The Tech-Wise Family

images 3. We are designed for a rhythm of work and rest. So one hour a day, one day a week, and one week a year, we turn off our devices and worship, feast, play, and rest together.

As technology has filled our lives with more and more easy everywhere, we do less and less of the two things human beings were made to do.

Work is the fruitful transformation of the world through human effort and skill, in ways that serve our shared human needs and give glory to God.

Work requires wisdom—understanding something about the world, its limitations, and its possibilities. And work requires courage, because even work at its best involves risk and effort, and in a fallen world, work is not often at its best. Work also requires wisdom and courage because we always work together with others, and other human beings are never easy to understand or work with.

We are meant to work, but we are also meant to rest. “Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns” (Exod. 20:9–10). One day out of seven—and, even more radically, one year out of seven (Exod. 23:10–11)—the people of God, anyone who depended on them or lived among them, and even their livestock were to cease from work and enjoy rest, restoration, and worship. They were called, you might say, to ceasing and feasting: setting aside daily labor and bringing out the best fruits of that work, stored up in the course of the week and the year, for everyone to enjoy.

This pattern is fundamental to human flourishing, and to the flourishing of the whole world that depends on our care, but it has been disrupted and distorted by human greed and sloth. Instead of work and rest, we have ended up with toil and leisure—and neither one is an improvement. And strangely enough, technology, which promised to make work easier and rest more enjoyable, often has exactly the opposite effect.

Think of toil as excessive, endless, fruitless labor—the kind that leaves us exhausted, with nothing valuable to show for our effort. This is, alas, the kind of work that many people in our world must do their whole lives. But toil actually can afflict even the people who seem to have “dream jobs.”

The journalist Dan Lyons, laid off from a position at Newsweek, found what he thought might be an exciting new calling at a technology start-up, an experience he describes with acerbic disappointment in his book Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble.1 It was “one of those slick, fast-growing start-ups that are so much in the news these days, with the beanbag chairs and unlimited vacation,” he wrote in the New York Times, “a corporate utopia where there is no need for work-life balance because work is life and life is work.”2

But Lyons reports that the reality was more like “a digital sweatshop,” with “glorified telemarketers” who “spent long days cold-calling prospects, racing to meet tough monthly quotas, with algorithms measuring their productivity.”

The most poignant part of Lyons’s essay, though, is the location where these (mostly) young adults toiled with no job security and pay just above the minimum wage: a former factory building for the Davenport furniture company. The name Davenport has become synonymous with some of the most beautiful pieces of human craftsmanship ever created. In the “cavernous red-brick rooms” of that factory, Lyons recalls, “skilled craftsmen once labored on elaborately handcarved custom pieces—woodworking treasures that today can be found in museums and in the White House.”

Lyons recognizes that the artisans who made furniture in that factory undoubtedly worked hard. Their work was far more physically demanding, and because they lived and worked in the era before easy everywhere, nearly everything about their lives was difficult in a way that few of Lyons’s coworkers have ever experienced. And yet their work created something of lasting beauty—“treasures.” How likely is it that any of the employees who now work in that building are creating anything that will be seen as a treasure even five years from now, let alone five hundred years from now?

Instead of working, they are toiling—and of course, muchworse forms of toil can be found in our world. Millions of people employed in factories around the world today, let alone those who can find no work at all, would gladly change places with Lyons’s fellow “digital sweatshop” employees. Still, what Lyons saw at that start-up is toil, not the fruitful work for which we were made. And this is happening at a successful, widely envied company that employs the most privileged winners of our society’s rat race.

Toil is not new—it has been with humanity since the fall—and technology can be a tremendous resource for real, valuable work. From the recording studio to the operating room, technology at its best allows us to create and care for the world in marvelous ways. Indeed, one of the proper places for technology is at work, where advanced tools allow us to use our skills in ways that are personally rewarding and widely beneficial. But Lyons’s story is a reminder that technology can just as easily double down on our toil, demanding more and more from us while we produce less and less of lasting value.

If technology has failed to deliver us from toil, it has done a great deal to replace rest with leisure—at least for those who can afford it.

If toil is fruitless labor, you could think of leisure as fruitless escape from labor. It’s a kind of rest that doesn’t really restore our souls, doesn’t restore our relationships with others or God. And crucially, it is the kind of rest that doesn’t give others the chance to rest. Leisure is purchased from other people who have to work to provide us our experiences of entertainment and rejuvenation.

