The Nick of Time
In the end, we will be defined not only by what we create but by what we refuse to destroy.
—JOHN SAWHILL, CONSERVATIONIST
Thoreau said that when the conversation in his cabin became loud and expansive, he pushed his chairs to its far corners. So to the idea that we might learn about ourselves through algorithms, the most ready answer is to embrace conversations that bring us back to ourselves, our friends, and our communities. As Thoreau would have it, the three chairs together, the room made large.
Thoreau’s chairs capture a virtuous circle. We find our voice in solitude, and we bring it to public and private conversations that enrich our capacity for self-reflection. Now that circle has been disrupted; there is a crisis in our capacity to be alone and together. But we are in flight from those face-to-face conversations that enrich our imaginations and shepherd the imagined into the real. There is a crisis in our ability to understand others and be heard.
But we also demonstrate a striking resilience. I am not surprised that a study of children who put their devices away for five days at camp shows that they begin to recover their empathic capacity. In my own experiences observing children at such a camp, I saw how easy it was for them to appreciate—as though for the first time—the value of conversation, with themselves and others.
The campers I met spoke about solitude and empathy. Campers said they were more interested in their summer friends than in their friends at school. They thought the difference was that at home they talk with their friends about what’s on their phones; at camp, they talk to each other about what’s on their minds.
And as I participated in nightly cabin chats, campers remarked on their deepening relationships with counselors. The camp counselors were offering campers something close to exotic: undivided attention. While on duty, the counselors, too, had taken a break from their phones.
Many campers come back every year to this device-free camp. Several of the returning campers remark that each year they notice that they like themselves better at the end of the summer. They say that what they notice most is that they have become better friends and teammates. Also, they are nicer to their parents.
And they speak frankly about how hard it is to keep up their “camp selves” when they get home. There, family and friends are preoccupied with technology—and it is hard to resist following along.
At camp I learn many lessons. Among them: We don’t have to give up our phones, but we have to use them more deliberately. And sometimes, just as deliberately, we need to take a break. I think of how Clifford Nass compared the parts of the brain that process emotion to muscles—they atrophy if not exercised but can be strengthened through face-to-face conversation. Time without our phones is restorative. It provides time to practice.
For most of us, our exercises in conversation will not be at device-free summer camps. Most of the time, we’ll reclaim conversation by working to protect sacred spaces, spaces without technology, in our everyday lives. With more experience away from our devices, we’ll develop a better sense of when we need solitude and when we need to give each other undivided attention.
As we become comfortable with our own need for “tools down” conversations, we’ll learn to ask for them. And we’ll take the petitions of others more seriously: when a child needs his parent to listen, when a teacher wants to reach a distracted class, when a business meeting is trying to rectify a serious misunderstanding, when a friend turns to a friend and says, “I want to talk.”
Guideposts
People often say to me, “What next?”
Every technology asks us to confront our human values. This is a good thing, because it causes us to reaffirm what they are. From there it is easier to see next steps and guideposts. We are not looking for simple solutions. We are looking for beginnings.
Remember the power of your phone. It’s not an accessory. It’s a psychologically potent device that changes not just what you do but who you are. Don’t automatically walk into every situation with a device in hand: When going to our phones is an option, we find it hard to turn back to each other, even when efficiency or politeness would suggest we do just that. The mere presence of a phone signals that your attention is divided, even if you don’t intend it to be. It will limit the conversation in many ways: how you’ll listen, what will be discussed, the degree of connection you’ll feel. Rich conversations have difficulty competing with even a silent phone. To clear a path for conversation, set aside laptops and tablets. Put away your phone.
Slow down. Some of the most crucial conversations you will ever have will be with yourself. To have them, you have to learn to listen to your own voice. A first step is to slow down sufficiently to make this possible.
Online life has ramped up the volume of what everyone sees on any day and the velocity with which it whizzes by. We are often too busy communicating to think, create, or collaborate. We come to online life with the expectation that we can ask a question and get an almost immediate answer. In order to meet our expectations, we begin to ask simpler questions. We end up dumbing down our communications and this makes it harder to approach complex problems.
Protect your creativity. Take your time and take quiet time. Find your own agenda and keep your own pace. Tutored by technology, we become reactive and transactional in our exchanges because this is what technology makes easy. We all struggle with this. But many successful people I’ve talked with say that a key to their achievement is that they don’t even try to empty their email inbox. They set aside specific times to deal with their most important messages but never let an inbox set their agenda.
So if as a parent or teacher or employer you receive an email request, respond by saying that you need time to think about it. This seems a small thing, but it is too rarely done. A thirty-year-old consultant tells me that in her world, this response would be “age-inappropriate.” This makes me think that it is time to reconsider our sense of the appropriate in every domain. To respond to an email by saying “I’m thinking” says that you value reflection and you don’t let yourself be rushed just because technology can rush you. Emails and texts make quick responses possible; they don’t make them wise.
Again and again, I’ve seen people retreat to screens because only there do they feel they can “keep up” with the pace of machine life. I think of Vannevar Bush and his dream in 1945 that a mechanical “Memex” would free us for the kind of slow creative thinking that only people know how to do. Instead we too often try to speed up to a pace our machines suggest to us. It’s time to return to the spirit of Bush’s original idea.
We help children slow down by keeping them in touch with materials such as mud and modeling clay. The resistance of the physical fires their imaginations and keeps them grounded. This kind of creativity can be sparked beyond playrooms, classrooms, and parks. And it should happen all through life. At Google, employees come together to work with concrete materials in specially designed spaces known as “garages.” The idea is simple: Adults need play as much as children do. Use space and materials to encourage thought, talk, and new ideas. It’s an idea that can be brought from corporate spaces into family life.
Create sacred spaces for conversation. In the day-to-day, families carve them out—no devices at dinner, in the kitchen, or in the car. Introduce this idea to children when they are young so that it doesn’t spring up as punitive but is set up as a baseline of family culture. It can be an ordinary thing for a mother of a four-year-old to say: “In our family we need time without any electronics to be alone, quietly. And we need time to talk to each other. I don’t text in the car while I’m driving. So that makes it a perfect time for us to talk or just look out the window.”
Remember that we teach the capacity for solitude by being quiet alongside children who have our attention. Design your environment to protect yourself against unnecessary interruptions. Take a neighborhood walk—alone or with fa
mily or friends—without devices. Experiment with an evening or a weekend off the net as a regular part of your routine. Be realistic about how you are going to signal a new attitude about committing focused attention to your children. What children need is to understand your intention and values. If you can’t spend two hours with your children in the park without your phone, adjust your plan. Take your children to the park for one hour and give them your full attention.
And just as families need these protected spaces, so do schools and universities and workplaces. Increasingly, there is demand in universities for study and lounge space that is Wi-Fi-free. When we wired the universities, every last room of them, we didn’t consider that we were making it harder for students to attend to their peers or their own thoughts. Yet these showed up as unintended consequences. In offices, we can make space for conversation without digital connection; we can trade casual Fridays for conversational Thursdays. Setting aside a space communicates that, in this place, people pay attention to each other. They take a breath.
Think of unitasking as the next big thing. In every domain of life, it will increase performance and decrease stress.
But doing one thing at a time is hard, because it means asserting ourselves over what technology makes easy and over what feels productive in the short term. Multitasking comes with its own high. Our brains crave the fast and unpredictable, the quick hit of the new. We know this is a human vulnerability. Unless we design our lives and technology to work around it, we resign ourselves to diminished performance.
When I talk to managers, parents, and educators, I realize that they are increasingly familiar with the studies that show how multitasking degrades performance. But in practice, I see multitasking everywhere. Unitasking is key to productivity and creativity. Conversation is a human way to practice unitasking.
Talk to people with whom you don’t agree. Conversation is inhibited as much by our prejudices as by our distractions. A recent study characterizes the political conversations on social media as a “spiral of silence.” People don’t want to post opinions on social media that they fear their followers will disagree with. A technology that makes it possible to interact with everyone does not necessarily have everyone interacting. People use the Internet to limit their interactions to those with whom they agree. And social media users are less willing than non-users to discuss their views off-line.
Our reticence to talk to those with opposing opinions extends to the face-to-face world. A recent study shows that college students all across the United States who declare themselves to be committed Republicans or Democrats will not discuss political matters with students on their campus who do not share their views. This means that they will avoid political discussion with those who live down the hall, who share a bathroom. We turn the physical realm into an echo chamber of what we have so easily created online. It’s a cozy life, but we risk not learning anything new.
We can do better. We can teach our children to talk to people who disagree with them by modeling these conversations ourselves. We can show them that it helps to begin by talking about how you see causes, reasons, values. Even a small amount of common ground can nurture a conversation.
Obey the seven-minute rule. This is the rule, suggested to me by a college junior, that grows out of the observation that it takes at least seven minutes to see how a conversation is going to unfold. The rule is that you have to let it unfold and not go to your phone before those seven minutes pass. If there is a lull in the conversation, let it be. The seven-minute rule suggests other strategies for a life enriched by solitude, self-reflection, and presence. Learn to see boredom as an opportunity to find something interesting within yourself. Let yourself go there, have your association, and then come back to your train of thought or to the conversation. Our minds work, and sometimes at their best, when we daydream. When you return from reverie, you may be bringing back something deeply pertinent.
Conversation, like life, has silences and boring bits. This bears repeating: It is often in the moments when we stumble and hesitate and fall silent that we reveal ourselves to each other. Digital communication can lead us to an edited life. We should not forget that an unedited life is also worth living.
Challenge a view of the world as apps. The “app generation” is what the psychologists Howard Gardner and Katie Davis called the generation that grew up with phones in hand and apps at the ready. It’s a way to describe people who bring an engineering sensibility to everyday life and certainly to their educational experience. The app way of thinking starts with the idea that actions in the world will work like algorithms: Certain actions will lead to predictable results. By this logic, you go to certain schools, you get certain grades, you take certain summer enrichment courses and join certain extracurricular activities, and the app works: You get into an Ivy.
The app way of thinking can show up in friendship as a lack of empathy. Friendships become things to manage; you have a lot of them, and you come to them with a set of tools. At school and work, the app way of thinking can show up as a lack of creativity and innovation. Your options are laid out and you pick from the menu. We’ve seen middle school teachers facing students who had an instrumental view of friendship and parents who saw school as an app for getting their children into college. From the teachers’ point of view, students had no time to dream. No occasion to structure their own time. Or learn about situations that had no certain outcomes.
In school, when the app generation has to deal with unpredictability, they become impatient, anxious, and disoriented. At work, the problems continue. One new manager at HeartTech, the large software company in Silicon Valley, moved there so he could leave engineering and try his hand at management. “I left my previous job because it was too predictable. I wanted to work with unpredictable systems [here he means people].” But he brings old habits with him: “I’m not really used to working with unpredictable systems. I’m not that good at thinking on my toes.” He elaborates: “I’m not used to thinking fast with people in front of me . . . the back-and-forth of conversation.”
His is a common plight. Engineers who move into management are asked to do a very different kind of work than that in which they were trained. They were groomed for today’s scientific attitude toward management, one that encourages research and an instrumental and hard-edged view of the world. But in daily practice, what faces any manager is a life of hard calls, ambiguous situations, and difficult conversations. In the most concrete terms, there are performance reviews, negative feedback, firing people.
A human resources officer at a high-tech firm tells me: “The catchphrase among my peers is that ‘engineers will not deliver difficult conversations.’” In the high-tech world, when I raise the topic of conversation, that’s the phrase I often hear back.
Difficult conversations require empathic skills and, certainly, “thinking on your toes.” Teaching engineers how to have these conversations requires significant coaching. Yet these days, as Gardner and Davis point out, a style of thinking that prefers the predictable extends beyond engineers.
It’s not just the engineers who need coaching. As we all accept a more instrumental view of life, we are all having trouble with difficult conversations. In that sense, we are all engineers now. Our challenge is to deliver those difficult conversations, the ones that include others and the ones with ourselves.
Choose the right tool for the job. Sometimes we find a technology so amazing—and a smartphone, for example, is so amazing—that we can’t stop ourselves from imagining it as a universal tool. One that should, because it is amazing, replace all the tools we had before. But when you replace a conversation with an email just because you can, there is a good chance that you have chosen the wrong tool. Not because email isn’t a great tool for some jobs. Just not for all jobs.
There is nothing wrong with texting or email or videoconferencing. And there is everything right with making them technically better, mor
e intuitive, easier to use. But no matter how good they get, they have an intrinsic limitation: People require eye contact for emotional stability and social fluency. A lack of eye contact is associated with depression, isolation, and the development of antisocial traits such as exhibiting callousness. And the more we develop these psychological problems, the more we shy away from eye contact. Our slogan can be: If a tool gets in the way of our looking at each other, we should use it only when necessary. It shouldn’t be the first thing we turn to.
One thing is certain: The tool that is handy is not always the right tool. So an email is often the simplest solution to a business problem, even as it makes the problem worse. A text has become the handy way to end a relationship, even as it upsets and diminishes all participants. As I write this, a new robot has been launched on the market as a companion for your child. It will teach a child to look for understanding from an object that has none to give.
Learn from moments of friction. We’ve met professionals who feel in conflict about the role technology plays in their lives. An enthusiast for remote work ends up taping the silence in his office and sending the audio file home to his wife. Architects build open workspaces even when they know that the people they design for crave more privacy. Young lawyers don’t join their colleagues in the lunchroom even though they know that taking time for these meals would cement lifelong business relationships.
If you find yourself caught in this kind of conflict, pause and reconsider: Is your relationship to technology helping or hindering you? Can you recognize these moments as opportunities for new insight?
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