A Review of Spacemaker

I read Spacemaker: How to Unplug, Unwind, and Think Clearly in the Digital Age by Daniel Sih earlier this year. Here are some thoughts.

I have struggled to write this review for days now and I don’t know why. When you devour a book in two days, opening Kindle and ignoring all else, you know the book is good.

So why am I taking the Struggle Bus to publish this post?

I don’t know, so let’s just go. And I’ll write to you like I’m talking to my friend Andrea or my bonus daughter Kati… and we’ll forget about being eloquent. (Hi ladies!)

I found Spacemaker by Daniel Sih by accident. I googled books about unplugging to prove a point — that there are a lot of them — and to have a few to site when I was writing this post.

The Noise of the internet is loud from my seat, and I know an election year will only make it worse if I don’t prepare myself. Noise and understanding amid the noise are things at odds.

When you can’t distinguish noise from intelligible language, life gets tricky. Someone close to me wears hearing aids, at a younger age than most people do, so I understand this on a more visceral level. And I see the similarities with the interwebs.

If it becomes more noise than distinguishable message, life gets fuzzy and confusing. That’s why I wrote the Noise post.

And how I ended up in google (ironically) searching for books to turn down the noise.

Spacemaker was the top image result in the SERPs for “books about unplugging”, so I looked into it, found that the library didn’t own it, discovered it on Kindle Unlimited, and dove in for 2 days straight.

I’m not sure I’ve ever highlighted more of a book than this one. So many things resonated with me. I’ve even purchased a paper copy to add to the homeschool bookshelf, now part of the required reading for our high school graduates.

It’s had me thinking about all kinds of things:

• how I spend my days, from sunup to sundown, and is it good for me and my people?
• how real life contact with friends (as opposed to social media) is actually better for your physical health – who knew?! — and I’m so glad to be actively pursuing deep, valuable friendships.
• Who am I? Who do I want to be? Do my habits reflect my values? What are the consequences of continuing the way I am going? Do I like who I am becoming, and how do I make space to become the woman God wants me to be? (page 25)

This book got me thinking about the idea of digital minimalism and what that would look like in my life. I’m more addicted to TV shows than Facebook, so I don’t know that I’m a textbook case, but I consume media and that certainly isn’t all there is in life.

It’s also spurned me to think about more intentional rest and what is restful for me. At first I tried a nonconventional rest day on Mondays but that didn’t really work. As it would happen, our church blip ended and it now makes more sense to enjoy a true Sabbath.

That said, in Spacemaker, he actually differentiates between a rest day and sabbath and advocates for both!

But even more important than my digital life and my rest days, reading Spacemaker has led to all kinds of thinking about my life, my identity in my work, and what does life look like without that? They’ve been interesting questions to ponder.

I don’t have answers, just lots of questions, but I’m thankful for the jump start the book has given me.

A few notes about reading Spacemaker:

• The author is Australian so some of the examples and stats he sites are specific to that nation. If you’re not used to reading books from other cultures (and yes, the USA is a culture of its own), this is a good change. It’s not so much that there’s much different, other than a chance to check any Ameri-centrism at the door. 😀
• Mr Sih is also a Christian. He weaves his faith into his writing in a very gentle way, without sounding preachy. His beliefs are clear. I like how he works this in in footnotes from time to time as well as in the main text. That said, I disagree on who the hero is in Elijah v. the prophets of Baal. The hero is God, of course. 😜

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