His experience illustrates disconnection anxiety. Now that connection is always on offer, people don’t know what to do with time alone, even time they asked for. They can’t concentrate; they say they are bored, and boredom becomes a reason to turn to their phones for a game or a text or a Facebook update. But mostly, it is anxiety that leads them back to their phones. They want to feel a part of things. That is the message of our messages: We are on someone’s radar.
I’ve talked so much about virtuous circles; here is a vicious cycle. Knowing we have someplace “else” to go in a moment of boredom leaves us less experienced at exploring our inner lives and therefore more likely to want the stimulation of what is on our phones. To reclaim solitude we have to learn to experience a moment of boredom as a reason to turn inward, to defer going “elsewhere” at least some of the time.
Where Empathy Begins
I’ve spoken about Holbrooke, a middle school in upstate New York. It is small, with about a hundred and fifty students, boys and girls in grades six to eight. For several years, the teachers have felt that something is amiss. This year, they have called me in as a consultant. The main thing on their minds: Their students are not showing empathy toward each other. The teachers themselves make the connection between this lack of empathy and the difficulty children have with solitude. As the teachers see it, if students can’t take time for themselves, how will they take time for others?
The teachers say they are trying to slow things down for their students. They want each student to have an experience of “breathing room.” Right now, students struggle to sit quietly and concentrate. They have very little patience. In the past, there were always some students who would balk at lengthy assignments. But now, even academically ambitious students rebel when they see a reading list that includes more than one long book.
While our brains are wired for talk, we can also train them to do deep reading, the kind that demands concentration on a sustained narrative thread with complex characters. It is the kind of reading the Holbrooke students say they don’t want to do. Generations of English teachers told their charges that reading this kind of fiction was “good for them.” It sounded like something teachers would say; no one really believed them in a literal sense. But now we know that literary fiction significantly improves empathic capacity, as measured by the ability to infer emotional states from people’s facial expressions. The English teachers were right, literally. First one identifies with the characters in a complex novel and then the effect generalizes.
Jane Austen endures because readers identify with the mix of pride and prejudice in her most famous hero and heroine. Readers groan at the mountain of complications that character and circumstance throw in their path and celebrate when Elizabeth and Darcy can find each other despite. Literary fiction exercises a reader’s imagination in matters of character and emotional nuance. The parallels to conversation are clear. Conversation, like literary fiction, asks for imagination and engagement. And conversation, like literary fiction, demands quiet time.
It’s time that today’s students don’t seem to have. An English teacher at Holbrooke says of her seventh graders: “They don’t want to be assigned projects that will claim their attention over time. They don’t want to see things through.” One teacher tries to sum up a new distractedness: “My students say things like, ‘I misplaced my journal. I looked for it for ten minutes.’ And then they look at me. The understanding is that now, it is my job to organize the search.”
At Holbrooke, my mind jumps to conversations with businesspeople who talk about the “special needs” of recent college graduates who come to them seeking employment. One advertising executive, with thirty-five years of experience, describes the sensibility of her recent hires. As she talks about them, she is arguably describing the kinds of workers the Holbrooke students will become:
These young people are not used to working on their own on a project. In the past, if you think of employees . . . who are now in their forties, fifties, sixties . . . if you gave them a project, they thought it was their job to do it. Alone. Now, people can’t be alone. They need continual contact and support and reinforcement. They want to know they are doing well. Left on their own to do their work, they feel truly bereft. They are always connected to each other online, but as I listen to their supervisors, they also need more support than before. They need a different kind of management.
An art director at an advertising agency says of her new hires, all from elite colleges: “They are incredibly talented, but they grew up in a world of Facebook ‘thumbs-ups.’ They are accustomed to a lot of encouragement. So, you don’t know if you should indulge that or if the management challenge is to teach them how to be alone and give themselves a ‘thumbs-up.’”
Negotiating Boredom
The concerns of the Holbrooke teachers are shared by those who teach older children. At one high school in Maine, teachers from all academic departments worry that students lack downtime. They say that high school students need it to learn how to think with autonomy. But the teachers don’t think that parents are on their side. As the teachers see it, “Parents don’t want their kids to have downtime. There can always be more piano lessons or soccer practice. . . . The kids in our school are shuttled from activity to activity; they eat dinner in their cars. . . . If parents think their children have any free time, they say to us and to the child: ‘You’re not doing enough to succeed.’” Or parents worry that downtime is the same as boredom and see it as a waste of time.
But childhood boredom is a driver. It sparks imagination. It builds up inner emotional resources. For the child psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott, a child’s capacity to be bored—closely linked to the child’s capacity to play contentedly alone while in the quiet presence of a parent—is a critical sign of psychological health. Negotiating boredom is a signal developmental achievement.
