When mainstream society wants to create a tool for resisting the creep of technology into daily life, it often simply appropriates religious traditions. One frequently cited spiritual “cure” is Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest during which Orthodox Jews like myself refrain from using anything powered by electricity, including computers, phones, and TVs (we also don’t travel, cook, or tear toilet paper).

It’s not hard to see why social media-weary folks view the concept as a tantalizing panacea for the Instagram-ization of life; in the past decade, so many essays have been published proclaiming Shabbat as the answer—not only to tech saturation but to work-life balance issues and the mental fraying caused by both—that they nearly comprise their own subgenre. Here’s Andrew Sullivan, in his 2016 New York Magazine essay “My Distraction Sickness”: “We can, if we want, re-create a digital Sabbath each week—just one day in which we live for 24 hours without checking our phones.” And Samantha Mann, over at Romper: “I’ve always liked the notion of purposefully slowing down … [so] Why not try a social-media-free Shabbat?” And this one, from the Reverend Doctor Donna Schaper, on infusing all aspects of your life with a Shabbat energy: “We find ourselves ready for a spiritual transition for the realities we face.  We find ourselves seeking—and needing—new ways of keeping Sabbath.” Social media is rife with people invoking the practice of the Sabbath, often against the soothing pastel backgrounds beloved by yoga aficionados or alongside pictures of paintbrushes or self-help books. By the look of it, Shabbat is undergoing the same secularizing process as mindfulness meditation and psychedelics, in which an ancient spiritual practice is drained of its religious substance and repackaged as a wellness mechanism.

I understand that everyone is hungry for boundaries around tech usage, which are sorely needed and have proven very difficult to formulate and enforce. But efforts to invent a Shabbat outside the religious paradigm are largely doomed to fail, for a host of small practical reasons and one really giant, philosophical one.

First, the observant Jewish community has successfully maintained Shabbat over thousands of years precisely because it’s practiced in a community, one that operates with particular norms and expectations. On any given Shabbat, my family will attend synagogue, take naps, read, and engage in religious study. We have friends over for long, leisurely meals or are welcomed as guests ourselves. During this time, we can be confident that because our neighbors are largely shomer Shabbat as well, no conversation will be interrupted by persistent beeps signaling the arrival of a text message, and no one will be forced to sit like a bored schoolchild as their companions take a moment to scroll through Facebook updates.

There is a serendipitous nature to the day, when you can bump into someone en route to another location and decide to stroll together, be spontaneously invited over for a meal, or lounge around drinking coffee with friends, agenda-less, as the afternoon light wanes. But as a freelance Shabbat practitioner, you would likely experience only a pale imitation of this. The first few years of my Shabbat observance, I lived in a secular Brooklyn neighborhood and spent a great deal of time explaining to my largely nonreligious peers what they should do if they couldn’t find me at the designated meeting spot at the park on Saturday afternoon, or trying to suppress eye rolls when a friend held an iPhone aloft because I just had to see a recent meme that was making the rounds. And trust me, such an adulterated repose is simply not the same. Many Jews refer to Shabbat as an “island in time,” a riff on an idea in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s love letter of a book, The Sabbath. But if you do Shabbat alone, your island is a deserted one.

Perhaps you don’t really mind this isolation, as it’s better than the alternative, which is all doomscrolling, all the time. Perhaps you’ve read somewhere that Shabbat is a “day of rest,” and so the only thing that really matters to you is that your eyes get a vacation from brain-deadening blue light. But a shallow knowledge of the practice will likely lead to its ultimate collapse because you’ll be aiming for the wrong thing, the rest itself. I’ve always thought that “rest” was a rather misleading shorthand for the purpose of the day because when people hear it, they think of “relaxing,” which isn’t exactly correct. Shabbat is restorative, but it isn’t necessarily relaxing, in part because the lead-up to it tends to be frenetic—ironing tablecloths, cooking multiple meals in advance—but also because it usually involves a lot of socializing. Instead, I think of Shabbat as more like exercise: It can feel daunting to carve out time for it, you don’t always instantaneously achieve a meditative flow state, but you recognize it as an objective good, and you always feel better when you’ve done it.