The other morning, the boys (and by boys I mean my son and his boyfriend, who are technically both young men now) were making breakfast and having a vociferous debate about excess screen time for very young children. My son was taking the position that we are raising a generation of anti-social psychopaths while his boyfriend was taking a more pro-tech view that we can be exposing children to things that are uplifting and educational and outside their normal experience. For the record, I think that my kid is more correct, not because you couldn’t use technology in a positive way, but because we objectively don’t (go read this if you don’t believe me).
Now, I know better than to get involved in this sort of debate, but it reminded me of a conversation that the kid and I had about a year and a half ago (when he was still technically a kid, and before Covid). He was trying to express some lack in his experience of his life. He was pointing out that without technology, he wouldn’t be able to easily connect and coordinate with his friends, but that at the same time technology was this huge distraction from them truly engaging and being present with one another. He was expressing a discomfort with how things were, something in the boundary between the online and offline worlds and the way that discourse and communication happened online. Of course, he didn’t use those exact terms or express it that clearly. He’s generally bright and articulate, but he was really struggling to explain this sense of wrongness without having any experience of a different possibility. He could give up technology, but the result would be isolation and loneliness.
In current context that makes the hair on the back of my head stand up.
Now, one of the dangers of growing older is that nostalgia can blind us to the realities of the past. The good old days weren’t all that good for many people, including people of color and LGBTQ people and women. That said, I was born in the early 70s, which means I spent my formative years in that decade and the early part of the next. And there’s something good from back then I think we’ve managed to lose: a sense of the real. We’ve lost a lot of possibilities for authentic experience, unfiltered through screens and unfettered by personal branding or social media judgement. I grew up running the streets and exploring the desert with kids from my neighborhood, coming home when the streetlights turned on. We got dirty and scraped up and played sports and invented games and were cruel and kind to one another and generally were in things and into things. Nothing was recorded or filmed. Your actions were localized and generally lived on only in memory. Your experiences were processed in your diary or your own head as you lay in bed at night. Certainly people told you what to think and believe (parents, teachers, church, news) but you tried out those things in the laboratory of the world.
I tried to express this difference to the kid, expressing it as authenticity, though that term has gotten coopted into something really messed up (I call it the Long Con of Authenticity and wrote about it here) but it’s actually about THE REAL. My example for the kid was his love of plants. Plants are real and they are unashamedly and naturally themselves. They aren’t rebelling against anything nor are they adopting anything that isn’t already their own. And for him, being with plants is therefore an honest and real experience.
Now, there’s nothing as pathetic and ironic as making a Luddite argument on a blog on a computer on the Internet. It’s a cognitive error on par with the myth of “the good old days.” What I’m saying is that I think we’ve lost (or maybe are in the last stages of losing) something important to our happiness and health. It’s not being lost because of technology, but through it. To be clear, it’s not just about doing real things in the real world, it’s about experiencing those things in an unfiltered and unmoderated way.
I stopped posting on Twitter. Or rather, I still share content from the blog or my Patreon and still heart and like things that people say about Circle Thrice (I do very much care when people find my work useful). But I’ve stopped sharing personal stuff. I stopped engaging with Facebook some time ago (except for auto-sharing my posts and stuff, as I appreciate that other people still use the site). The result is really interesting.
First, it seems to have greatly benefitted my attention span and made me feel more creative. The number of posts you are seeing here is a reflection of that. I’ve also been reading way more fiction than I have been in years. I actually think this is a result of both my increased focus and my work with the Jungian therapist (though that latter point is a topic for another time). Still, my ability to focus is much improved.
Second, it’s made me aware of how much I thought about how my experiences would be shared online while I was having them. I’m sure it’s not as much as someone who is like an Instagram influencer, but it was still something I experienced. Of course we all mine our experiences to create things (whether that’s music or writing or whatever) — creation requires actual experience to drive it. It’s not that we can’t share what we think and feel and do… in fact without that our creations would be hollow. It’s just that prioritizing the direct sharing of our experiences can have the effect of reducing our experience of having them in the moment.
Recently I made a garden bed in our back yard. It’s the first of two large beds and it will got planted last weekend. When I started the work, it occurred to me that it would be fun to take a bunch of progress pictures and string them together into a time lapse video which I could share online. Instead, I just focused on doing the work (and it was a lot of hard work), step by step, and enjoying it as I was doing it. I worked every day — a bit at lunch and each afternoon, slowly moving rocks and lining up cinder blocks. It was fulfilling and healing and just generally good for body and soul. I didn’t spend time with a camera and tripod and therefore you have a single photo of the finished bed. And I’m fine with that! I’m proud of the work and, yes, happy to show my neighbors and tell my friends (and you of course). But the best part was the DOING of it, without thinking about how that doing would get presented to the world. I want to rebel against everything having to be recorded and packaged and part of one’s personal branding.
I do think as a society we are starting to rebel against it, but naturally we’re doing it in some really messed up ways.
We seem to be getting more extreme in the search for positions and ideas that aren’t paternalistically doled out as approved by the dominant narrative. It’s like we’re starting for real experience and understanding, but have a hard time finding it. We know that what’s on offer isn’t real, but we somehow get confused about what is, and end up believing some crazy stuff. And then we get frustrated that other people believe other things and fight with them about it online.
We are also increasingly cynical about people’s online personas — the influencer stories, the photoshopped experiences, the fake travel or wealth. I call this the ‘blog your perfect life’ syndrome and I try not to fall into it. But I feel like we haven’t been able to replace online “persona” engagement with real engagement. We couldn’t even do it before real, personal engagement became effectively outlawed in the past year. So if we were out of practice before, we’re really out of practice now!
We think we have to position ourselves AGAINST, when in reality we just have to BE. We just need to revisit the act of living and experiencing our lives, without a sense of audience or feedback or approval. We need to connect with one another directly and heart forward. We need to embrace the really real.
