Breeding and Writing: The fast-food joint at the end of the universe

 

–by Tracy Lucas

 

As a parent, I worry for the future. Not my own so much; I have my life arranged the way I want it, and I’ve made my choices. But what is the world going to look like by the time my toddler is paying a mortgage? What will have changed by the time I’m a hundred years posthumously famous? (Yeah, well, a girl can dream.)

What happens if the foil-wearing pyramid people are right, and something drastic happens in 2012, leaving all of our technology obliterated? Who would we be?

Say we all survive and start over. Could you help your kid with a science project without Google? Stand reading a single newspaper once a day, or worse, once a week? Could you permanently remember how your favorite songs go, even without being able to listen to your iPod for the rest of your life?

I’m a little weird, spiritually speaking. Let’s just get that out of the way now so you’ll humor me. But one of my core beliefs is that we’ve all done this before. The whole thing.

Ancient people were smart. They had the same genes we have and their entire lives to mull over ways to make things easier. We aren’t any more advanced than they were mentally, we’ve just gotten better at respecting the need for preservation of ideas. We pass things down on paper more often; that’s about it.

Sure it sounds moronic that they didn’t know how to solve the problem of the plague by using clean water. That’s hindsight for you. Do we know how to solve cancer? It’s probably some little stupid thing we’re doing and just don’t realize yet. We’re tomorrow’s idiots, make no mistake.

We’ve learned important things and lost them many times before.

There was the library at Alexandria that’s now been shown to have had blueprints for computer-style calculation machines, modern medical inventions and best practices, and steam-powered toys. In the third century B.C.

We just forgot.

The Native American Hopi nation is said to believe the world has been destroyed four times, and that we’re working on the fifth. The legend tells that the earth was ruined once by fire, once by ice, once by water, and is next going to bite it by weather and human violence. In light of, respectively, the fireball death of the dinos, the Ice Age, the Great Flood talked about in every major religion, and any given headline in the New York Times, I can buy it. It’s at least as plausible as global warming.

Even the Christian Bible talks about a “Tower of Babel” which men built to raise their knowledge to the heavens, only to be struck down and scattered into different nations who could no longer collaborate. (Pangaea, anyone?) The funny thing to me there is that they must have been dangerously close to getting it right–you know, to threaten God and all. Must be reachable, then, yeah? Maybe they had the Internet, too.

Anyhow, I digress. The point is this: assume for just a moment that if something catastrophic did happen and there were human remnants left of us, we’d rebuild.

What the hell would our kids know of the real world?

Which pasty techno-geek teenagers would survive hard labor in a universe that suddenly lacked a Home Depot or plastic bins or bottled water?

What if they couldn’t call the electric company for service, or reach their government in any way but by two-week-delivery letter–if that?

There are articles everywhere on parenting skills getting totally screwed over by Internet addiction. Kids who never go outside. Text speak being allowed in the classroom–on final exams, no less. Social habits we have totally, irrevocably lost. (That last link is actually really funny. You should click it.)

Yet the Internet, the holy bank of our collective knowledge, has doubled every five years since it started. We’re supposed to be smarter now, aren’t we? More information, I’d think, has got to be a good thing. We swap ideas now regardless of geographical boundaries, we can look up the already-discovered solution for any problem we’ll ever have. Some guy in China can tell you why your bread won’t rise, a lady in India might know the best way to fix your bike. Pictures of anything you’ve ever seen are on the ‘Net. That’s pretty much a given. Everything is there. That is beyond cool to try to comprehend. It’s so futuristic it sometimes still baffles me.

So what kind of generation are we? Are we getting better, or worse?

I say this not as any kind of high-and-mighty call to action to become Amish or bust. (I’m writing this on a blog, aren’t I?)

I love being online. I work exclusively from home on my computer so that I can spend more time with my family and manage my own employment. And then, hypocritically, I take my son to daycare in the mornings so I have time to make business calls and finish my work sans background Elmo-music. Have I really made any extra time? If I had a regular day job building whatsits, the kid would spend the same number of hours at daycare, and I’d be less mentally drained by the time he got me on the living room rug with the Legos. I could leave work at work and not feel the need to check my email on the hour. Am I just kidding myself by thinking our setup is good? Am I selfish?

I cuddle up, when I can, on the couch with my kids–but to watch a movie on Netflix, not to take them on a nature walk or tell them a handed-down story. I do that, too, but not nearly often enough. Even our quality time is ornamented by the Playstation, or talking board games, or Youtube videos of funny cats.

My step-daughter is on Facebook. I chat with her there more through the week than I do when she’s in my house every other weekend. Is that better to have the online time, then, or worse? Does it leave us without anything new to say?

“Hey, I went to [this place] and did [this thing] yesterday.”

“I know, I saw your wall post.”

“Oh.”

There’s nothing left to talk about. I’ve spilled it all. She knows everything I ate, she’s seen all the new family pictures, and she has already visited all the websites it occurred to me she’d like. It’s all done instantly, and our one-on-one time is left a little lacking. There isn’t much more to share when it’s all been visible so fast.

It’s play-by-play life. Not living.

I think maybe Alain de Botton recently said it best. From his City Journal article:

We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties—something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows.

and

To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.

And if we feel that way, a generation who does remember what it was really like without the Internet–or, gasp, even cable TV!–and instant access to everything everyone has ever known, what kind of minds will our kids have?

I’d like to think that writing will save us. I wouldn’t do it otherwise. It’s naively idealistic, yeah, but that’s what I’m in it for. I read the ideas of those I agree with, those whom I hate, those I don’t understand, and those I wish I were more like. I read everything I can get my hands on. You probably do, too.

I write what I believe. I hope someday someone cares. Not in that woe-is-me, shitty emo way… I mean in the way we pore over Samuel Clemens or Saint Augustine, and marvel at what they were probably like to have coffee with. I want somebody to know what I thought. I want what I’ve had to learn the hard way not to be in vain, or be lost as soon as I am. I think each and every one of us deserves that; my gadgety grandfather, who never wrote down schematics for his many inventions; the gas station guy who composes songs in between cigarette sales; the frazzled mom collapsed in the bathtub during her one free hour to herself; the man chosen as the new leader of the free world. We’re all equally worthy of being remembered.

But in our new society, remembering only happens for a split second. I think it’s because we feel like we have to remember everything, at all times, with no exception. Sure, we’re all more interconnected. But how long do the hard-won emotions last?

Like a great example from the article quoted above, we leave the movie theater vowing to let the new, warm values learned change our lives and become lifelong watchwords–but then we’ve forgotten about them by the next night, a hundred loud commercials and meaningful blog posts later. All thought is now temporary and had behind closed doors as individuals instead of within a flesh-and-blood community.

We hear more. Of course we do, there’s no way to argue that. But I can’t remember whether we listen. What happened last Wednesday?  I have no idea. I’d have to check my Twitter feed to see what I posted. It’s all in and out, and nothing seems to stick.

Even cultural milestones and major events are becoming as temporary as newscasts. What happens if and when our digital-only archive crashes? How would we know where we’ve been, what we’ve learned? Would we all be lost again?

Maybe the Internet will never die. Maybe technology is safe from that giant blue screen in the sky. But who are we becoming? After only fifteen years of web life, is this really who we are? What happens after fifty, or two hundred?

If we don’t care about each other anymore, really care, what have we got? If you choose to believe current trends, our kids will care even less…

Is anyone else scared shitless of where we’re heading?