YOU'RE DOING GREAT; NOW, LEAVE ME ALONE

When my daughters were toddlers and beyond, I responded to their actions and words by naming them -- clever, resourceful, kind, persistent etc. Sometimes, I would tell them something was unkind or dangerous, Now, my daughters are doing the same with their children.  They are going beyond "good job" and "stop that" to name the qualities they are seeing.  

I applaud this feedback.

It appears, however, that a great many people did not receive positive feedback from their parents and caregivers. or possibly they received a boatload of negative feedback. How else to explain the multiple requests for assessment I receive daily?

Almost every time I visit a doctor, hire someone to provide a service, or order something online, a survey asking how he/she/they did will follow.  Sometimes the requests for assessment come before the service is provided . . .

Seriously?  Are they that needy?

I have a life, people.  I'm not going to fill out your surveys.  

Here's another puzzlement.  I listen to a lot of podcasts, which often involve interviews.  It used to be that an interviewee would occasionally respond to a question by saying, "That's a great question."  Now, hardly an interview goes by without these words being spoken.

Honestly, the questions aren't always all that great.  And even if they are, isn't it the job of the interviewer to ask great questions? Is the interviewee stalling in order to come up with an answer? Inquiring minds want to know.  

And while I'm on my soapbox, I'm also not going to open the multiple texts I receive asking for money.  I'm going to block those numbers every time.  It's not that I'm against making charitable contributions.  To the contrary, I make them regularly. It's just that I don't want to see these requests in my text feed. Texts are for brief communications with family and friends.  

So, leave me alone, already. 

Same with requests for political contributions.  Not on my text feed.  Not on your life.  

And then there are the phone calls.  I no longer answer calls from unknown phone numbers.  If a call isn't from a scammer, I assume the caller will leave a message.  Come to think of it, scammers leave messages too . . .

For some reason email stopped working on my phone a few months ago, and I decided not to try to fix it.  So, I'm not dealing with those incessant dings anymore. Yay!  (Actually, a friend suggested turning off notifications for emails, which I did, but not having emails on my phone is even better.)

As for people who come to the house wanting to sell me something, I try to be polite.  I tell them they may give me literature, but I will not agree to anything while speaking through my front door.  (And I'm definitely not inviting them in.)

So, is it just me or do I have companions in wanting to ward off these intrusions?

 

                                        Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash

REMEMBER PRIVACY?

Have you taken a DNA test yet?  You know the ones. You send away for a kit, then spit in a test tube and send it back to Ancestry or another outfit that tells you where your ancestors  hailed from. If you choose to share your DNA results, you might even find some long-lost relatives.

I have done this and learned what I already knew -- my ancestors are all from Scotland and Ireland.  And no surprising relatives were uncovered -- those who showed up were no closer than third or fourth cousins, so I guess none of my near family is participating at this point.

In her recent novel The Candy House, Jennifer Egan takes the concept of shared DNA information one step further, perhaps several steps further, and imagines a world where you can upload all of your memories to a box and, if you choose, share your memories with others who are doing the same.  And it is not just the things you actually consciously remember that are uploaded. The entire store of everything you have ever experienced is disgorged.

Thus, if, for instance, your parents have uploaded and shared  their memories, you can choose to access their memories of a given day or time and learn more about their lives.  At first intriguing, but, upon further reflection, horrifying.  This would clearly be a Pandora's box -- one where something once seen, could not be unseen.  

Just imagine the mental and psychic overload.  

Of course, none of us would choose to implement the memory box, would we?  I can hear you saying emphatically, I would never do that. Yet I have shared my DNA information on Ancestry and, if you haven’t done this, you have likely expressed political views on social media or taken one of those innocuous-seeming quizzes that are actually designed to collect data about you and your habits. 

Why do we do this? I remember reading George Orwell's 1984 back in the 1960s and being horrified by the notion of Big Brother. Yet, we have effectively invited Big Brother into our homes. (Don't be too quick to congratulate yourself if you eschew social media. Notice when you send an email to a friend in which you mention that you are looking for a new backpack, and the next day an ad for backpacks flashes on the screen while you are doing a Google search for something entirely unrelated.)

And then, there's this.  Unless you have expressly asked to have it removed (and I hate to think what it would take to do this), there is an image of your house on Google Earth.  Further, anyone can look up your house on Zillow or Redfin and find out how much your paid for it and the amount of your property taxes.  Sure, this information is public record, but how many people bothered to go to a courthouse and look it up before an online search was possible.

If the British mystery series I watch on TV are any indication, it would appear that there are CCTV cameras everywhere in the UK, recording everyone all of the time.  And I have read that sophisticated facial imagery allows Chinese officials to pick someone out of a crowd of thousands (and then, presumably, pick them up). It would not surprise me to find such technology coming here to the U.S. very soon.  Maybe it's already here.

