Last night my wife and I were talking to our nineteen-year-old
about the old days, i.e. the days before
she was born. When we lived in South
Georgia, we would occasionally take trips to the Gulf coast, to a Florida state
park on St. George Island. We always went
in the off season, and rarely saw anyone else there. We were poor, and it was free.
We would soak up the winter sun, read, talk, relax,
nap. We left the world behind us. In the late 1980s, no one had cell phones, and
so we could really unplug.
My daughter had a few questions: Did you tell anyone where you were
going? (Sometimes yes, sometimes
no.) What if someone needed you? How could they reach you?
The short answer is that they couldn’t. There was no way to reach us by phone. The park welcome center was unmanned and
locked, except for the restrooms. We never
interacted with the few parties who also came to the park. We were unreachable, unless someone sent the
sheriff to find us. And that never
happened. Our high-tech answering
machine on our home phone served as our connection with any news we might need.
I checked the machine first thing when we returned home. The blinks of the light told me how many
messages were awaiting my attention. A
non-blinking light soothed my soul, because I knew that we had not missed
anything.
Stories of retreat and inaccessibility sound like fairy
tales to my children. How did we get
along? It almost defies imagination. In those days, people took vacations and had
no contact with family, friends or work.
It was part of life: detaching
and getting away, recharging, relaxing. How
quaint.
Today unplugging feels like holding your breath under water. You can only do it for so long or you will
drown. We reenter the state of
connectedness when our flights arrive, when the movie is over, when we drive
back down the mountain to the land of cellular towers. Yet our ancestors actually lived in a normal
state of disconnection. They connected only
when they went to their (physical) mailboxes, when they read their newspapers,
when they turned on the one hour of local and national television news.
Only old people, old-fashioned people and hermits live like
that today.
But for the hip and enlightened, our troubles and responsibilities
are now portable, following us everywhere we go. Vacation becomes only a change of scenery, a
chance to check occasionally (not constantly) for new messages, a scavenger
hunt for wi-fi. We only respond to the
urgent stuff. And then we follow up to
make sure our message was received.
How can anyone really take vacation today? Or even a day off? The world expects us to stay in touch. We oblige.
On the typical day we follow tweets and posts and blogs. We check the news through the day. We respond to texts and the stray phone call. On vacation, we just scale it back. And feel guilty.
We didn’t check in enough.
Or we didn’t unplug enough.
There is no win.
And we experience ADD, high blood pressure, stress, heart
disease, poor diet, sleep deprivation, isolation, depression and general
fatigue. How’s it working for us?
I’ll Google it and let you know.
