The Winter of Our Disconnect (9 page)

It’s like the old days, when people just
showed up
.

 

 

 

Am so over that damned ice chest. Wine bottle tipped, and bouquet of cut-rate Sem Sauv infuses all provisions. Nasty scratch on countertop too.

Went to Bill’s room this a.m. and caught him playing with SHADOWS. Besotted with Hazel, as are all. (Suss put out she was not in on selection. Sat on rug for hours playing hide and squeak.)

Missed iPhone painfully when had to wait twenty mins with B. at Thai takeout joint. In desperation, played Mr. Squiggle and Scattergories instead. Pretty fun. A notepad makes a decent handheld game actually. Had forgotten that.

 

 

 

10:30ish—last night of powerlessness!

Anni literally counting the minutes till midnight. She is reading
Dating Up
by lantern light, surrounded by candles, Hazel dozing on chest.

 

 

 

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

—
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 ‘boring’ 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
un
fulfilled?

“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.