The Winter of Our Disconnect Read online

  January 18

  I let there be light. Also power.

  And it was very, very good.

  B., capering around kitchen: “Electricity is awesome! Electricity is awesome!” Switched on microwave just to hear the beeps and danced away again.

  A: “I don’t care if I NEVER have my computer, as long as I can read in my bedroom with the fan and the lights on.”

  S. “visiting” again today. “I miss Hazel,” she explains. Uh huh.

  The Beast returned from its wanderings. Lies defeated in the hallway, as if to say, “Look on my graphics capability, all ye mighty, and despair!”

  Straightened hair slowly and with deep, soul-satisfying enjoyment. Baked muffins (corn).

  Electricity was still awesome the next day, and remained awesome for many weeks to come. Yet as withdrawal periods go, we got off pretty lightly, I think. No one broke out in a cold sweat or hallucinated visits from the ghosts of playlists past. But the darkness drove us apart in some ways. There was Sussy’s departure, most spectacularly. And frankly we all sought our own places of refuge: in friends’ houses or movie theaters, at the town pool, or in Wi-Fi-enabled cafés on Fremantle’s cappuccino strip. My own little haven was a certain rocky outcrop on the northernmost corner of South Beach, where I spent hours reading Walden and hiding my frizzy bangs. And that was okay. After all, that was a major part of the plan: to pry us out of our respective digital cells and into that e-mail-free zone called “life itself.”

  Anyhow, as Thoreau himself reminded us, “How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?” Now that the lights were back on, the real fun (if that’s what you want to call it) was about to begin.

  » 3

  Boredom for Beginners

  Don’t just do something. Stand there!

  —ANONYMOUS

  That very first morning, I awoke to the sound of birdsong. “Shiznit!” I muttered. (Living with three teenagers isn’t a vocabulary builder.)

  Leaning across to turn down the volume on the CD player—that frigging Balinese relaxation CD was getting on my nerves—I suddenly realized. OMG. The birds were live. It was everything else that was dead: my alarm clock, the fan over my bed, the lights, the appliances, and every medium and device that we owned. From the family room, the usual sounds of a Sunday morning were conspicuously—almost creepily—absent.

  No MTV. No Video Hits. No burst of antiaircraft fire or charge from a sniper’s bullet. No pinging or bleeping or—barring the magpie—chirping of any kind.

  To be honest, part of me was weirded out. But another part of me, possibly my middle ear, trembled with something that might have been joy. I recalled Thoreau’s words about the healing power of quietude: “There are many fine things we cannot say if we have to shout.” At that moment, I felt such a rush of gratitude and certainty. I knew, deep down in my soul, that what we were doing was right, and long overdue. I lay there, soaking up the silence, practically pillowed in it, when there was a knock on my door.

  “Mum!” the voice thundered.

  I sank under the covers, cowering like some large maternal ostrich.

  “Muuum, I’m bored.” It was Bill, a towel slung over his shoulders, demanding to be taken to the water-polo pool. It seems he’d spent “like an hour” already rereading Harry Potter, and his screen-free options were now exhausted. I’m sure there were many fine things I could have said without shouting. I just couldn’t remember what they were.

  One hour down, only 4,379 to go. Oh, boy.

  After we’d packed away our technology, I spent hours disentangling stuff, getting uncomfortably up close and personal with the snarl of cables, connectors, and tufts of pug fur that lurked behind our workstations. Bleugh! Who knew it was such a mess back there? When the job was finally finished, I felt—to use my daughters’ favorite verb—cleansed. Over the next six months, I spent many more hours disentangling my ideas about our technology, separating out assumptions from observations, unraveling articles of faith (and hope) from inconvenient truths. Bleugh! Who knew it was such a mess in there?

  Boredom was one of the first knots I encountered. And it was boredom that got me thinking about Sir Don Bradman.

