The Winter of Our Disconnect (11 page)

Don’t get me wrong. I still think the App Store is among the greatest secular miracles of our age—and when I read somewhere in the second trimester of The Experiment about its billionth-download milestone, I paused for a moment of silence and longing. But I am reluctantly mindful of Thoreau’s warning that “our inventions are wont to be pretty toys which distract our attention from serious things.” Not that I ever really confused my virtual Zippo lighter for the torch of learning or anything, but the human capacity to be seduced and sedated by bright, shiny objects should never be underestimated. The Canarsie Indians who sold Manhattan for $24 worth of trinkets are still our spiritual brothers.

When my own trinkets were taken away, I whiled away many an abruptly empty hour considering how the flight from boredom, so-called, has been systematically impoverishing all our imaginations. I’d certainly taken the “boredom defense” at face value, accepting uncritically that my children “needed” stimulation; that without it they’d be deprived—and, by implication, potentially destructive or intrusive. Like so many other modern parents, I’d taken it as a given that even tiny babies experience boredom. I never stopped to ask myself exactly what that meant. Like, when a three-month-old watches her fist as if it were the latest episode of
Scrubs
, what on earth can boredom mean?

I recalled in high-resolution, cringe-making detail how unhesitatingly I’d diagnosed a case of premature boredom when Anni was that age and had trouble settling for naps. The interior of her crib must be too dull for her twelve-week-old sensibilities, I decided—its raucous profusion of music boxes, mobiles, activity toys, and stuffed animals ranging from teddy bears to stingrays (seriously, the kid had a stuffed stingray) notwithstanding. I was encouraged in this delusion by Penelope Leach, whose book
Your Baby and Child
was pretty much The Dummy’s Guide to Motherhood of its day.

Leach’s view was that “fussy” babies, as she called them, were simply understimulated babies trying to communicate a need for better programming options. She was big on DIY boredom-busters, such as mobiles of dangling tea bags and Christmas balls and teaspoons, or “whatever is to hand.”

I made one out of child-safe fishing tackle that would have put Alexander Calder to shame ... in so many ways. I staged mini-puppet shows, and worked for hours creating entertaining balloon faces. My masterwork—a yellow skull-shaped number grimacing as if from sleep deprivation—was something of a self-portrait.

Baby Anni’s resolute failure to be amused by any of it suggested (to me and to Penelope, anyhow) that I simply wasn’t trying hard enough. Leach hinted openly that difficult babies were probably super-intelligent. It took me some months to wake up to the fact that, regardless, she was also super-exhausted. She didn’t need more entertainment. She needed less. Like mother, like daughter: She needed to sleep.

Boredom is a bit like spastic colitis. It is massively overdiagnosed. Also like spastic colitis, we forget that it is essentially an effect, not a cause. Patricia Meyer Spacks refers to the word boredom’s “capacity to blur distinctions.” When we say something is “boring,” it is “an all-purpose term of disapproval.”
⁴
It’s not dissimilar to describing a baby’s crying as “colic”—or for that matter an adult’s failure to thrive as a case of “low self-esteem.” Spacks, who happens to be a mother as well as a scholar, notes how often boredom is invoked as a screen for more difficult emotions within family life. She refers to “the hidden aggression—every mother knows it—in proclamations of boredom.”
⁵
Boredom implies victimhood, and even a quasi-self-righteous anger directed at the perceived source of the deprivation (i.e., you!).

An inability or unwillingness to engage may be a side effect of physical fatigue, as we’ve just observed. Children who are sleep-deprived find
everything
boring (just as their mothers and fathers do). Less obviously, boredom may also mask
fear
: the fear of failing at some new undertaking, for example, or within a new social setting. Boredom can be erected almost as a shield, a force field protecting us from potential psychic harm. As the expression “numb with boredom” suggests, it can also function as a kind of psychic anesthetic. The real source of discomfort is blunted, or supplanted altogether—which is why, over the long term, addressing boredom by treating it with escalating doses of “entertainment” is a dodgy excuse for a cure. Interestingly, psychoanalysts have observed that boredom and clinical depression are closely related. “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!” moaned Hamlet. Translation: “Muuum ... I’m bored!”

