From the Prince and Princess of Wales
through the work of Jonathan Haidt (US academic and author of The Anxious Generation through The Amazing Generation) to one of my favourite writers whose headline this week was “This year drop your phone and touch grass” – the thoughtful press has begun to realise the extent of the damage constant access and social media does – to them, the grownups, never mind the kids. Janice Turner writes “My new year’s resolution is to stop letting Mark Zuckerberg monetise my life.” The only figure the billionaires value is the share price.
Imagine a very little girl ,attended by her devoted dog, racing through the house because she heard voices, or movement, or something new. That was me – I would turn up in the kitchen and my mother would say beaming “Oh hello … Afraid of missing something ? “
Natural curiosity has been moulded into must – must know, must see, must comment, must share. Your experience isn’t enough without “other people”. And you pay for it, monetarily and emotionally.
Online addiction and what is called slop consumption is not of interest to me. Never was. Many of us have forgotten that we have choice in this – or in the case of the Wales’s, the children just don’t have phones.
I have always disliked the idea of being available 24/7. For what, for whom? I learned a long time ago that if you didn’t – look at the phrase we use – switch off from time to time, I would be exhausted. I had to pause.
The screen has it uses, certainly – but once you start zapping around with stuff at the speed of light, to tell you what you could live without knowing, I was reminded of the early days of television where we wondered about the impact on the brain of the speed of film images.
And what could be more unsettling than to compare constantly every aspect of yourself, with somebody else’s in particular or worse, with everybody else. What happened to being the person you are and using your abilities to communicate?
The title comes from “Ballad for Americans” – I used an extract when I did Desert Island Discs many years ago. We hoped for change and improvement – and we got it, better health, more food, better schooling, wider horizons, different chances. Progress was slow but it was progress. Then we fell in love with speed and sameness and began to reap a terrible whirlwind – the tapering off of individuality, unwillingness to look at what a life really meant, as in “I must do this because everybody else does” as if by being like other people, that would somehow protect us from life itself.
Great creative artists know that you don’t just make great art – in any creative endeavour, you try, you fail, you get lost, you find something else , the journey is long, often not at all the shape you thought it might be
but endlessly interesting and even if it isn’t at the time, it is when you look back on it, because you see it differently.
This is about our relationship with time, as if , if somehow we could speed it up, we could get to the good bits and skip the rest. Sorry chum. The “rest” is part of the whole.
And when we began to see the impact of this consumerist model on health and education, it got very scary very quickly. And those of us who walk down the street, greet the unknown as well as the known, shying away from the quick fix and the short cut, were horrified to see the price – the real price of not knowing real grass from plastic.
Denning and I say to each other at regular intervals that we are very glad we are not rich. Too often, it is inferred that if you spend enough, there is nothing you can’t have. What rubbish. Money can’t buy you health or happiness, or help you keep them.
You have to find a way to be. There are few short cuts, except getting a job you love as I did, or meeting a life partner and he or she really is but there are moments – the sky at sunset, the softness of snow, laughing at yourself, or with others –this bird, that flower.
dew on the flowers at dawn
A change is as good as a rest – will you try it?
Annalog 