The Winter of Our Disconnect Read Free Page B

plug once and for all, hurtling us cold turkey into Wi-Fi withdrawal—myself and my omnipresent information IV included.
    And at that stage, it was a fantasy. As a journalist and author, my livelihood depends on technology. People who wax nostalgic about a golden age of any kind, whether technological or political or cultural, have always seriously annoyed me. It’s like listening to my mother talking about going to the movies for a quarter and having change left over to buy a hamburger and a Coke and, for all I know, stock options in MGM. The way I see it, it’s hard enough to live in the present moment without somebody trying to drag you back to some sepia-tinged, hyperidealized pseudotopia that is usually three parts “La Vie en Rose” to one part irritable bowel syndrome. Every mythical “golden age,” I have always believed, was exactly that. Mythical.
    I grew up in the sixties and seventies, and although I have fond memories of I Love Lucy , instant mashed potatoes, and the Latin mass (in no particular order of importance), I do NOT believe my own childhood was superior to that of my own children. Parents and kids lived in two separate worlds in those days. That had its plusses, sure—like when you jumped on your bike and went to play at your friend’s house till puberty, and nobody panicked. But it also had its minuses. Like most everybody else in my generation, I watched way too much dumb black-and-white TV, ate ridiculous snack food—come on, aerosol cheese?—and wouldn’t have dreamed of confiding what I really felt and thought to a grown-up.
    So nostalgia for “the way we were” isn’t one of my weaknesses. I don’t believe in avoiding your own reality, and I don’t believe in the healing power of deprivation. The temptation to fix our family’s discontents by ripping the modem from its socket smacked of both these fallacies.
    Plus, I was menopausal. Sweet reason was not exactly what you’d call my strong suit.
    If it hadn’t been for Thoreau—or, more accurately, Sherman Paul, who wrote the introduction to my well-thumbed Riverside edition—I would probably have put away the idea with the rest of my hare-brained maternal schemes. a It was Paul’s succinct explanation of why Thoreau took to the woods in the first place that was the tipping point. “He had reduced the means of life,” Paul had written, “not because he wanted to prove he could go without them, or to disclaim their value in enriching life, but because they were usually factitious—they robbed one of life itself.”
    Thoreau’s inspired mania for simplifying life, in other words, was just like Michelangelo’s gift for “simplifying” a chunk of stone: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” It was an act of creation and courage—not destruction, not fear. By isolating himself at Walden Pond, Thoreau hadn’t run away from life. He’d run toward it. Why couldn’t we leave our lives of quiet, digital desperation and do the same?
    Now that I’d done the reframe—it wasn’t something I’d be doing to my family, it was something I’d be doing for them!—I couldn’t wait to begin. There was only one thing stopping me.
    Oh, all right. Three things.
     
     
    Anni, Bill, and Sussy, like most teenagers, live in a pre-Copernican universe. They are convinced the sun revolves around them. As their mother, I have done little to challenge this view. So when I finally worked up the courage to spring The Experiment on them for real, I chose my moment carefully. The stakeholders would need to be in a good mood. There would need to be lots of distractions: lights, music, refined sugar, whatever it took. And there would need to be witnesses.
    Gracetown, Western Australia—go on, Google it—is a remote and ridiculously tiny coastal community on the southwest coast of Australia. It is renowned for its jaw-dropping Indian Ocean beaches, fearsome surf breaks, and curious lack of normal utilities.