  As every American schoolchild knows the story of George Washington, every Australian kid learns the story of Don Bradman, a little boy from the bush who didn’t grow up to be prime minister, but something much, much more important. Captain of the Australian cricket team. To be fair, Bradman wasn’t just any cricketer. He was the God of cricket. The greatest and most beloved batsman in the history of the game.

  Bradman was born in 1908 and raised in country New South Wales—the original “back o’ beyond.” Legend has it that the young Don had no cricket ball or even a bat, but only a golf ball and a stick, which he batted devotedly and not a little compulsively against a rainwater tank in the long, hot, dusty afternoons.

  “At the time it had no meaning,” Bradman later admitted. “I was just enjoying myself. I had no idea that I was training my eyesight and movements.” By the age of twelve, Bradman was declared a child prodigy of cricket. His career batting average of 99.94 is widely acknowledged as the greatest statistical achievement in any sport.

  All because he was so lavishly talented? Or all because he was so lavishly ... bored?

  Boredom is something the Winter of Our Disconnect gave us plenty of time to ponder. It was there from the first moment I’d imagined The Experiment, one day toward the end of 2008 when I’d been having another in a long series of conversations with the back of my son’s head. He was playing Jason and the Argonauts without a pause as he pretended to listen to me. Don’t ask me how you can tell this from the back of a person’s head, but trust me, you can.

  It’s like talking on the phone to someone who’s reading their e-mail. There’s a hooded quality to their voice that’s kind of the vocal equivalent of a blank stare or a busy signal. I don’t remember exactly what I was trying to talk to Bill about that day. It could have been anything. Whether he’d fed the dog. Whether he believed in a personal savior. Whether he planned to turn around and make eye contact before the end of the financial year. Whatever it was, the grunts I was getting by way of reply were setting my teeth on edge, like a borrowed mouthguard.

  Anni was behind me, stationed with her laptop at the so-called craft table. A few years back, when its indestructible, recycled pine-plank surface was still hidden under a happy clutter of paints and scissors, glitter and smoking glue guns, the name made sense. By 2008, it had been years since the craft table had been used for anything more craftsmanlike than inserting a thumb drive, and only a few stray deposits of fossilized Play-Doh remained to mark the passing of an era.

  Sussy sprawled on the couch with her Nintendo DS, I remember, playing some weirdly addictive Japanese cooking game that was all the rage with her Year 9 classmates. (“It develops skills, Mum,” she’d huffed the last time I’d ventured to criticize it. “You try frying eggs on a screen this size!”) Beside her, Rupert looked on benignly, yet with a touch of anxiety—something you can generally count on a pug to do.

  “What would life be like,” I heard myself mutter, “without all this crap?” No one looked up.

  “What would life be like,” I repeated, more loudly this time, “if all our screens suddenly went blank—if we just pulled the plug on the whole shootin’ match?”

  Maybe it was the word “shootin’” that did it. Who knows? But Bill responded with a full sentence. In fact, he almost turned around.

  “It would be boring, that’s what,” he replied.

  “IT’S ... BORING ... NOW!” I wanted to shriek.

  I gazed from one set of flying fingers and glazed eyeballs to the next. They say you shouldn’t shout at a sleepwalker. I decided to try a different tack.

  “Maybe being bored isn’t such a bad thing,” I ventured.

  “And maybe it is,” he replied, right on cue. I asked for that.

  “Anyway, what does ‘bori
ng’ really mean, Bill? Like, what did people do with themselves before computers, or for that matter before Gutenberg?” There was a pause.

  “As if Police Academy has anything to do with it,” Suss muttered. Sad to say, it wasn’t a quip. I soldiered on.

  “Like, was everybody just ‘bored’ all the time, or what?”

  “They probably were, Mum, but they just didn’t know it,” Bill responded, a bit uncertainly. He went back to hitting somebody over the head with a mace, but I could tell he was thinking about it.

  Quite obviously, boredom is all about perception. It’s a self-diagnosis, pure and simple. If you don’t realize you’re bored, you’re not. For a few minutes all you could hear was the sound of Sussy’s virtual eggs frying in their virtual frying pan.

