should have chunks of time free from digital chatter and technological interruptions—time without TV, time without earbuds, time without radio/podcasts, time without the possibility of notification dings from the phone or computer. In such times away from our devices our lives can be retuned and recalibrated to a better and more humane soundtrack—one which includes segments of silence. In his book Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport explains, “we need solitude to thrive as human beings, and in recent years, without even realizing it, we’ve been systematically reducing this crucial ingredient from our lives. Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.”
There is some level of discomfort with silence because it frequently forces us to confront ourselves and ponder existential questions. It’s just easier to keep the music playing. This tension is not new. The great 17th century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in his Pensees that “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.” When we allow ourselves to get over the discomfort of silence, we open up wide vistas of opportunity: levels of thought that were previously foreclosed, elements of creativity that seemed to have disappeared after childhood, modes of reflection that we had forgotten. Many of our most beloved heroes of history and heroes of the faith cultivated solitude and silence.
Tip #5: Cultivate a Positive Vision
No one wakes up in the morning and says “I want to be addicted to social media!” or “I want to spend all day on my phone!” Rather, digital dependency is something that develops gradually as we are nudged towards fulfilling our human needs and desires through these technologies. “Often, you follow the habits of your culture without thinking, without questioning, and sometimes without remembering,” James Clear explains. He continues:
Your brain did not evolve with a desire to smoke cigarettes or to check Instagram or to play video games. At a deep level, you simply want to reduce uncertainty and relieve anxiety, to win social acceptance and approval or to achieve status. Look at nearly any product that is habit-forming and you'll see that it does not create a new motivation, but rather latches onto the underlying motives of human nature.…Your habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires. New versions of old vices. The underlying motives behind human behavior remain the same. The specific habits we perform differ based on the period of history.
Then Clear offers some hope. “Here's the powerful part: there are many ways to address the same underlying motive. One person might learn to reduce stress by smoking a cigarette. Another person learns to ease their anxiety by going for a run. Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face; they are just the methods you learned to use.” The key is to develop new habits to meet our human needs for connection, belonging, and relationship in ways that don’t require inordinate social media and technology use. We can create and reclaim healthier habits and ways of living that offer a positive and attractive alternative.
This positive and attractive vision is a vital key. No matter what specific rules and restrictions you ultimately adopt, the most important thing is to situate your approach within an intentional, larger positive vision and pattern for living. Intentionality is crucial here. Developing a plan and rationale as an individual or together as a family increases the odds of success. Cal Newport suggests in Digital Minimalism that everyone needs a “full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.” By underdoing such an intentional process, there is an inherent satisfaction built into the process.
Teenager Amy Crouch, in the Foreword to her father’s book The Tech-Wise Family, epitomizes this spirit when she writes,
I think the best part of tech-wise parenting, for me, has been its focus on ‘something older and better than the newest thing.’ The key word is better. Tech-wise parenting isn’t simply intended to eliminate technology but to put better things in its place.
What Amy notes here is essential; there has to be “better things put in its place,” or this won’t work. Although families that take this approach are often accused of having a negative posture toward technology, these moves actually represent true optimism because they are rooted in the conviction that there is a better more hopeful way.
Jonathan Haidt is another thinker who is helping point toward a better way. His writing and speaking frequently focuses on achieving freedom and flourishing through engagement with the real world rather than digital interfaces. In his 2024 book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Haidt documents the impacts of digital culture and offers some real suggestions “to motivate and empower teens, parents, educators, policymakers, and tech industry leaders to act collectively to free children and adolescents from a childhood spent largely alone on screens, and instead promote independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.” Haidt is among a growing coalition of mainstream thinkers offering actionable items at the individual and communal level, while working to influence school and government policy. One of the organizations co-founded by Haidt, “Let Grow,” focuses on the power of unstructured outdoor play for children and the need to eschew parenting models that only serve to make children more fragile. Haidt has co-founded another organization called “The Anxious Generation” that is working with community leaders and policy makers to establish the following four norms:
no smartphones before high school;
no social media before sixteen;
phone-free schools;
more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.
A growing movement is forming around norms like these, not for the purpose of withholding things from children, but freeing them for more fulfilling and flourishing lives.
For our human desires to be truly formed and shaped towards truth, goodness, and beauty, we can’t just remove the bad things; we must replace them with better things. The possibilities are endless here, but at the very least we might consider some of the following:
Take digital sabbaths to focus on higher goods: reading and reflection, Scripture reading and prayer, family fun and games, arts and crafts.
Develop hobbies that require bodily skill and mental acuity: art, music, traditional handcrafts, woodworking, car repair.
Host “Phone-Freedom” events with other families: phoneless feasts, teen sleepovers, dances, maker days, or sporting events where digital devices aren’t allowed.
Hone the art of conversation with your family through structured conversations (discussing a book you read together, doing family devotions, etc.) and unstructured conversations (around the campfire, in the car, etc.).
These positive activities might be compared to the strategy of the Greek hero Orpheus when he sailed near the isle of the sirens. Most of us are familiar with the sirens through the story of Odysseus: the hero who resisted the sirens’ bewitching music by tying himself to the mast, as in the picture below.
Yet when Orpheus had to pass in hearing-distance of the sirens, he used a different strategy: he drew his lyre and played music that was more beautiful. One might say that Orpheus cultivated a positive vision that made the sirens’ song pale into insignificance. I encourage families to find ways to imitate Orpheus, to create activities and environments that offer grace and beauty deeper than anything digital distractions have to offer.
In fact, the approaches of Orpheus and Odysseus are complimentary. We need properly curated environments and routines to bind us to good habits, just as Odysseus bound himself to the mast. When framed and understood within an intentional positive vision, even the forms of self-denial and self-discipline that we practice have a larger purpose, pointing us towards higher goods and ultimate ends. Then even such self-imposed limits become a joy and actually are invigorating and liberating. Following Paul Kingsnorth, we might call this “technological askesis.” The parallel with ascetic disciplines is important. Think of how the practice of fasting develops one’s strength of will and resolve, or how the self-discipline of exercise develops a sense of confidence and grit. Just as the spiritual life is punctuated by both times of fasting and feasting, so too our technological habits can be characterized by the type of balance that emerges out of well-honed asceticism and self-discipline. We can train and discipline ourselves in a way akin to training for the Marines, preparing for battle, or conditioning for competition. But this asceticism, like boundaries, is ultimately a means to a higher end, namely connecting to what is good, true, and beautiful in the world God has given us.
4-Part Video Series
My church recently asked me to do a 4-part series on digital boundaries. Each week I recorded my lecture for YouTube so people outside the parish could watch it. Here are links to all four parts. I’ve included some of the tips mentioned above, plus additional brain-based best practices for healthy living in the digital age. Enjoy!
Further Reading
Are We All Cyborgs Now?: Reclaiming Our Humanity From the Machine
The Role of Stillness in Education and the Problem of Thinking Too Quickly
The Power of the Pause Gregorian Chant, Leisure, and the Joy of Going Slow
It would be great if they just gave us to tools to control our own devices, right? In frustration, I turned on parental controls for my own iphone, blocked apps and set Safari to 5m, and gave the password to a friend. I've only asked for more time once in 2 years! I'm with you that cutting back digitally does best when paired with a beefing up of our analog time and activities.