None of this seems to be very troublesome to most people under 40. They appear to have little concern about privacy.  So is privacy now as quaint as, say, a family sharing one phone tethered to the wall?

Maybe if you never experienced privacy, you don't know what you're missing.  Or maybe you won't care until someone posts naked pictures of you online and you find out how nearly impossible it is to have them taken down. 

I, for one, remember privacy fondly.  As I have written before, I miss letters.  Remember sealed envelopes? Unless someone steamed one open or plundered your box full of love letters, these missives were eyes-only.  

What a concept.

Still, it does seem that it is nearly impossible to preserve privacy without going completely off the grid, and who among us is ready, or even able, to do this?

I will leave you with this challenge:   Google yourself.  And then tell me what you think (in the public comments to this public blog).

                                                        Photo by Marten Newhall on Unsplash

TIME'S WINGED CHARIOT

  

         "But at my back I always hear 

          Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near . . ."

                                  - Andrew Marvell 

Can you remember a time when you were not conscious of time?

The last time I can remember not having a sense of time was the summer after third grade.  The days spread before me without end, and I inhabited each with no sense of the coming autumn.  I did not think about the next week or even the evening of the day I was living. I simply did not look ahead.  Now, I watch people read books, take classes, and meditate, trying to get to presence. But when I was eight, presence was all there was.

I don't know when I fell into time, but it was sometime after that summer.  Slowly at first, and then all at once, time took shape.  I learned to read a calendar and the calendar began to superimpose its grid onto my life.  

Still, the grid notwithstanding, before I had children, time generally moved at a stately pace. Days had a steady rhythm.  I look back and see life as a slow-moving river.  In contrast, when I look back at the years following the births of my daughters, I see a blur of swiftly moving water.  

On the rare occasions when I stopped to think about the future during those happy/crazy/filled-to-the-brim years, I assumed that when my girls were grown, life would return to its pre-child-rearing pace.   

Alas, it did not. 

So maybe it wasn't having children that changed my sense of time. Maybe it was something else altogether. 

Maybe it was technology.   

After all, it was during those (for me) post-baby years of the late '80s and early '90s that the whole world started to speed up.  First it was Fax machines.  Remember those?  Until they came along, I would receive a letter at work, consider it, maybe wait a day, then dictate a reply, which my assistant would duly type up and mail.  Now, clients would send the letter via fax and expect a response within hours.  

Things only got worse with email.  There was no longer a breather between the time a fax was sent and the time someone brought it to my desk.  Now the messages were showing up on my computer.  What was my excuse for not responding immediately?

But the real change came with cell phones.  If you have a cell phone, why can't you take a business call at home?  Or while on vacation? And then along came smart phones.  Great for taking pictures, but they also captured emails and texts.  Yikes.  

Look, I am not a Ludite.  I like my cell phone.  Most of the time.  I just don't like 24/7 anything.  I don't like the temptation to check for email or text messages when I am doing something that used to be all-engrossing.  I don't like the fact that I find it more difficult to concentrate than I did before all of these distractions.

I am very grateful that my childhood, teenage years, and early adulthood were device-free.  I don't know how to tell those of you born after the dawn of the age of distraction what those pre-distraction days were like, but I will try. 

I see myself at about age ten,  playing on our dead-end street with my friends.  There was no impulse to run home and check my iPad for messages because there were no iPads.  I just played.  We just played. 

I see myself at around age 14, walking through the woods to a local library, lost in my own thoughts.  There was no buzzing in my pocket.  No stopping to respond to a text.  

I see myself again in my late 20s, when I would sometimes, while doing something interesting, unplug my phone.  (This was back when phones were tethered to the wall.)  From time to time, I forgot to plug it back in, only remembering when I realized I hadn't received a phone call for a couple of days.

And there I am as a young mother, nursing a baby, no smart phone to interrupt my returning her steady gaze.

In that pre-digital age, days were round and whole, not fragmented. If I was reading, I was reading.  If I was writing, I was writing. If I was with someone, I was with them.  I wasn't feeling a pull  to check my phone for texts or emails or voice mails.  

Of course, there is much that is wonderful about technology.  During the years my daughter Anne was living overseas, we talked weekly via Skype.  For free.  In real time. I could see her face as she spoke. What a gift. When my daughter Mara was in college, she would sometimes call me as she walked across her very large campus.  Long-distance charges were a thing of the past.  Another gift. 

I do love using texts to share photos or quick messages with friends.

And wouldn't I have liked texts or emails back when I was PTO president at my daughters' elementary school and had to use a phone tree to get a message to other parents?    