  “Because if they weren’t bored,” Bill added at last, “why would they have invented the computer, or whatever, in the first place?”

  Ah! So it was possible to think and smite the enemy at the same time. Impressive.

  Bill’s point—basically, that boredom might be construed as the impetus for achievement rather than as an obstacle to it—made intuitive sense (and, given that he’d lent unexpected support to my own case, I was gracious enough to acknowledge that at the time). Months later, when I started to investigate the topic more systematically, I discovered how spot-on his hunch actually was. The role of boredom in encouraging innovation and creativity is a critical one. It’s not only history that teaches us this—like the story of Sir Don and his bionic batting eye—but the evidence of our own life experience. So why have so many of us forgotten this simple truth: that motivation begins with discomfort—with needs that are unfulfilled?

  “Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion,” observed eighteenth-century man of letters Samuel Johnson. “And he whose wants are supplied must admit those of fancy.” Which is arguably where the virtual fried eggs come in.

  It’s like the joke about the nice Jewish boy who still lives at home at the age of forty, and has never spoken a word to anyone—until one night at the dinner table, he suddenly says, “Could you pass the salt, please?” His amazed parents cry out in wonder. “My son! You can speak! But tell us, why have you never spoken before?”

  The son shrugs. “Up to now, everything’s been fine.”

  Twentieth-century philosopher William Barrett was getting at pretty much the same thing when he observed our primal need to see the universe as being “rich in unsolved problems.” Without that perception, Barrett argued, we feel at loose ends, literally purposeless and maybe even panicky—like my mother obsessing over the laundry while she’s supposed to be living it up on a Caribbean cruise (“I can’t meet you at the pool till I’ve washed and hung out my underwear,” she’d tell my dad in all seriousness) or, for that matter, my “retired” father keeping meticulous records of his personal-best lawn-mowing times. Post-Experiment, I can see that the games that once absorbed so much of my kids’ hard-drive space were functioning in the same way: creating imaginary problems to solve in an existence unnaturally and possibly dangerously deficient in real ones.

  The problem of having unfulfilled needs—or would that be a blessing?—made me think about social entrepreneur David Bussau, who’d been awarded the honor of Senior Australian of the Year around the time Bill and I started sparring over the uses of boredom. In fact, I’d just interviewed Bussau and read his biography, so the details were fresh in my mind.

  A construction magnate who amassed a multimillion-dollar fortune by the time he was thirty, Bussau is the cofounder of Opportunity International, a global microfinance initiative that provides small business loans to individuals in developing nations. Like Dr. Muhammad Yunus, who won a Nobel Prize for similar work, Bussau believes self-determination, not charity, is the way to transform lives and local economies. But perhaps the most amazing thing about this man, who is now in his sixties, is that he has achieved all this despite growing up as an orphan—abandoned first by his father, then relinquished by his mother. In his view, however, he has achieved all this because he grew up as orphan. “The fact that my parents abandoned me was probably the greatest gift they could have given me,” he told me.

  I’d found this mind-blowing. Yet when I shared it with the kids, they were unfazed. “I can understand that,” Anni said. “It’d be kind of fun to have the house all to myself.”

  I closed my eyes. Really, what do you say? Their only experience of “abandonment” was being left for the night with a babysitter who refused to serve them hot chocolate in bed.

  Now, obviously no one would advocate leaving your kids on the doorstep of an institution. (Fantasize about, yes. Advocate, no.) And, Lord knows, Bussau’s perception is an unusual one. Many children would be, and have been, crushed by similar circumstances. But the truth is, many haven’t—and some have thrived.

  Frankly, even acknowledging this as a possibility seems a subversive thought. The whole notion of allowing children to tough things out for themselves has disappeared from our parenting without a backward glance. And that very much includes finding a personal solution to the personal problem of boredom. “A man must assume the moral burden of his own boredom,” admonished Samuel Johnson. Yet as parents, and perhaps particularly as mothers, we tend to assume the moral burden of everyone’s boredom.

