TO LET ALONE

Dear Spike:

In one ear, I’m listening to the Jazz game (it’s early in the fourth quarter and Utah is up by two points.) We’ve got a movie playing on the television (the president’s wife has just discovered that Dave is an impostor.) I’m sifting through my e-mail (my inbox had been overrun by legions of lemmings who aren’t happy about a story I wrote about Dr. Laura Schlessinger) and surfing through a few news sites on my laptop computer (the Republican contenders for president took jabs at each other in a debate tonight.)

And now I’m writing you.

Humans have always been good at multi-tasking. Being able to juggle many tasks at once may, in fact, be one of the fundamental abilities that make us human.

But especially where technology is concerned, the past decade has brought an enormous surge in our capacity to handle many tasks at once. And while there remain serious questions as to how effective we can be at any one task while performing others (mobile phones are said to impair a driver’s ability as much as alcohol, for instance) I don’t think there is any debate that, in fact, we are simply doing more.

And more.

And more.

I wonder what that means for you. I can only assume that your generation will be far more adept at multi-tasking than mine. How many tasks will you be able to juggle? Seven? Ten? Twenty?

And I wonder if, as our capacity grows to do more, we are losing our ability to do less.

I hope not. For there is much to be said for occasionally doing nothing at all.

No car, no work, no mobile phone. No radio, no internet, no television. No music, no movies, no museums. No ball games, no house chores, no newspapers.

Back in the 1850s — a time in which life was considerably simpler — a man named Henry David Thoreau left his city home to live aside Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. For two years, two months and two days, he contemplated the trappings of civilization from outside of the trappings of civilization, finally emerging with the manuscript for “Walden,” one of the best-regarded works of political and social philosophy ever written by an American.

In that text, Thoreau famously observed that “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”

More than 150 years later, that’s still good advice.

You don’t have to retreat into the woods for two years to understand that. (Although I believe you’ll find that two days — or even two weeks — away from the bustle of this modern world can be clarifying.)

When you can — and even, on occasion, when you believe you cannot — turn it all off.

Multi-tasking may indeed be one of the fundamental abilities that make us human. But it all does little for our humanity.

Love,
dad