New West Living

“Your Connection Has Been Lost”: Plight of a Twenty-First Century Geek

By Tonya Poole, 3-11-06

I fold laundry when I’m under stress. Any other time and I avoid all things domestic like the plague, but when the going gets rough there’s little therapy like simplicity. For Shane, it’s cooking. After a long and grueling phone conference with a client he’ll head straight for the kitchen where he’ll spend the next hour on yet-untried recipes as a way to unwind. Things that once felt like menial chores have become sanctuaries in our house, in part, I think, because they involve and engage parts of us we’re not used to using anymore. And very likely because they’re delightfully low-tech and far removed from the constant deluge of communication we’re navigating all day, as two small business owners reliant entirely on technology in the rural west.

We’re transplants here to southern Colorado, wandering here from Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and before that, northwestern Nevada and northern California – a migration that started more than twenty years ago for Shane in the Midwest, and for me, in New England. Our work allows us that freedom, to travel and to live anywhere we choose, provided there’s enough outlets and an Internet connection close by. Heaven! At least I once thought so. But increasingly I’ve been questioning what kind of freedom that really is, tied to technology and unable to earn a living without it, and whether or not we need it as desperately as we think we do.

I think most of us love technology for its ability to connect us with, potentially, millions of people on seven continents, and for the convenience that allows us to make quick-and-clean work of the things that once took two or three times as much time and energy. But it isn’t without its price, and over the last year or two I’ve watched that loss come into increasingly sharp focus in our lives.

I’m sure you’ve seen bits and pieces of it happening in your own communities. Why stop by the neighbor’s for coffee when we can shoot them a quick email to chat?

Why drive down to the local movie store when we can order DVDs with the click of a mouse, and have them delivered straight to our doors?

Why walk into the neighborhood craftsman’s shop to order custom furniture when we can browse virtual catalogs online?

Why travel long distances to visit family and friends when we can hook up a mic and a web cam to the machines we’re tied to?

Why browse a century-old bookstore when we can order books by the pile at half the cost online?

Why go antiquing with our best friends when we can pop into eBay and bid anonymously on one of millions of items up on the block?

And why have limiting business hours when we can take our palm pilots to bed with us and work on projects and exchange emails at 3am from the comfort of our pillows?

It sounds ridiculous even to me, a long-time advocate of communications technologies, when I list it out that way because its suddenly so much easier to draw the lines that show us how we’ve given up one type of human connection for another. In financial circles, it’s referred to as disintermediation: pulling our resources from low-yield entities and placing them in those with higher-yields. But, just as in finance, there’s a risk that accompanies it – and I think we’ve found ours.

Freedom to live and work anywhere in the world doesn’t matter much when we can’t step away from the cell phone or email or our online appointment book long enough to get out and enjoy where we are. My connection thus far with the San Luis Valley – save for time at our land and a few stolen getaways out into its countryside – has been primarily through the glass of the windows in front of my desk. Even when we’ve traveled, we’ve been in such a rush to get to our destination to set up camp and check email and get busy working again, lest our clients fall apart without us and take their business elsewhere, that I may have perfected my 65mph-out-the-window camera shot more than any other technique.

I’m ashamed of that. We’ve taken a potentially good thing and turned it into a demon we’ve become enslaved to, that, instead of freeing us up to enjoy our lives outside a cubicle space, has tied us to a handful of electronics and a way of life that’s in some ways less free than that of the 9-to-5ers we never wanted to be. If I get up to get a glass of water in the middle of the night, the glow of the laptop on the desk in the office leaks out into the kitchen, and I feel obligated to check in on it to make sure all the balls I’ve launched are still in the air, so I can go back to sleep. At least the majority of 9-to-5ers can safely go home at the end of the day and put those hats on the rack for the night.

I don’t know what the solution is, but this week I quickly got very tired of waiting for my own evolution to kick-start itself. So I fired a high-maintenance client and hired someone to come help out part-time at the office, and began the slow trade back to reversing the income vs. time, connection vs. convenience question that, over time, got helplessly turned upside down.

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