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Truth Tuesday
I just read a really interesting article in Ladies Home Journal about attaining happiness by making your life harder. I admit, when I saw the title of the article I kind of snorted and thought “Why would I want my life to be harder?”
However, the author caught my attention with her admission that after reading Little House on the Prairie with her daughter, she was jealous and yearned to go back to the harder but simpler days. That’s my dream, too.
I want to live in a small cabin in the woods somewhere, growing my own food and being self-sustaining. It’s actually more of a long-term goal. Our family is too connected for our own good. Sometimes I think it’s time to disconnect and learn how to reconnect.
We’re connected in a connectivity kind of way.
In a household consisting of two adults, a 15-year-old, an 8-almost-9-year-old and a 1-year-old we have twelve Internet-ready devices. That’s: 1 netbook, 2 laptops, 2 desktop computers (one personal and one strictly for my husband’s job), 2 smartphones, 2 iPod touches, 1 Wii, a Kindle and a blue-ray player.
You can be sure the 1-year-old doesn’t use any of those, so that’s a mean of 4 devices per user. That’s just insane, but apparently par for the course. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a mere 4% of adults from the ages of 18 to 46 do not own any kind of Internet-ready device.
Think that’s crazy? It gets even crazier. Pew’s research also discovered that not only have 79% of adults used online means to communicate with family and friends, but that 21% of adults communicate online only. That’s 1 out of 5, which means at some point in our lives, the odds are one of my family members might literally stop talking and only type.
You can see why I might be concerned that we’re too connected and yet not connected enough.
Of course, my husband’s a programmer and I do a lot of work writing for online publications, so we’re just as much at fault as the kids. The smartphones are ours, the Kindle is mine and, truth be told, I love being able to stream Netflix through the Wii and the blue-ray player.
Here’s the thing, though. My husband, daughter, baby and I were sitting in the living room the other day, all using our phones or iPods while my son sat in the dining room using the computer. The baby toddled off to find the old cellphone he uses as a toy and, instead pretending to talk on it, was pretending to text. That’s not what we want him to learn.
For now, the dream of a self-sustaining life stays a dream, but I think we can find a way to reduce our need for connection and reconnect to the simpler, if harder, ways of life. After all, that’s what real family connection is built on, right?
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