Last week I offered some reasons to consider fasting from digital media for Lent, as well as some tips for how to go about doing that. You might think a digital fast sounds like an excellent idea ā or you may be unconvinced. Let's talk aboutĀ it!
One thing I want to avoid is becoming the āanti-techā guy in your inbox because thatās just not me. I built my own PC just out of high school, been a gamer for years, and get very excited when there are new updates for my favourite apps. I love modern technology, I just think a lot of it is broken.
Which explains the exchange I had with one of the hosts of the Device & Virtue podcast below:
Neil Postmanās phrase is actually āloving resistance fighter,ā but tweets fired out between tasks at work often miss their marks. Still, the spirit of the aphorism comes through. I want technology to be better than it is, not because itās always bad but because I think it can be very, very good. It needs recovery. It needs redemption.
So hereās my question for this edition of Discussion Threads:
Are fasts in general, and digital fasts in particular, valuable if they donāt result in a fundamental change of habit?
Absolutely - and I love the question. Fasts can serve various purposes. Traditional fasting (from eating) can be done for health reasons or spiritual reasons, in the former case (either case, really) it's part of a routine cycle and the goal is not to train us to eat less outside of the fasting period (quite the opposite, in fact). Similarly there's probably a ton of benefit to digital fasting in a way that's not sustainable in everyday life, and frequently not meant to be sustainable.
I've always seen fasts during Lent as serving the opposite purpose: depriving ourselves of something that is purely good and valuable, in order to focus attention elsewhere - more similar to meditation. I actually avoid giving up things like alcohol for Lent because I don't want to think of it as a self-improvement effort. (I've usually given up caffeine or meat, two things that I consider 100% good and thus would never give up for any other reason)
Absolutely - and I love the question. Fasts can serve various purposes. Traditional fasting (from eating) can be done for health reasons or spiritual reasons, in the former case (either case, really) it's part of a routine cycle and the goal is not to train us to eat less outside of the fasting period (quite the opposite, in fact). Similarly there's probably a ton of benefit to digital fasting in a way that's not sustainable in everyday life, and frequently not meant to be sustainable.
I've always seen fasts during Lent as serving the opposite purpose: depriving ourselves of something that is purely good and valuable, in order to focus attention elsewhere - more similar to meditation. I actually avoid giving up things like alcohol for Lent because I don't want to think of it as a self-improvement effort. (I've usually given up caffeine or meat, two things that I consider 100% good and thus would never give up for any other reason)