On Circles & Summer Sabbaths ☀️

...because screen breaks rightly-order our loves

Walk Around the Island, by Childe Hassam (1890) #

There are so many essays and notes on Substack about going analog, ditching the smartphone, loving your offline life, and most tiresome to me—why Substack is “so different” than the rest of the internet and is therefore The Place to Be because it’s for people who believe all the above—that I hesitate to write yet another piece explaining why I love my annual screen sabbaths so much.

You’ve already read my words about these breaks. I’ve had multiple discussions on podcasts about why I depend on these hiatuses (hiati? Ooh, good new word). I don’t need to belabor the points yet again. So I won’t. Not really, anyway.

Before I bid you a fond farewell (for a mere six weeks this time), I’ll leave you with a benefit to screen breaks that I don’t think I’ve explained much in writing yet. To set the stage, I’ll quickly remind you (and me) of the general parameters of a good screen sabbath—or, at least how I do mine:

• No social media—including Substack Notes (I swear, people wax poetic on there how it’s so very different from Instagram or X, and while yes, generally the conversation is more pleasant, I promise you its still built on the same addictive rubric and still delivers the same facade of connection without real, in-person community </rant>).

• No internet scrolling in general (except for book-writing research in my case this summer—which will indeed require some hard parameters). This means no YouTube, Pinterest, Wikipedia, or what-have-you rabbit holes that serve no purpose other than blatant curiosity (in the worst sense of that word).

• No screens as downtime, within reason. Meaning, the good-ol’ standard family movie night on the bigger screen is perfectly legit, but not streaming a Home Town rerun on my laptop as I fold laundry.

• These breaks last anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, with every seven years an entire summer (like my break last year). The length depends on my mental health, family calendar, and current personal take on the internet. I always regret it whenever I choose to make my breaks three weeks or shorter; I never regret several months or longer. Interesting.

• ...And since I'm book writing this summer, ‘screen sabbath’ is a bit of a misnomer, since I’m really talking about the internet more than a literal screen. Hey, I’m no Wendell Berry (though I am typing this first on my Remarkable tablet¹, as I tend to do more and more with writing projects—such as my current book project). “Screen sabbath” just has an alliterative quality to it, you know?

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These ingredients comport my annual Summer Screen Sabbath, in a nutshell. With that in mind, here’s a quick unpacking of the benefit I’m eluding to.

Circles of Concern, Influence, and Control

This is an idea featured in Stephen Covey’s famous The 7 Habits of Highly-Effective People.

source

The Circle of Concern includes things we care about and can become easily influenced by, such as global news, larger community events, and people in our lives with whom we interact at an either superficial or distant level.

The Circle of Influence includes things we can directly impact through our actions and attitudes: think the activities and relationships with members of our household, the lives of our closer friends, people who directly benefit from our work, and the like.

The Circle of Control includes exclusively—well, things we can control. Which is surprisingly little. But this includes our own responses to things in the two other circles, our personal choices and actions, and generally how we think.

For optimal health, we should prioritize first our inner Circle of Control, followed by our Circle of Influence, and finally our Circle of Concern. But investing too much time online tempts to flip this: to prioritize the Circle of Concern, followed by Influence, then Control at the very bottom of the list.

For most of human history, people in, say, Ireland didn’t have one iota of a clue about any current political upheaval in Japan. We didn’t have any access to the opinions or thought processes of someone who lived 10,000 miles away from us. Heck, we barely knew the daily news from the next village over.

Now, the internet affords us the “luxury” of knowing what John Doe said about the such-and-such thing some so-and-so politician said in another country, instantaneously and off the cuff. Interesting, perhaps, but does his thought really affect my personal life? No. Or, at least it shouldn’t.

Likewise, the internet tempts us to believe that our Circle of Influence, the second circle, must include people who only know us through the internet, and therefore we place an unhealthy weight on the things we say and do online to the detriment of our immediate offline surroundings. We (and I include myself here) are tempted to place too much value on something we say online and not enough value on paying full and total attention to our friend across the table from us at the coffee shop.

And with this in mind, because we’ve invested far too much emotional energy on our Circles of Concern and Influence, we have mere breadcrumbs left to feed our Circle of Control, where we should actually invest our best efforts: our interior life, what we consume, how we care for our bodies, and the like.

All this to say: By the time I wind down an annual screen sabbath and return to engaging on the internet, my circles have usually been reset to a right order. Or, at least toward a much more rightly-ordered system. You might even say rightly-ordered loves, a la St. Augustine. Virtue.

I desperately need this screen sabbath because it reminds me what’s mine to control, what’s most important that I influence, and what to do with what concerns me most. There’s a good and healthy order to these things, and I’m too easily swayed by what’s out there to get it out of order. I want to live a life of virtue.

If you find yourself even remotely head-nodding to any of this in solidarity, I encourage you to schedule some version of a screen sabbath soon. It doesn’t have to look like mine; I get that many people aren’t self-employed and can’t set parameters as freely as I can—but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still be the boss of you. (This was an interesting recent comment from Lacey, a reader who works a screen-based job yet finds a way to practice regular screen sabbaths.)

Make a list of what you can let go of temporarily, and test out the waters of actually letting it go, even for a short while. You might be genuinely surprised at the benefits, as well as how much less you thought you “needed” to keep yourself in the fray of whatever-that-is.

I promise you, it’s worth it.

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With this, I’m briefly closing out the internet and will return in mid-August. I’ll have shortened summer versions of 5 Quick Things sent to your mailbox as usual on Fridays, but otherwise you won’t hear from me for about six weeks. As I experience every single year: you'll barely miss me and won’t care one whit that I’m temporarily gone, and the readers I care about most (the ones who understand the benefits of a screen break) will be there to welcome me back when I return. There’s very little to lose and so much to gain.

I’m grateful for you reading this! Grateful to have work I can control like this, grateful to weave words together as my job, and grateful that you’ve found what I have to say even a smidge interesting. Almost twenty years into writing online, and I still pinch myself that I get to do this.

Many, many blessings on your summer—I’ll see you soon,

-Tsh

1. If you’re curious, my setup is this with this—I’ve used this daily for several years now. It’s been 100% worth it for me.