My own experience with boredom also suggests a connection to loss of control. Sitting trapped in a classroom, or at the laundromat, or on a station platform, or in a long-term relationship, or even a perfectly nice foreign country, may be labeled “boring”—but it’s really frustration borne of powerlessness. The resentment we feel at such times may get massaged into something more passive, more socially acceptable. Instead of getting mad, we zone out. In situations where, on the contrary, we perceive we do have what psychologists call “locus of control”—regardless of the level of stimulation we receive—we are less likely to invoke boredom. Even the illusion of choice helps us to reduce boredom’s dead weight.

Paradoxically, too much choice can also induce boredom, or at any rate indifference—almost as if an overload switch has been tripped. An oft-cited study that found shoppers bought more jam the
fewer
varieties they had to choose from is a sweet illustration of the numbing effect that “options overload” can produce. Thirty years ago, when cable television was an innovation, the joke that you now had access to one hundred channels and there was
still
nothing on seemed the height of irony. Today it’s more in the nature of a truism. The dilemma has been noted by many observers, among them Orrin Klapp in
Overload and Boredom
, who points to the “major paradox that growing leisure and affluence and mounting information and stimulation ... lead to boredom—a deficit in the quality of life.”
⁶

The more interesting life becomes, in other words, the more boredom we are doomed to experience. Kinda fascinating, really.

 

 

 

Electricity still awesome.

Bill and Anni to see
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
today ...
together
. (The Curious Case of Socializing Siblings?!)

B. lobbied for reimbursement—“Thanks to you and YOUR experiment, we have nothing else to do!” Frankly too stunned to object. Last time they saw a film together was literally last century.

Had hoped to save money, but can see error of expectation now. Between movies—FOUR this week for me alone—books, music lessons, and CDs (we’re allowed those, thank God), am cleaned out for the month already. “And don’t forget you promised to reactivate our gym memberships,” A. scolded. “It’s the least you can do.”

 

 

Okay, okay. So in the early weeks, we hadn’t quite gotten the hang of “assuming the moral burden of our own boredom.” I was still pretty much carrying the can for all of us—and offering cash compensations, no less, when I let the side down.

That same week, I went to a barbecue and found myself surrounded by a knot of admiring parents, avid to know how we were surviving. Honestly, I hadn’t been called “brave” by so many people since the last time I took the kids to midnight mass. One man, the deputy principal of a prestigious private boys’ school, told me he’d recently been ordered to smart wire the residence hall to allow the boarders “equal access” under the Digital Bill of Rights. “Parents nowadays consider Internet access an ‘essential service,’” he explained bitterly. “I think it’s nuts, but ...” He shrugged. “I guess no one wants their children to feel deprived.”

I smiled just a little stiffly at that.

 

 

Back at Test Pattern Central, the deprived ones were starting to find their sea legs. Within a day or two of the blackout, Bill had fished his saxophone out of the toy closet, where it had long lain abandoned like some brass Velveteen Rabbit. Listening to “Summertime,” played on the deck after dinner in the waning light of a still-sultry midsummer evening, was my first moment of pure joy during The Experiment. “If it never gets better than this,” I mused in my journal, “I don’t care. It’s already been worth it.”

It had been a ridiculously long time since I’d heard Bill play anything that didn’t involve a joystick or a mouse. Yet fewer than two years before, he was taking weekly lessons with a teacher he loved, and had even started talking about the possibility of a musical career. Then ... nothing. By the end of Year 9, he’d discovered water polo, World of Warcraft, and Windows Live Messenger. MySpace, SideReel, and a terrifying procession of first-person shooter games followed in swift succession. Music disappeared from the horizon, as if it too had been picked off by a sniper’s bullet. From time to time Bill would talk vaguely, almost nostalgically, about picking up his instrument again one day. As if music were a childish thing he’d put away along with his Meccano set and his beloved vacuum cleaner (the one he’d found on a rubbish heap and used to perform party tricks with marbles).

