The other night I came across this thread on Twitter, about students struggling following the pandemic.

I read dozens of replies and I screenshotted a few that struck me. Take a look at these two on smartphones:

And:

These two:

And these broader ones:

And finally, this one:

It’s spooky reading all of this. It’s disheartening. It’s not political. It’s not rhetoric. It just is. After the illness phase of the pandemic is over, this is all going to stay with us.

This last comment describes a familiar feeling for me during this period. Maybe it’s just the general stress of the last two years (or the last six years), or outgrowing our small place, or striking out on self-employment in the middle of an economic…situation. Some people think asymptomatic COVID cases have left lots of healthy people with some measure of brain damage or other health problems. It’s left some people with long-term symptoms. Could it be almost all of us?

The anecdotes about increased aggression in normal situations—roads, supermarkets, airports—are sobering. It feels like there are a lot of signs that something is off. It’s a funny thing. I had this feeling back at the “end” of the pandemic, during the mid-2021 vaccine drive. Then it dissipated and things felt more or less normal. Now, for awhile, it feels like we’re trapped in a weird state. I don’t really know how to describe it. It almost makes me think of The Tunnel Under The World. (Check out Frederik Pohl!)

But about the kids. If comfortable, well-employed adults are talking about barely hanging on, what’s it like to be a kid? When your whole, mostly innocent world is turned upside down? But college students too. It’s easy to forget how uncertain we were at 18. I think people my age, in their mid-to-late 20s, project our current selves back into college, forgetting that we had to grow to where we are now. Just losing a year of in-person school and life in college would have been awful, but that was just one disruption of many.

The technology comments especially struck me. The idea that having the answer at your fingertips shortcuts intellectual work and curiosity seems really deep. I’ve had a similar-ish thought. Remember before smartphones, when someone would try too remember an old theme song or cartoon or advertisement, or something, and you’d ask, “What was that thing called?” and everyone would sort of have fun seriously or semi-seriously trying to recall it?

Nowadays, that often gets cut out by “Why don’t you look it up?” In fact, it feels almost weird to ask people a question that can easily be looked up. It’s similar to the overused (by me) example of the wood versus the gas fireplace.

It can feel lonely to be in a group of people, and have this thing in your pocket that shortcuts real interaction, and, if social media flame wars are any indication, seems to trigger more intense feelings than almost anything in real life.

Again, imagine all of this, but being a kid.

Last time I was up in New Jersey, when I was road-tripping with my best friend up there, we got onto the subject of schools. He has a few nephews—two older sisters who both have families—and he spends a lot of time with them. All their families are close, and these kids have grown up with him. The oldest is now in high school, and the youngest are about elementary-school age.

He brought up some of this stuff that’s getting debated in politics these days, on race and gender, or parental rights, all that. He had even heard from a friend the bizarre urban legend about schools putting litterboxes in the bathrooms (for the students who identify as cats.)

He didn’t believe that, and he didn’t have any particular view on any of this stuff. He was just aware of it, and generally concerned for his nephews as they went through the school system.

It was one of those conversations that gave me a taste of how parenting changes you. My friend has always been pretty breezy and laid back, and also a bit of a risk-taker. He still is, I guess, but it was obvious to me that a few years of being a valued figure in his nephews’ lives had changed him in some way; brought him outside of himself. Suddenly, how a given thing would affect the kids was a consideration in his mind. In some ways I dislike the idea of losing my breezy autonomy. But I also sort of look forward to having that maturity forced on me. It’s really interesting.

Another thing he said was that his nephews were always bored. They grew up with smartphones and other modern tech, and always having entertainment at their fingertips meant that any moment without it became boring or frustrating.

He and I were homeschooled (me all the way, he until high school), and were rarely bored. We had one homeschool meeting at our church every month. I remember the feeling of looking forward to that meeting for two or three weeks, and how if it was really fun it would carry your spirits almost until the next one.

We had these long days: morning Mass, two or three hours of meeting/play time, out to lunch, sometimes over to each other’s houses afterwards. But the number of days out of the month where we did that sort of thing was very sparing. Our minds were sort of calibrated to be satisfied with that. Neither of us recalls very often feeling that bored frustration that kids that age today seem to feel.

Back to the technology stuff, when I was a kid in the 90s, in the early days of the internet, sometimes I’d have a bunch of questions, and my dad would write them down and google them and then come back and answer them with me. The computer was a sort of “family appliance” that you weren’t hooked to all day. It was almost a ritual or a treat to connect to the internet.

Those long stretches of unbroken, offline time, unmediated by a screen or machine, feel lost. If you try to recreate it consciously, that frustrated boredom sets in. What is it like growing up without never knowing that slow, comforting rhythm of the before times? Before what? Lots of things, I guess.

Social card image credit Flickr/Terence Faircloth, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Do Not Re-Enter?

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