A game of pickup football in the backyard can be real rest (as long as the competitive spirit doesn’t get out of hand!). But watching football on TV is leisure, and not just because we’re not burning many calories. It is leisure because we are watching others work, or indeed toil, for our enjoyment. It doesn’t really matter whether the workers are well paid, like professional football players, or paid minimally and indirectly, like college athletes. From the point of view of the Sabbath commandment, it’s still work.

Likewise, when we enjoy a nice restaurant meal on a Sunday, the enjoyment of that meal requires others to work. (Few people work, or toil, harder than restaurant workers.) If they have a regular day off on another day of the week, our leisure may not strictly require them to violate the principle of Sabbath. But even if their work is well balanced with rest, it’s still leisure for us: rest that requires others to work on our behalf.

Of course, fruitless toil and fruitless leisure existed before the technological age. A tiny number of families enjoyed almost complete leisure, while many families worked without respite and collapsed, exhausted, for a few hours of sleep, day after day. Some societies, including our own, bought the leisure of a few at the price of the literal slavery of many. Slavery is the ultimate in fruitless toil, work that does nothing to benefit the workers themselves or allow them the dignity of passing on skill, rewards, and a better life to their children.

But in the technological age, toil and leisure are, oddly, less divided along these lines of social class. Many of us, even the most apparently privileged, have the uneasy sense that our work, though it seems physically undemanding (in its complete lack of physical activity, it may even be actively dangerous to our health), is toilsome. Most of us can now afford to purchase extravagant amounts of leisure—Netflix will sell you more entertainment than you could ever consume for $9 per month. But no amount of leisure can compensate for the sense that your life, whether poorly paid or well paid, is ultimately in vain.

The home used to be the location of both work and rest. In societies where almost everyone was a farmer or an artisan, most work happened in and around the home, often with the whole family involved—even today, child labor laws in the United States make exceptions for children who help with the family farm. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved Little House series depicts the backbreaking and difficult work—and indeed toil—of homesteading on the American frontier, but it also shows the family singing together to the music of the father’s fiddle. The family would work hard, together, while it was day, inside and outside the house; then at dinnertime and in the evening, once the light had faded and work outside was impossible, they would rest together.

In the industrial age, the role of the home began to change. Work moved outside the home, into factories like the redbrick Davenport building. (In an era when industrial jobs were mainly reserved for men, this also meant that women’s work became disconnected from men’s and began to be treated as less valuable.) All that happened in the home was rest from the day of work—and, as affluence and technology increased, various forms of leisure. Maybe the high-water mark of leisure at home was that 1970s invention, the “TV dinner”—a prepackaged meal reheated and served in front of the television, the ultimate leisure device. Instead of conversation at a table set with a dinner prepared with care and often skill, the family “enjoying” a TV dinner had both their food and their conversation provided by others.

What happens to families when the home becomes a leisure zone? One of the most damaging results, as the philosopher Albert Borgmann has pointed out, is that children never see their parents acting with wisdom and courage in the world of work.3 Even if the adults’ jobs still require skill and insight, even if those jobs are quite meaningful and rewarding, that work now takes place far from home.

Technology also made much easier many of the forms of work that used to take place inside the house. I will admit that laundry probably never was much more than drudgery—though there is beauty and skill in a well-ironed shirt, something I still pride myself in being able to achieve. The technological magic that gives us washing machines, dryers, and noniron shirts can easily seem like a harmless improvement.

But when the art of cooking is replaced by meals warmed up in a microwave—something a five-year-old can do as well as a fifty-five-year-old—then children no longer see their mothers or fathers doing something challenging, fruitful, admirable, and ultimately enjoyable. Instead, the family’s life together is reduced to mere consumption, purchasing the results of others’ work or toil. No wonder children at the “peak leisure-home” stage of the 1960s and 1970s stopped admiring their parents. They never saw their parents doing anything worth admiring. (Is it totally an accident, by the way, that the 1970s gave us the “leisure suit”?)

Further into the technological age, the home has become the site of work—or toil—again. Many of us bring our work home on our screens. Parents and children alike can work late into the night, as kids download their homework assignments from the school website and as parents field messages from globalized, round-the-clock workplaces. But this is little like the era when children would watch, fascinated, as their mother or father demonstrated some skill, whether caring for farm animals, repairing a plow or an engine, preparing a pie or a roast, or turning a wrinkled piece of fabric perfectly clean and crisp.