He’d also acquired an iPod and seemed more focused on amassing music rather than making it—or even, necessarily, listening to much of it. I’d noticed the tendency in other teenage boys. (“Do you only have eight gigs? Aw, too bad, man. Me? I’ve got one-sixty.” Spit, swivel, and swagger, stage left.) They’d compare hard-drive capacity the way earlier generations boasted about horsepower or rifle caliber. At the same time as the iPod encouraged Bill to get excited about acquiring the ultimate playlist—mostly, it has to be admitted, by file-sharing stealth (polite terminology for breaching copyright)—it helped push music from the center to the periphery of his consciousness.

You listen to your iPod while you do other stuff, after all. That’s the beauty of the device. In fact, that’s the whole
point
of the device. It allows you to live your life to a set of soundtracks of your own devising (homework music, bus music, workout music, maternal-nagging-block-out music, etc.). But a soundtrack, as the name suggests, is something that plays underneath the main event. It provides atmosphere, not plot; background noise, not foreground action. It is a takeout coffee in a cardboard cup, consumed in careless sips on the way to work. It’s not breakfast.

“If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer,” Thoreau observed, in what is surely the best-known line in
Walden
and perhaps in all of American literature. “Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured, or far away.” Like everybody else in the civilized world, I was familiar with those words. But The Experiment made me hear them anew—with unstoppered ears—as an absolutely uncanny evocation of the age of iPod. Each of us stepping to the music we hear? Hello? That is sooo not a metaphor anymore, but literally and explicitly what technology invites us to do. The fact that “pod” is derived from the Latin for “foot”—so that it could be translated roughly as “I step”—makes the connection all the spookier.

As I write these words, I experience an almost visceral longing for the personal drumbeats of my own iPod. (Put it this way: It’s no coincidence that the Winter of Our Disconnect has coincided with the Winter of My Lapsed Gym Membership.) Yet I’ve become acutely aware that there are benefits to undergoing an elective iPodectomy. In some ways, plugging in can make it
more
difficult to hear that elusive different drummer. And as for the guy on keyboards, don’t get me started ...

I should clarify here that using our iPods (or in my case an iPhone) was verboten at all times during The Experiment, as opposed to computers, which we were able to access at school or work or friends’ places or cafés, or anywhere, really, outside the boundaries of our property. (Luckily our nearest neighbors had access codes in place, or my kids might have taken up residence on the sidewalk.) “Kind of arbitrary rules,” my friend Mary sniffed. But then she’s a Presbyterian, so she would say that. Yes, there was a degree of flexibility, as we Anglicans say, in the way we—or I, really—interpreted the “no screens” injunction. We were allowed to listen to CDs, and the radio, of course, but any form of docking station was strictly out of bounds. It wasn’t logic that dictated this decision—an audio file is an audio file, after all—it was pragmatism. If iPods were allowed to roam free in people’s bedrooms, I reasoned, sooner or later they would be sure to migrate to people’s ears, and lodge there like mites. Allowing iPods into the equation would have been like, oh, I don’t know, decking the halls with bowls of Lindt truffles while you were on Atkins (which Sussy and I were by month four, btw). Like, why would you do that to yourself?

There was one loophole the kids did manage to slither through: their phones. Like all moral lapses, this one happened when I was looking the other way. Let me explain. Way back on Christmas Day, some time between the carving of the holiday roast salmon and the popping of our homemade crackers, Bill had suddenly shattered the merriment as if with a beribboned Christmas sledgehammer. “What about our phones?” he’d asked. I watched the merriment drain from my children’s faces as, hollow-eyed and beseeching, they turned to me. The mood had lurched in an instant from Norman Rockwell to Edvard Munch. (But then holiday dinners can be like that.)

The truth was, I’d already considered the phone question in some detail. I knew that The Experiment would need to entail a total iPhone disconnect for myself. It was my chief and most cherished addiction; plus, the device itself functioned as a kind of super-screen. It did everything all the individual devices could do, and more. I could watch TV on it, or movies, or check e-mail, or surf the Net, or take photographs, or play games, or listen to music, or ... Okay, down, girl.