Noise

Today I'm borrowing a topic from the blog of my alter ego, Cassandra Austen (have you seen her website? It's so pretty!). Cassandra's blog is different from mine; hers is dedicated to her world of Old England and New England, emphasizing beauty and romance. She likes to post beautiful images and thoughts from her journal, and she definitely does not go to rock concerts or eat sushi. But the lovely photo above was taken behind her barn, and she raised a topic that I've been mulling over recently.

I'm the homeschooling mom of teenagers, with another kid in college and my eldest in graduate school. I feel as if I've watched the impact of noise on children for years. By noise, I mean digital noise, smartphone noise, app noise, social media noise. In a previous blog post I mentioned Cal Newport, the Deep Work guru; he discusses the need for quiet in order to pursue “deep work” on his blog frequently.

I learned to read and write in an era without smartphones or digital anything, and I think it was probably easier to focus and learn to think deeply in those days. I watch with dismay as the children around me show signs of being chronically unable to dive deeply into just about anything. It's not their fault. The world is noisy.

My children are homeschooled, so they've been raised with a lot less media than most. However, they eventually do acquire smartphones, and they manipulate Netflix and Snapchat with the best of them. They seem to be able to think deeply and analyze, but I still think it's hard for them, harder than it was for me at that age.

I'm attentive to all the digital noise around me and how it affects my own work. The deer in the photograph would have disappeared if it hadn't been quiet, absolutely still. Its ears have evolved to be able to trap the smallest noise, allowing it to escape predators to the best of its ability. A deer that is a) slow, and b) deaf, wouldn't last long.

I'm thinking about my own ears. Can I still hear the stories in my head, with all the digital noise surrounding me? And young people–is it too late to develop this skill when Victorian literature is so dense and wordy, it's probably the last thing a smart high schooler wants to read? Why bother, right? Can't you just Google it? Yes, you can. But you can't Google an actual ACT. You can't Google the ABILITY TO ANALYZE and have a great creative idea, and plug it into your brain.

This is what worries me as I counsel my kids to put down the phones and instead to read hard books. I worry that people are going to get stupider.