The high school teachers say that most of their students don’t have this achievement behind them. Even short periods of time alone make their students uncomfortable. If there is an open space in the day, students expect an adult to come in with an activity. If not, they expect to turn to their phones for distraction, a new connection, or a new game. What they don’t allow themselves is stillness. A high school math teacher tries to sum up the costs: “Seeing things takes time. Seeing yourself takes time. Having a friend takes time. And it takes time to do things well. . . . These kids don’t have time.”
Back at Holbrooke, an art teacher describes her most recent attempt to get a class of twelve-year-olds to slow down. She asked students to take five minutes to draw an object of their choice. “Several,” she says, “told me that this was the longest they had ever concentrated on one thing, uninterrupted.” And then she says, “They got upset when they couldn’t do it well. They asked for help. So, what happened is that I went over to help. But then, as soon as I stepped away, they lost interest. Some turned to their phones.”
A drama teacher says she had similar problems during rehearsals for a recent school play: “I tell them that acting is not about the verbal performance. The actor is really doing ‘deep listening.’ That is, the actor is responding to the other actors.” But the students could not sit still long enough to listen to each other. In the end, the drama teacher presented them with an ultimatum: Listen to each other or leave the play. The ultimatum had its effects: A group of students dropped out.
The Holbrooke teachers worry that they are making some problems worse. At Holbrooke, each student is given an iPad for reading textbooks, organizing assignments, and keeping up with the school schedule. The school is asking students to work from the very devices that distract them.
One fifteen-year-old says that once he’s on his iPad, “I am lost. I go on to check the time for a team practice, but it pulls me in. So I check my Facebook.” Life, for him, “would be simpler with a printed schedule.” A fourteen-year-old girl describes the strain of having to do all her c
lass reading online. “Once I’m on the iPad for assignments, I’m messaging my friends and playing a game. It’s hard to stay on school things. I don’t see why they got rid of books.”
Right now, the Holbrooke teachers are in no position to take the iPads away. They tell me that as a school they have made a commitment to the platform’s “efficiency” and to the “content available online.” But it’s hard to keep students from jumping online whenever they have a free moment. And once students are online, it’s hard to keep them from the path of least resistance. That path leads to texting, games, and shopping. That path leads to Facebook.
The Facebook Zone
How does technology hold us close, so close that we turn to it instead of turning within? It keeps us in a “machine zone.” When she considered gamblers’ connection to their slot machines, the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll wrote about the machine zone as a state of mind in which people don’t know where they begin and the machine ends. One of the gamblers Schüll interviewed said, “I’m almost hypnotized into being that machine.” For gamblers in the machine zone, money doesn’t matter. Neither does winning or losing. What matters is remaining at the machine and in the zone. Technology critic Alexis Madrigal thinks of the “Facebook zone” as a softer version of the numbed state of Schüll’s gamblers. When you’re on social media, you don’t leave, but you are not sure if you are making a conscious decision to stay.
Here is how Maggie, a college junior, describes that place: “When I check my Facebook and Twitter and email on my cell phone, I feel like I am forgetting to check something and I’ll continue to look through those three things because I feel like I am missing something.” The process of checking draws her into the process of checking. Judy, another junior, speaks about Facebook on her phone as a “lucky charm” that will protect her from boredom. But when she describes her time with her phone, it seems as if it is training her to be bored with anything other than her phone:
If you’re on some app and looking through stuff because you’re bored, you can click your little round button and go through a circuit of apps. Even if nothing is happening you probably have an email. Sometimes when you’re just sitting and talking to someone or in class it’s boring. So you check your phone even if you know nothing has happened. That switching makes it so that when you’re just sitting or engaged in one thing, it feels weird.
As Judy would put it, in the Facebook zone, you are never available for “just sitting” or “being engaged in one thing.” That’s a problem: These are the building blocks of solitude.
It is helpful to compare the Facebook zone with what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” In flow, you are asked to do a task that isn’t so easy as to be mindless but isn’t so hard as to be out of your grasp. If, when skiing, you are challenged but your skills are sufficient to give you a feeling of connection with the mountain, you are experiencing flow. For Csikszentmihalyi, experiences in the flow state always lead to new learning and a stronger sense of self. Schüll’s gamblers don’t experience growth but entrapment and repetition. Madrigal calls the machine zone the “dark side of flow.”
Between flow and its dark side, where are we when we enter the Facebook zone? Maggie and Judy both say that cycling through apps takes them away from other—and they think more important—things they used to do, like going for a walk, drawing, and reading. They no longer make time for these activities, but they can’t break away from their phones and are not sure they want to. In their stories, we see the “success” of devices whose goal, ultimately, is to keep their users connected.
A humorous moment made this point during a Boston visit of Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google. Schmidt was in town to speak about his recently published book. When he walked into the hall, he asked the audience, “How many of you are going to be on your phones during the lecture?” When a roomful of hands shot up he said, “Good! That’s what we want you to be doing.” Apps are designed to keep you on apps. And the more of your downtime you spend cycling through apps, the less time you have to be alone with yourself.