So, yes, technology is a double-edged sword, but acknowledging its plus side does not change the fact that it has (at least for me) sped up and fractured time.  With attention, though, I think it is possible to counter the fracturing.

I started this post by naming the summer after third grade as the last time I was unconscious of time.  Upon further reflection, I realize this is not true.  It takes more effort now, but there are moments--if I am lucky, hours--when I am engrossed in, say, writing or reading or gardening to the point where I am unaware of time.  This is not the natural state that it was during that long-ago summer.  But, if I turn off my phone and leave it in another room, I am sometimes able to step outside of time again.

And for that I am grateful.

                                                                                 Photo by Ivan Diaz on Unsplash 

ARE MY EARS BLEEDING?

          About 30 years ago, I read the novel Easy Travel to Other Planets by Ted Mooney.  Of course, I have forgotten most of the plot.  One of the things that I do remember is that some characters suffered from “information sickness,” which caused bleeding from the ears. 

         It was prescient of Mooney to posit information sickness in 1981, when the book was published.  I doubt, however, that he could have imagined the flow of information that now inundates us at every turn. 

         When Easy Travel was published, there were, after all, no smart phones.  There was no Facebook.  No Twitter.

         Now our phones are alive with text messages, emails, phone messages, and lists of missed calls.  If we don’t check for an hour, we might miss something.  I understand that many young people respond to bings and bleeps from their phones all night.  When do they sleep?

         I confess to being overwhelmed.  Take email, for instance.  When email started playing a role at work, it seemed, for a while, like a good thing—until the constant appearance of incoming emails became a permanent distraction.  And then there was the fact that you could no longer peruse a letter and take some time to ponder your reply.  A response was expected NOW, and 24/7.  If you had a smart phone, why couldn’t you be on call all of the time?

         Personal email is no less vexing.  No matter how frequently I unsubscribe from retailers, my email inbox still fills up with unwanted sales pitches.  I have sometimes failed to notice a personal email among the onslaught of junk mail.

         And now there is Facebook, with which I have a love/hate relationship.  I have tinkered with my settings so that I will not be bombarded with constant emails telling me who has posted what on FB.  But I find that I am tempted to check FB more frequently than feels comfortable, just in case I might be missing something.   I, along with a great many others, have been hooked by an intermittent reward system.   We are apparently more likely to repeat a behavior when the rewards are intermittent, than when they are constant.  Sure, much of what is on FB is of no moment, but what if there is a grandkid photo today?  Or a link to a thoughtful article?

         Of course, email and FB are also dandy procrastination devices.  I spent more time checking email and Facebook when I was writing a Masters thesis two years ago than at any time before or since. 

         And let us not forget the news.  When I graduated from college, I worked for a while as a reporter for a local paper.  There was a machine in the newsroom that constantly spewed forth a ticker tape with the latest wire service news reports.  When there was an election, we would work late to answer phone calls from people wanting to know about the returns.  Now, every computer and phone serves the function of a ticker tape, updating the news from moment to moment.  There is no respite.

         No wonder I am tempted to check my ears for bleeding. 

         So what is to be done?  My husband, who does not own a smart phone and would not be caught dead on Facebook, thinks the answer is simple:  Get off of Facebook.  I am not ready to do this.  I like seeing what my daughters and his sons are up to.  This is where they post photographs.  Also, I have reconnected with some people on FB and it is a nice place to share feelings when something important happens in the world. 

         Still, there have to be ways to step back.  Here are some things that I have done, and am doing, by way of interrupting the constant flow of information.  I would love to hear your suggestions.

         - I turn off the sound on my phone at night. 

         (While my mother was alive, I was constantly on call for the latest crisis.  It took me a while after her death earlier this year to understand that I could turn off my phone without letting anyone down.)

- I am trying to remember to turn off my phone while I am eating, especially when I am eating with others, including my husband. 

         - I carry my phone, but turn off the sound, when I am on a walk. (I feel safer having it with me when I am walking the dog in the woods.) 

         - I leave my phone in the house when I am gardening.  I turn off the sound when I am writing.

         - I am vowing to check Facebook less often.  I will start by backing off to every other day or every third day, and then re-evaluate.   (The photos, I remind myself, will still be there when I check in.)

         - I am contemplating a technology Sabbath—one day a week when I stay off of my computer and ipad and do not read emails on my phone.  (Have any of you done this successfully?)

        

         I can do this, right?  After all, until I was in my mid-thirties  telephones were tethered to the wall and had handsets that were tethered to the base of the phone.  There was no “voice mail.”  If someone called you and you weren’t home to answer, you didn’t know about the call. 

And, most of the time, it didn’t matter. 

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash