Reclaiming Conversation (9 page)

And we get our children to live the same way. The children on the Boston–New York train had their own devices—tablets and phones. I said that we use digital “passbacks” to placate young children who say they are bored. We are not teaching them that boredom can be recognized as your imagination calling you.

Of course, any too-poetic picture of solitude needs correction. Solitude may be a touchstone for empathy and creativity, but it certainly does not always feel good. For the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, “Openness, patience, receptivity,
solitude is everything
.” And yet, in a way that Louis C.K. would have understood, Rilke confronted its difficulty: “And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that
wants to move out of it
.” Indeed, research shows that adolescents experience solitude as downtime that can feel bad in the short run. But in the long run it
facilitates healthy development
. Without solitude, in days and nights of continual connection, we may experience those “moments of more” but lives of less.

When I ask children and teens about quiet time alone with their thoughts, most tell me that it is not something they seek. As soon as they are alone, they reach for their phones. No matter where they are. Most are already sleeping with their phones. So, if they wake up in the middle of the night, they check their messages. They never take a walk without their phones. Time alone is not, most say, something their parents taught them to value. If we care about solitude, we have to communicate this to our children. They are not going to pick it up on their
own. And more than telling our children that we value solitude, we have to show them that we think it is important by
finding some for ourselves
.

W
e have testimony about solitude
from the most creative among us. For Mozart, “When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer—say, traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep—it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.” For Kafka, “You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.” For Thomas Mann, “Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry.” For Picasso, “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.”

Answering these warm poetic voices are the cool results of social science. Susan Cain, writing about the importance of privacy for creative work, cites a study known as “The Coding War Games.” Here, researchers compared the work of more than six hundred programmers at ninety-two companies. Within companies, programmers performed at about the same level, but among different organizations, the performance gaps were striking. One thing characterized the programmers in the high-performing organizations: They had more privacy. The top performers “overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and
freedom from interruption
.”

It is not surprising that privacy allows for greater creativity. When we let our focus shift away from the people and things around us, we are better able to think critically about our own thoughts, a process psychologists call meta-cognition. Everyone has this potential. The important thing is to nurture it. The danger is that in a life of constant connection, we lose the capacity to do so.

A vice-president of a Fortune 500 company tells me that he recently had to write an important presentation and asked his secretary to “protect” him from all interruptions for three hours.

I wanted my email disabled. I asked her to take my cell phone away from me. I told her to let no calls through except for family emergencies. She did exactly as I wished. But three hours without connection were intolerable. I could barely concentrate on the presentation, I felt so anxious. I know this sounds crazy but I felt panicky. I felt that no one cared about me, loved me.

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.

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.'”

T
he 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 class 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.

H
ow 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.