Surfing as Solitude
College students are clear: What they count as solitude involves being online. One college junior tells me that she doesn’t daydream but does something she calls “chilling.” It involves “aimlessly searching the web.” Think of it as daydreaming 2.0. But it doesn’t do the work of daydreaming. In fact, she calls the web her “safety mechanism” against daydreaming. Time wandering the web protects her from the “danger” of having her mind wander. Another, in a similar spirit, calls her phone an “insurance policy” against boredom. Like the Fortune 500 vice-president alone at his desk, these young women understand that time alone without a phone creates anxiety.
I ask Carmen, twenty, if she ever has time to just sit and think. Her answer: “I would never do that.” If she has a quiet moment she goes to Facebook. She says she doesn’t want to think about the past without it. “To think about your past experiences instead of looking at pictures or messages, it takes more effort to do that.”
Effort she would rather not put in. “The problem,” she explains, is that “if you think about the past without Facebook, you would have to consciously say, ‘Okay, now I am going to think. . . .’ You would have to prepare to go sit by yourself.” To her, this is an unlikely idea. Carmen has reached a point where solitude means being alone with her laptop and the people she reaches through it, a new definition of solitude as crowd management.
Anya, twenty, describes an evening when she accompanied her college roommate to the hospital. A triage nurse decided that the roommate’s stomach pain was not an emergency and so the two women had to wait for over five hours to see a doctor. They both went to their phones. When her phone began to lose its charge, Anya panicked.
My phone gets to the red mark and I started freaking out, like, “Oh no, it’s about to die.” That anxious feeling. I really get anxious when my phone is about to die. And then it dies. I am not even joking when I tell you that I went around the entire hospital. I asked every worker, every nurse, every random person I could find if they had an iPhone charger. I finally found a random security guard. He took me to a back room so I could charge my phone. I will go to that length—even invade people’s privacy.
This is disconnection anxiety in the presence of your best friend. Anya explains that she and her roommate didn’t want to sit quietly with their thoughts. And in a related development, conversation felt like too much work. “We just wanted to be quiet and look at our phones and keep our minds preoccupied.”
Lightbulb Moments and the Value of Your Inner World
People like the image of a creative idea coming to someone as though a lightbulb turned on. But usually these “lightbulb” ideas have been long prepared.
Writing about his own experience, the French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré explored the slow unfolding of what seem like “lightbulb” ideas. “Sudden illumination,” says Poincaré, is only “a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work,” work usually done alone.
Often when one works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest, longer or shorter, and sits down anew to the work. During the first half-hour, as before, nothing is found, and then all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself to the mind.
It was the dream of early computer scientists to have machines do the fast and routine work so that the slow and creative work could be done by people. In 1945, the inventor and engineer Vannevar Bush dreamed of a device he called a Memex (an idea often considered a precursor to the web) that would take care of logical processes in order to leave more time for the slow unfolding of human creativity. Ironically, as we move closer to the world Bush imagined, the opposite may have happened. Machines present us with information at a volume and velocity that we try, unsuccessfully, to keep up with. But we try. And the effort means that we are often so bus
y communicating that we don’t have time to think. K–12 teachers and college professors use the same words to describe their students: rushed, impatient, not interested in process, unable to be alone with their thoughts. It’s as though we are waiting for the lightbulb without taking the time or the time alone for the “long, unconscious prior work.”
The psychologist Jonathan Schooler demonstrated that “mind wandering” is a stepping-stone to creativity. “The mind is inherently restless,” says Schooler. “It’s always looking to attend to the most interesting thing in its environment.” If children grow up expecting that the most interesting thing in their environment is going to be on their phones, we have to teach them to give their inner worlds a chance. Indeed, in a quiet moment, all of us, child and adult, have to fight the impulse to turn first to our devices.
Our devices compel us because we respond to every search and every new piece of information (and every new text) as though it had the urgency of a threat in the wild. So stimulation by what is new (and social) draws us toward some immediate goal. But daydreaming moves us toward the longer term. It helps us develop the base for a stable self and helps us come up with new solutions. To mentor for innovation we need to convince people to slow things down, let their minds wander, and take time alone.
Reclaiming conversation begins with reclaiming our capacity for solitude. When we reach for a phone to push reverie away, we should get into the habit of asking why. Perhaps we are not moving toward our phones but away from something else. Are we hiding from anxiety? Are we hiding from a good idea that will demand difficult work? Are we hiding from a question that will take time to sort through?
In our world of “I share, therefore I am” we are not primed to give solitude a chance. We can cultivate a different attitude, beginning with our children. We can give them time without electronic devices. And we can give them more time alone. The teachers who complain that parents see free time as their children’s enemy are pointing to something real. Children can’t develop the capacity for solitude if they don’t have the experience of being “bored” and then turning within rather than to a screen.
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