Instead, the work that parents do at home, on our laptops and our phones, is hardly different from the schoolwork our children do—and sometimes much less obviously rewarding. As a young boy, my son told me he had figured out what my job was: “You type on your computer and talk on the phone.” He didn’t seem very impressed—and in one sense he was all too right. And I’m one of the fortunate ones who can bring fulfilling and rewarding work home. In a technological age, even those of us who have good work to do have to make an extra effort to show our children how our work requires real skill and produces something worthwhile.

Honestly, most of us can’t do much to change the nature of our work—or toil. The demands of our industry, workplace, or profession are set by others and by complex social and economic systems. Few of us can entirely name our own terms of how, when, and where we will work. (Though if we can, there are few more important callings for us than to make our own work, and the work of those who labor for and with us, more fruitful, sustainable, and rewarding.)

But there is one thing most of us can do—and all of us are meant to do. It is to rediscover rest: real rest, in harmony with one another, our Creator, and all of creation. The biblical word for this kind of rest is Sabbath.

Sabbath appears in the very beginning of the Bible: on the seventh day of creation God himself “rested” from all the work he had done. Many of the Ten Commandments, the “thou shalt nots,” address the distortions of fallen humanity—our tendency to make idols, betray and lie, murder and covet, all rooted in our persistent human desire to have other gods before the true God. But keeping Sabbath, along with honoring our father and mother, is one of the “thou shalts”—one of the positive things we would have been called to do even if we had never fallen into sin. Like family itself, Sabbath is rooted in the loving and creative purposes that brought the world into being.

Alas, of all the commandments, the Sabbath command may be the most persistently and casually broken. Just one generation ago, very few people went to work on a typical Sunday in America (except, of course, pastors!). Even now, fewer of us have to go to work on Sunday than other days. Some professional workplaces, notorious for their round-the-clock schedules, have even mandated a day off for their junior staff—Goldman Sachs and other New York financial firms introduced “protected weekend” policies in the early 2010s that are supposed to keep at least part of the weekend free from work demands.4 But for more and more of us, Sunday can easily become another workday. If you work at Starbucks, you’re as likely to be given a Sunday shift as any other day. And even if your workplace is technically closed on Sunday, thanks to technology, work follows us everywhere we go, every hour of every day.

And just as work (or toil) follows us into our day of rest, so does leisure. Netflix is always waiting to stream more entertainment into our home. Facebook keeps serving up more morsels of news, animated GIFs, and cute cat videos from our friends. It’s easy to let Sunday become one more day of toil and leisure (maybe, if we’re a churchgoing family, with the added stress of getting the whole family out the door at the same time in the morning, slightly better dressed and more polite than usual).

But there is a silver lining in the way technology has clouded our lives with nonstop toil and leisure—it gives us an amazingly simple way to bring everything to a beautiful halt. We can turn our devices off.

Close the laptop. Slide the little onscreen button on your phone to the right and watch its screen go not just blank but black.

For bonus points, unplug the power strip that keeps all your entertainment devices constantly listening, like hovering ghosts, for the silent voice of the remote control.

Suddenly, with the flick of a few switches, you have left the world of technology—at least its most commanding and demanding forms—entirely behind.

Your home is now eerily quiet—not so much aurally as visually. Nothing is glowing—you are back in the visual world human beings lived in for millennia, where almost all light was reflected rather than transmitted. Nothing is blinking or buzzing at you, and for the next few hours, nothing will.

Now, consider your options. The wide world is outside your door. Maybe it’s time for a walk, a run, a visit to the park or the playground. (At the playground, with phones left behind, parents may have to actually play too, rather than just hover at the edge tending to their devices while their children enjoy the fleeting years of physical engagement with dirt and grass and sky.)

Or maybe the weather outside is not appealing. There are still options—good ones.

There are books, some of them full of stories (leave the heavy-duty nonfiction for the rest of the week). Maybe it’s time to sit with one for longer than you normally would, or to read one aloud together.

Or there is the kitchen—maybe today is the day not just for one parent to rush nutrition to the table but to make something together, fresh bread or cookies or a roast or soup, that takes time and is actually rewarding to prepare. (Don’t forget the responsibility of cooks and children alike to sneak some tastes of cookie dough along the way!) Since (based on commitment number two) you have structured the central, most welcoming space of your home around the kinds of creative engagement that your family loves best, and with the screens dark around the edges of the house, the family will slowly but surely gravitate to that center. Especially if there are cookies.