  I’d been listening to my kids bleat on about being bored practically from the moment of conception. If their ultrasound photos had a caption, I have no doubt it would have been: “Muuuuum, there’s nothing to dooooooooooooooo in here!”

  I often think about our first big trip to the States, when they were seven, five, and three. Just for the record, getting from Perth, Western Australia, to my sister’s place on eastern Long Island takes twenty-eight solid hours of travel, twenty-four of them airborne. When traveling with children, the kid-chill factor makes it feel much, much longer. On this particular trip, we left for the airport by taxi in the wee hours of the morning, wending our way through the neighborhood until we reached the main highway—a distance of perhaps five blocks. At the red light, the baby tugged on my sleeve. “Are we in New York yet?” she lisped. “’Cause I’m bored!”

  The assumption that it was my job to remedy life’s boring bits (or, preferably, to prevent them) had never seriously been questioned—by any of us. I don’t think that makes our family particularly unusual.

  Boredom is a big issue for parents today. Not just listening to kids complain about boredom—but responding to those complaints. Taking responsibility for those complaints. And, perhaps above all, throwing technology at those complaints. Somewhere along the line, providing “stimulation” became a key aspect of our job description. The belief that a stimulated child is an advantaged child is so widely shared we rarely bother to articulate it. So too, of course, is its corollary: that a bored child is an at-risk child. In fact, the moral imperative to keep our kids occupied or suffer the consequences is one of those unexamined articles of faith that has helped to make modern parenting such a minefield of misplaced guilt and misdirected resources. (Baby Einstein, anybody?)

  Even before The Experiment, I’d started to wonder whether we’d been confusing “plugging in” with “switching on”; whether boredom—far from being the enemy of all that is educational—might turn out to be our friend.

  When we contemplated taking the leap of faith into screen-free living, there were many things we feared. Gaining weight. Losing friends. “Missing out” (in some vague but disquieting way). But our greatest fear of all was the one that Bill had articulated right from the git-go: that without our media, we’d be bored.

  How ridiculous. Of course we were bored. Paradoxically, though, we found reconnecting with our inner blank slate wasn’t nearly as gruesome as we’d feared, once we got the hang of it and rediscovered the lost art of staring into space. And allowing ourselves to be “in the moment” with boredom did motivate us—each in different ways—to discover ways to plug up the gaping, screen-sized holes in our imaginations.


  For my part, I amused myself by turning to the study of boredom. I read most of Patricia Meyer Spacks’s compulsively interesting Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind on the train (the looks I got from my fellow passengers were pretty entertaining too). Along the way, I learned that boredom is first and foremost an idea—a set of beliefs and values. Boredom is not a universal experience—like hunger, or the urge for straight bangs—but a product of culture. And a fairly recent product of culture at that. In fact, the word “boredom” did not even exist until the eighteenth century. And some historians argue that the concept of boredom, and by extension the experience of it, didn’t either.

  For that matter, “interesting” (in its current sense) was also an eighteenth-century innovation, making its first appearance in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey in 1768. “If life was never boring in pre-modern times,” notes Spacks, “neither was it thrilling, interesting or exciting, in the modern sense of these words.”1 That’s different from saying that people did not, by Bill’s standards or yours or mine, experience these states of mind. One thinks of the sheer tedium (to us) of agricultural tasks such as hoeing or planting or harvesting—or of old-fashioned rote-learning of poetry, or Bible verses or times tables. Such activities may not have been precisely relished, but to have experienced them as “boring” implies the existence of an alternative. A better offer forgone. In the absence of such an alternative, you might feel blank or unmotivated or, as we say, “on autopilot.” But when there really and truly is nothing better to do, you are unlikely to feel bored.

  When my kids were babies, I found staying at home and being a “housewife”—despite the fact that I was divorced (LOL) and despite the fact that I felt I was doing “the right thing”—to be supremely boring much of the time. My mother never did. At least partly, this is because I could imagine other options.