As the year winds down, many of us start doing a quiet audit of the year that was and the year ahead. What drained us. What helped. What we want to carry forward and what we’d like to leave behind.
Increasingly, technology turns up in that thinking. Not because phones and social media are new, but because we’re tired. Tired of the constant pull, the endless news cycle, the reflex to scroll whenever there’s a spare moment. Doomscrolling rarely announces itself. It just settles in and you fall down rabbit holes and into the occasional echo chamber.
That weariness has been borne out in the idea of taking “digital sabbaths” — intentional pauses from screens and notifications, not as a rejection of technology, but as a way of reclaiming attention. A way of noticing when staying informed quietly becomes staying agitated.
Interestingly, none of this would have surprised C.S. Lewis.
Long before smartphones, Lewis was already uneasy about what he called “gadgetry.” He wasn’t alarmed by tools themselves, but by the way they distort perspective and value. In a 1956 letter responding to a man asking for spiritual advice about “motoring,” Lewis cut straight to the point:
“Of course enjoying equipment or motoring is not a sin. The point I wanted to make is that excessive excitement about gadgetry and the belief … that the possession of, say, wireless and aeroplanes somehow makes one superior to those who lack them … is bosh. My motto would be, ‘Have your toys, have your conveniences, but for heaven’s sake don’t start talking as if those things really mattered as, say, charity matters.’”
Let’s be clear, Lewis wasn’t condemning technology. He was exposing how easily it becomes a proxy for worth. The danger, he argued, isn’t the device, but the subtle pride it fosters and the way it distracts us from love and charity.
He went further, anticipating the obvious response — that perhaps the faithful solution is simply to give these things up. Lewis dismissed that too:
“As for ‘giving up’ things—well, when we’ve given up all our sins (the things everyone knows to be sins), we can think again! … The devil is fond of distracting us from our plain daily duties by suggesting vague and rather faddy ones.”
That line feels uncomfortably current. A digital detox can become its own performance, a fashionable substitute for the slower, less visible work of patience, attentiveness, and care. Lewis wasn’t interested in dramatic gestures. He was interested in obedience — in daily faithfulness expressed through love.
In this, Lewis is effectively reappropriating the apostle Paul’s reasoning that also feels weirdly prescient for a technological age. Paul’s insistence that “having” or “not having” certain things is ultimately beside the point but echoes clearly here. “Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing,” Paul wrote. “Keeping God’s commandments is what counts” (1 Corinthians 7:19). Lewis applies the same logic: owning gadgets is nothing; rejecting gadgets is nothing. What matters is loving one another.
That reframes the idea of a digital sabbath. It’s not about proving restraint. It’s about asking better questions. Does this device help me love others, or does it quietly train me to feel superior, distracted, or perpetually outraged? Does my scrolling make me more attentive to the people in front of me, or less? The answers to these questions are clearly self-evident.
Mindfulness, in this sense, isn’t retreat. It’s reorientation.
Choosing not to be endlessly available to everything, all the time, so we can be present to someone. A digital sabbath becomes less about absence and more about intention — about making room for attention, prayer, rest, and genuine connection.
Lewis reminds us that technology is neither saviour nor enemy. It is a tool, and tools reveal what we value.
When our devices pull us into cycles of fear, outrage, comparison, and doom, stepping back is not an act of rejection but of clarity and wellbeing. Not because gadgets don’t matter at all — but because, next to love, they matter far less than we’re often willing to admit.
