ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.
A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially
cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so
consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch
TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail
parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional
ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of
nowhere.”
Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night
to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly
for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future
of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which
charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their
rooms.
Has it really come to this?
In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving
devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them —
often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the
more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to
have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all
but overnight.
Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.
Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that
enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet
connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all
companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted
hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers.
(The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no
more than three minutes at a time at his or her desk without
interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use
the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads
and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group
recommended that the policy be extended to others.
THE average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in
front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The
Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent
online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in
front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily
increasing).
The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day,
though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000
every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell
you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself
tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom,
if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming
videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too
full all at once.
The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is
nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the
more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have
to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that
consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal
wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our
miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come
from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more
important than content — and speedier means could make up for
unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose
horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important
messages.” Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer
than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you
very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck
a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man was made for the
highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but by also acting on
it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.
Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because
“breaking news” is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is
just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We
barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages,
researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less). And the more that
floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, “Dancing with the Stars”),
the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice
is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us — between
Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there — are gone.
We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less
and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he
might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we
hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.
So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our
lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they
cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information
revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world
cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to
process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by
summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on
any screen.
MAYBE that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga,
or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to
connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist
friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath” every week, turning off
their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to
try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and
conversation. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in
Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing —
or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio
contact for a few hours.
Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to “forget” their
cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr.
Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings,
subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally
improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More
than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists
like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are
“inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time
for.
In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to
keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which
is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the
time). I’ve yet to use a cellphone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered
Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I
moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily
survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the
movies would be an event.
None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure
selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier —
than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of
music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy,
which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness
that doesn’t depend on what happens.”
It’s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know
what’s going on; I took pains this past year to make separate trips to
Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St. Petersburg, to rural Arkansas
and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai. But
it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it
whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.
For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times a year —
often for no longer than three days — to a Benedictine hermitage, 40
minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t
attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated, there or
anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness,
recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and
bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them. The
last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to pass,
on the monastery road, a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old around
his shoulders.
“You’re Pico, aren’t you?” the man said, and introduced himself as
Larry; we’d met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he’d been living in
the cloister as an assistant to one of the monks.
“What are you doing now?” I asked.
“I work for MTV. Down in L.A.”
We smiled. No words were necessary.
“I try to bring my kids here as often as I can,” he went on, as he
looked out at the great blue expanse of the Pacific on one side of us,
the high, brown hills of the Central Coast on the other. “My oldest son”
— he pointed at a 7-year-old running along the deserted, radiant
mountain road in front of his mother — “this is his third time.”
The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms
of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential.
