Some days we sound like our parents. Other days, our parents would object to that comparison. Nonetheless, we all agree the world just isn’t the same as it was. It’s as if little chips of “life as we know it” are flaking off and vanishing into a great void.
Is that so bad?
Yes…and no.
Good news! The world changed – we no longer worry about smallpox, getting eaten by wolves, or who shot JR.
Bad news! The world changed – along the way we’ve lost some skills that once distinguished us from our pets sprawled beside us on the sofa. Our global hyper-connectedness is changing our lives for better and for worse. We go faster but not always farther. We process more facts but often understand them less. We scan global headlines easier but seldom dig deeper. We got smarter, but rarely wiser.
Hardly ever do we pause long enough to ask ourselves, “Is this OK?”
It’s easy to start cyber-bashing, blaming cellphones and earbuds, or cursing Youtube and endless social media forums. “You can’t get kids’ attention anymore! They just don’t listen! All they want to do is be with their friends, play that awful music and tune us out!!”
Oh, wait—I accessed the wrong file. That was a quote from my Dad, some 40 years ago.
“The More Things Change”…
The truth is, we’ve always had our distractions. They weren’t as prevalent and pocket-sized as iPods and smartphones, but we fool ourselves if we think modern diversions just popped into our culture in the last 10 years.
So, we must ask: are we really frustrated with the frenzied hum of techno-noise, or by the vanishing human skills the gadgets displace? Perhaps it’s more chaotic than before, but do we need to destroy the world wide web to preserve the lost arts of being human?
Let’s simplify the issue by looking at three human skills vanishing in the clouds of cyber-clamor:
Telling Time
A linkster* girl sat by her ailing mother on the ER bed, listening to me explain about drinking the oral contrast prior to the CT. I told them that the radiology tech would return at “a quarter to three.” The daughter stared at the wall clock and asked, “When is that?” Her mother and I** exchanged looks of exasperation. Chalk up another waning skill “they just don’t teach kids nowadays.”
*“Linksters”: the generation born after 1994, so named because they were born into a world already linked by cyber technology.
**”Lunksters”: People born before 1994 who blame today’s evils on technology.
The lost art of telling time. When has mankind seen such a colossal shift in that basic life skill? Hmmm… that would have been when we stopped relying on sundials, about 200 years ago.
Be honest. Is looking at a particular timepiece that important? If so, we should have smashed that digital wristwatch to pieces before it was first sold…in 1956.
What’s missing nowadays is something deeper, harder to pin down. Many of us have lost the internal sense of time – awareness of daily patterns, circadian rhythms, and seasons that mark our journey through the year.
In the Bible, one of the wisest men in history tells us that “To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven.” He goes on to list 28 activities common in his ancient world. Granted, we don’t “cast away stones” very often in our society, but neither are we taking the time to live in the moments of weeping, laughing, mourning or dancing.
It’s like an epidemic of “time-itis.” According to a 2016 CDC report, over a third of Americans don’t get enough sleep, because, unlike our parents’ generation, who rose with the sun and went to bed after a long day of physical labor, many people confess to having no sleep schedule, or one frequently interrupted by an electronic device, whether a phone or a TV. We manipulate our environment so it’s light whenever we need it or dark whenever we want it. We insulate ourselves from the cold in the winter, the pollens in the spring, the heat and humidity in the summer and the dreary winds in the fall. Then, surprise! Another year has passed, leaving us gasping, “Where did it go?”
Perhaps instead of asking, “What happened to Summer?” we should be asking ourselves, “What happened to me?”
Listening
Here’s a vanishing art that many people haven’t missed yet because they’re too busy “communicating.” We’re so involved in our electronic multitasking taps, dings, pings and wiggling emojis that we skipped right over the meaning. We quickly shoot an email to the boss, send a text message to the kids, check a weather alert ding during dinner, post on Facebook, offer an online review of a purchase—sometimes all in the same few minutes.
But wait—did our outgoing messages get more attention than our incoming ones, or were they, too, all swept up in everyone else’s piles of texts, posts, reviews and dings, to be sorted out as time and interest allows? Wow. That’s discouraging.
Back in my earliest days as a nurse, I was intimidated nearly speechless by the hospital’s doctors. Giving an MD patient report as he raced down the hall was dreadful. Yet, I remember one night when I approached a doctor to update him about a patient of mine with increased difficulty breathing. I stammered, “May I ask you a question?”
To my utter amazement, the doctor set down his pen on his chart, folded his hands, looked me in the eyes and said, “What is it?” He listened and responded in those few moments without being distracted. A life lesson taught.
By contrast, most conversations nowadays are lost in phone phog. If I’m talking to someone and I observe that I’m being incorporated into other “tech-tivities,” I’ll stop talking in mid-sentence. It’s amazing how many times my abrupt silence goes unnoticed.
Mom always said that God gave us two ears and one mouth so we could listen twice as much as we talk. Today, the ten fingers seem to rule our communications.
That is, unless we deliberately decide to do something about it. The answer’s literally in our own two hands.
Memorizing
My Mom used to recite lines from the epic Longfellow poem “Evangeline,” memorized in her childhood:
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Mom’s repertoire included poetry, scripture, inspirational writings and speeches. I’m lucky if I can remember my phone number on the first attempt.
Blame today’s lack of ability to memorize on what you want: age, sleep deprivation, lead poisoning, head injury, aspartame, or an endless list of other possible conditions. The plain fact is, we just don’t do it anymore, and haven’t for a while. Somewhere back in my high school days—the “Age of Aquarius”—the educational experts traded memorization for “looking things up.” Apparently, no one thought the two systems could work together.
But is memorization even important today? It is, according to William R. Klemm, PhD., in his Jan. 12, 2013 Psychology Today article. Memorization is more than stacking facts into the storage areas of our brains. The very process of memorization trains and disciplines the mind, gives us a database from which our thoughts are created, and helps us to learn even more.
Klemm accused kids today of having “lazy minds” that don’t memorize. Then again, why should they when they don’t see their parents doing it, or witness their grandparents making it an important activity in their lives?
The bottom line is that technology is not entirely to blame for losing the arts of being human. Its overuse and abuse are symptoms, but not the disease itself. If we look up from our phones and find the world disintegrating chip by chip, then the problems—and answers—lie within us.
Good news! You get to be part of the solution.
TO DO list to salvage these lost arts:
- Time – at least once a day this week give yourself time to reconnect and appreciate NOW. Take five uninterrupted minutes to stare into space and think about the time of day, the day of the week, the month, the season, sunrise, sunset, even the moon phase. Remind yourself that “I’m not a human-was or a human-will-be, I’m a human being.”
- Listen – all the self-help books on listening could not have taught me what that doctor did in five minutes. Be that example. When someone talks to you, stop what you’re doing, look them in the face and give them your complete attention. It will be good for both of you.
- Memorize – find a short piece of writing that you love—a poem, scripture, speech—and commit it to memory this week. Not only will you stretch the brain cells, but you’ll have something comforting to ponder some dark, sleepless night when technology fails you.
Very true and well said!