” I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude .”
– Henry David Thoreau
This week’s notable accomplishment is getting the winter issue of Computor Companion magazine done. As you’ll find in the Letter from the Editor, putting out this issue was no mean feat thanks to an extended power outage. Fortunately, we have a generator, which we use to power our offices. It also powered up my laptop’s battery, so even during the times we had to turn the generator off, I got in extra hours of computing time so I could finish the issue.
One thing that is interesting about spending that much time disconnected from the world is how very quiet it is. Until it’s missing, you sort of don’t notice the ambient noise that fills our modern world. For example, at our house, normally we hear the hum of our refrigerator and the fans running on our pellet stoves. All those little clicks and hums add up.
It got me thinking about a recent study from the December 2005 issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family that contends that the prevalence of cell phones may be having a negative impact on family life. (The study was widely reported, especially in the nerd press, but it hit more mainstream sites like CNN)
In the study, blame was centered on cell phones because they allow a new level of crossover between work and family life. But I wonder if the problem doesn’t go deeper than that. I think that people need “down time.” A little quiet never hurt anybody. I mean think about how you feel when you’re walking on a beach or in the forest alone with your thoughts versus the time you spend on the phone at work (or worse, at home talking to someone at work).
People always say how “stressed out” they are. Maybe the solution is to just be quiet for a while. Turn everything off and just be. After all, even if he could have, I don’t think Thoreau would have taken his cell phone with him to Walden Pond.