When Life Went Online

Lately, I have found myself wanting to go back to the 1990s.

Not literally, of course. I have no particular desire to print directions from MapQuest again, and I am quite fond of being able to order a book without first locating it in a catalog.

What I miss is harder to explain.

I miss not knowing.

I miss not knowing what everyone else was doing on a Tuesday afternoon. I miss not knowing what someone in Connecticut had done to her kitchen, what a woman my age was wearing, where an acquaintance from high school had gone on vacation, or what everyone else had accomplished before breakfast.

There was a kind of privacy to ordinary life then—not merely privacy from other people, but privacy with yourself.

You could have an afternoon that belonged entirely to you.

When I was young, I remember going to the library and coming home with books. I remember my mother making quilts and knitting. There was dinner to make and laundry to do and, when autumn came, leaves to rake. Nobody photographed the leaves before raking them. Nobody turned the quilt into content. Nobody needed to know what we had for dinner.

We simply lived there. And there was boredom. I had almost forgotten about boredom.

Now, if an empty five minutes appears in my day, my hand seems to reach for my phone before I have even decided to reach for it. There is always something waiting there: something to read, something to buy, someone to compare myself to, some small piece of information I did not need five seconds earlier.

But once upon a time, an empty afternoon simply remained empty until you thought of something to do with it.

You might read. You might bake something.

You might rearrange a room, take a walk, pull weeds, look through a magazine, begin a project, abandon a project, or sit on the porch doing absolutely nothing useful.

We puttered.

And I am beginning to wonder whether puttering was more important than we knew.

Because puttering requires you to be present long enough in your own life to notice what it is asking of you.

The leaves need raking. The book beside your chair is unfinished. The dog wants to go outside.

The light has changed. You suddenly feel like making something. None of it is particularly impressive.

Perhaps that is precisely the point.

Lately I have been wondering what would happen if I stopped trying to make my life interesting enough to show other people and simply made it interesting enough to live in.

Maybe I don't really want the 1990s back.

Maybe I want my attention back.