Now, whatever the nature of your work during the week, you’ll be doing something both demanding and rewarding, restful and rejuvenating—something adults can enjoy and children can admire and aspire to learn.

And then, just as the Sabbath commandment expands to include not just parents and children but servants and immigrant neighbors, find ways to invite others along for the joy of refreshment and rest. One of our treasured family traditions is Sunday afternoon tea, a custom loosely borrowed from our British ancestors that is easier to prepare than a full Sunday dinner. Our daughter makes place cards and hand letters a menu. We slice up fruit, bake cookies and bread, make little sandwiches, brew a pot of tea (and maybe pour some still or sparkling wine along the way, too)—and many Sundays we invite friends or neighbors to join us. The adults love the lack of pressure to deliver (or clean up after) a hot meal, the children love a meal composed entirely of snacks, and we all love the conviviality of passing simple, tasty treats around the table, and around again.

This is meant to be—commanded to be—our life, one day a week and more. A life of abundance, gratitude, rest, and quiet. It will only happen if we choose it, but if we choose it, the experience of our family and many friends has been that God blesses it.

We think of Sabbath as a day, but in fact Sabbath was not just a day but an organizing principle for the Jewish people. It was a pattern of life that extended to the “Sabbath year,” one year every seven where fields lay fallow and the people were commanded to rest and worship, and to the “Jubilee year,” one year every forty-nine where debts were forgiven and indentured servants were freed. (I wrote more about this “Sabbath ladder” in my book Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power.)5 For us, too, Sabbath will be most powerful and helpful if we let its core pattern of work and rest become the defining pattern of our lives.

So I suggest a simple, minimal pattern of Sabbath: we choose to turn our devices off not just one day every week but also one hour (or more) every day and one week (or more) every year.

Build into every single day an hour, for everyone in the household, free from the promises and demands of our devices. For many of us, this will most naturally be the dinner hour. Few Americans, of course, sit at a weeknight dinner for a whole hour, but if we weren’t springing up from food hastily scarfed down to get back to the demands of homework and leftover office work, maybe our dinners would last a few minutes longer. However long we’re actually at the table, make it a daily practice to gather up the devices at the beginning of the hour, plug them all in (where they can have their own little feast on electrons), and leave them there, silenced and untouched, for sixty minutes. For families with small children, the better hour may be the hour just before bedtime, where baths and stories and cuddling can happen without digital distraction.

How many times per week does your family intentionally eat a meal together, either in your home or at a restaurant?

n = 1,009 US parents of children ages 4 to 17 who have family meals together at least once a week

How often do you or your spouse take calls or texts or do something else on your phone at the table during a family meal?

n = 683 US parents of children ages 4 to 17 who bring phones or other devices to meals

How often do your children take calls or texts or do something else on their phone at the table during a family meal?

n = 683 US parents of children ages 4 to 17 who bring phones or other devices to meals

At the other end of the time scale, there are very few better gifts we could give ourselves and our families than an entire week—at the very minimum—free of devices. Our family has had the great privilege of being able to take two solid weeks of vacation each summer while our children were growing up. On the Friday before that vacation, I clean out my email inbox, set up a filter that will send every single message straight to an archive, and activate a “vacation message” with the stark subject line, “Unfortunately I will never read your email.”

And it is gloriously true. For two solid weeks, my inbox stays completely empty. (Part of true rest is not having work accumulate relentlessly while you are resting!)

The days that follow are full—full of rest rather than work. We fill them with biking and hiking and grilling and reading and napping. Thanks to this annual Sabbath, we have memories of life together at every stage of our children’s lives, memories that we will remember longer than anything anyone might email me about during those two weeks. When I return after two weeks and deactivate the filter, my empty inbox quickly begins to fill again. But I have had two weeks of rest. Somehow the work ahead, and the year ahead, seems more like gift and less like toil than it did before my digital Sabbath.

Not everyone can take two weeks entirely off from work, as my wife and I can. Even fewer believe they can. But we need to be clear: Sabbathless toil is a violation of God’s intention for our lives and our whole economy. When we find ourselves in its grip, it means that we are slaves to a system of injustice. Sometimes that slavery is external to us and all too real—we are genuinely bound to systems of toil that prevent us from a healthy life, with no good option for escape.

