FOR a year now, I’ve had a little quote pinned above my desk. Tell me, it says, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
On a particularly joyless day, I scribbled a response: “Make lunch boxes.”
But even doctored with my smarty-pants cynicism, that scrap of paper winks at my soul. Some days, I try for ‘wild’ by blasting The Buzzcocks through my office after dropping the kids at school. Other times, I aim for ‘precious’, tinkering with words in the hope they’ll flow from me to you as naturally as breath (they don’t).
Now, I’m not one for malcontent. Live well, love well, don’t leave a mess and “yes, please” to another piece of cake is generally my motto. But, recently I’ve felt disconnected, which is absurd because last year I received 13,506 emails, sent 432 tweets and became Facebook ‘friends’ with someone I kissed in 1989. I’m so connected that I go online the second I wake up. I’m linked in, favourited, retweeted, liked.
Tech torpor, nature deficit disorder, digital ADHD – call it what you like, it’s fracturing our lives. How many couples spend their evenings on separate devices? How many babies looking up from their prams see their parents’ faces masked by an iPhone? New research shows Australians are less inclined to embrace adventure and try new things, with 80 per cent blaming technology and social networking for their inertia. Add to that the 130 million days of stockpiled annual leave and you get the sense there are a lot of people visiting life rather than living it.