Shabbat Rituals Are *Critical* for Taming Work Anxiety | Deep Questions Podcast with Cal Newport
Chapters
0:0 Cal's intro0:53 What Cal believes in
2:30 Cal talks about traditions that survive
00:00:00.000 | Alright, so here's a non-baseball related question.
00:00:04.140 | We got Marguerite, who says, "What lessons can be learned from how modern Orthodox Jews
00:00:11.940 | who are found in every field navigate their Saturday Shabbat to abstain from any electronic
00:00:19.600 | inputs?"
00:00:20.600 | Well, I'm a big believer in the practice of Shabbat.
00:00:25.600 | I don't care as much about the super specifics of the rules, right?
00:00:31.040 | Like exactly what you can use or don't use, and does a combustion engine, is that going
00:00:36.280 | to count as creating energy, and can you turn on the light or not turn on the light?
00:00:40.440 | So I'm not too caught up in the specific rules that maybe if you were a modern Orthodox Jew,
00:00:45.120 | you might think about how do we interpret this versus a different level of observance.
00:00:50.440 | But the thing I'm a big believer in is the underlying idea here of having this day of
00:00:57.080 | rest for your mind to reset and to connect on other things that are important that aren't
00:01:02.120 | related to work and aren't related to the news.
00:01:05.480 | I think this is a fantastic ritual.
00:01:07.920 | What I think is important, this is what I more or less do, no work, no email, no digital
00:01:16.320 | news.
00:01:17.320 | So just all of those stimulating things, the outside world stimulating and trying to capture
00:01:22.640 | your mind, Friday sundown, Saturday sundown, take them out of your life.
00:01:28.320 | I think everyone could use that, and everyone could find some relief in not just being away
00:01:34.280 | from that, but rediscovering the things that that keeps them away from.
00:01:38.160 | Friday night, it can be family, you're connected to your family.
00:01:41.080 | The next day, it's activities, you go and do things, you read, but you're not in that
00:01:46.440 | peak state of anxious information consumption.
00:01:50.840 | So we do that.
00:01:51.920 | We do something like that, Friday sundown, Saturday sundown, and maybe we'll even refine
00:01:56.720 | that practice.
00:01:57.720 | But I think there's great wisdom there.
00:01:59.220 | And this should not be a surprise.
00:02:02.880 | It's something I talk about a fair amount, that wisdom traditions have a lot of wisdom
00:02:08.680 | to offer, because it is not just an arbitrary book.
00:02:15.960 | Wisdom traditions often, what you have here is ideas and thoughts and rituals and techniques
00:02:22.240 | and practices for living that have been battle tested in harder situations than you live
00:02:29.680 | in now.
00:02:31.040 | And a lot of stuff didn't survive, but the stuff that has survived, the stuff that we
00:02:35.480 | will consider revelation, give it that moniker, is the things that actually seem to work,
00:02:40.760 | the spiritual technologies that actually seem compatible with the way that the human mind
00:02:44.360 | and the human soul actually operates.
00:02:46.840 | There's a reason why the books stick around.
00:02:50.480 | It's why the Tanakh is still here, 2,800 years later, is because there's something deeply
00:02:58.160 | true about a lot of these ideas.
00:03:00.480 | So we shouldn't be surprised that in one of our oldest wisdom traditions still surviving,
00:03:05.220 | we find this idea, this idea that is laid down in Genesis.
00:03:08.000 | I mean, we're talking very old.
00:03:11.300 | God took the seventh day and he rested.
00:03:13.720 | There is wisdom in it that makes complete sense when now today in 2022, you put down
00:03:19.180 | the phone on Friday night and there is no Twitter and there is no Instagram and you're
00:03:24.480 | not scrolling for things and you're not checking through emails.
00:03:27.320 | There's a perspective, there's a peace, there's a calmness.
00:03:29.520 | I'm a big Shabbat fan, so I recommend it.
00:03:32.680 | [MUSIC]