This is certainly true for countless people in our world—not just those who toil at the very edge of subsistence in poor countries but also those who have to take multiple jobs to make ends meet in rich countries. Any serious commitment to Sabbath involves doing our best to ensure that the people who serve us—especially those who serve out of sight, not just the waitress but the dishwasher, not just the store cashier but the nightshift cleaning crew—are provided wages and benefits that allow for hourly, weekly, and yearly rhythms of rest.

But there is another form of slavery to systems of injustice, and that is the slavery of the imagination. Many of us are not as captive to round-the-clock, never-ending demands as we believe we are. Instead, we are our own jailers. We are prisoners of our own insecurity (Will I still have a job if I take two solid weeks of vacation?), pride (How can people get along without me?), fantasies (What if I miss an email telling me I’ve won the lottery?), and cultural capitulation (This is just how the world works now, isn’t it?). For us, the door to a better life is only locked from the inside. We prefer our brightly lit cage of toil and leisure (this cage, after all, comes with unlimited Netflix).

In this area, as in all of life, the path toward real freedom—including the freedom to actually choose freedom, rather than imprisoning ourselves in our too-small substitutes for real life—is to embrace disciplines. And that is what the practice of Sabbath, whether on a daily, weekly, or yearly basis, can be. The beautiful, indeed amazing, thing about all disciplines is that they serve as both diagnosis and cure for what is missing in our lives. They both help us recognize the exact nature of our disease and, at the very same time, begin to heal us from our disease.

The disease of toil and leisure goes all the way back to our first human parents. Technology makes it more acute and damaging. Fortunately, our devices still have an off switch (at least most of them, and at least for now). Once we have made the choice to give our devices a rest—once we have gotten over the crucial, core discomfort of declaring that we will not attend to them for extended periods, every single day, week, and year—we are far more likely to live with them in restful ways the rest of the time.

By the time of Jesus, the pursuit of religious Sabbath observance had become its own kind of toil, a demanding set of rules and obligations. “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath,” Jesus told the Pharisees (Mark 2:27). The biblical prohibition on work was life giving, but the thicket of rules about what exactly counted as “work” ended up being so dense and forbidding that the Pharisees were scandalized when Jesus healed the sick on the Sabbath. Something has gone wrong with our disciplines when we become more obsessed with the mechanics and mechanisms of fulfilling them than with the gift they are meant to give.

So we should be wary of legalism in the way we implement our hour, day, or week of (relative) technological freedom. But for most of us, the risk of legalism is far, far less of an issue than our nearly insatiable appetite for the easy everywhere that technology offers. When it comes to technology, most of us are more like alcoholics than we are like sourpussed teetotalers—and most of us desperately need an infusion of intentionality about technology into our lives more than we need release from overly limited, legalistic restrictions.

When the Pharisees complained about Jesus doing “work” by healing on the Sabbath, he pointed out that any of them would (rightly) do the “work” of rescuing an ox, let alone a child, that fell into a well on the Sabbath day. By all means, if technology will help us rescue someone who falls into a well, we should use it—even if it is during our precious week of vacation once a year. But we are already constantly telling ourselves how much we want to use technology for good. We are probably more at risk of being so distracted by our devices that we would fall into a well ourselves.

When I think about our family’s practice of daily, weekly, and yearly Sabbath, the phrase that comes to mind is, “It could be a lot worse.” Our annual vacation really is completely, totally, and joyfully email and social-media free—though our screens do come along (for tasks like checking weather, tracking bike rides, and planning recipes), and there are times when they turn from servants of our creativity into the same kinds of tedious distractions they are at home.

Sundays, too, are more often than not truly free of work and glowing rectangles. But I find myself too often letting Sunday slide from rest into leisure. Often that means mindlessly picking up a tablet to aimlessly read the news or peruse sports stories—even though I can, and do, indulge in that kind of leisure activity any day of the week—leaving the unique, screen-free possibilities of Sunday unexplored.

And as for the one hour a day, we do keep our dinner table free from devices. At least until the plates are mostly clear. Then, many nights, a trivia question or a family scheduling decision prompts someone to bring a device to the table. Sometimes the question is quickly answered and the device is shut off; other times it leads one or more of us into distraction. It’s rarely a full hour before the accumulated stress of the day propels us into the evening’s schoolwork, office work, and housework. But for at least a short time, we had a taste of the life we were meant for: conversation, conviviality, communion. It’s just enough.