A Rant

 June 13, 2025

The internet has been intermittent here. There’s a wifi signal, which makes me think it’s not the modem. This reminds me of Pender, before the recent upgrade, except that here, it’s been gone on for some twelve hours. What did people do before internet? I lived most of my life without it — what did I do? I wandered into the kitchen this morning, and somehow Katharina had baked a quiche. Somehow, between 9:30 last night and 7:00 this morning, when she was off to work. Maybe I used to bake things? 

If I were at home I would have a ton of things to do, a list that had grown while I whiled away my time on the internet. No internet, that list gets tackled. Maybe I never used to have a list, and simply did things that needed to be done when they needed to be done. 

Ezra suggested that maybe people talked to each other? I thought, maybe that explains why my generation went through so many divorces, while his stays married. I mean, how much can two people find to talk about for decades?* The internet saves marriages! 

Parents are rightly worried about their kids and screen time. We just don’t know what it’s doing to their brains and their ability to actually connect to others. (We do have a pretty good idea what it’s doing to their psyche, though, due to online bullying, and it ain’t good.) Maybe, minus the online bullying part, it’s not all that bad. I remember a university professor telling us, back when I was naive enough to think that a university professor must be purveying the truth, that when novels first became a thing back in the 19th Century (I think it was the 19th, but the internet is down, so I can’t fact-check myself), young people had their noses stuck in books, and parents thought it would be their downfall — it would ruin their young minds and stunt their ability to be social. With this as a model, maybe we need to relax about screen time, as long as it’s not getting in the way of, you know, physical activity, school work, doing chores. 

What did kids used to do before the internet? My kids read a lot of books (risky to young 19th Century brains), built a lot of Lego (dangerous underfoot), and made big messes in their rooms. I don’t remember much else; frankly, my life was so frantic in those days, I don’t remember much at all. School nights, there weren’t many hours between picking them up from after-school care, feeding them, and getting them off to bed (always with read-aloud during which I was the one to fall asleep.) Weekends, we’d go on outings. When my first-born was little and the weather was lousy, an outing might be to a shopping mall — he actually liked that! Our outings when we didn’t go to the shopping mall were pretty great; kayaking, hiking in the mountains, cross-country skiing, markets, and parks. After the divorce, likely brought on by having to talk to each other in the absense of anything like the internet, I have no idea. Overwhelmed, I was. Their father had them every second weekend and kept the adventures going. I was grateful for that, doing the best I could when the boys were with me, and spending my “off” weekends trying to remember who I was.

We worry about online influences on kids. But kids always had that, blaring at them from all sorts of media: movie stars, pop music stars, dead-eyed models on magazine covers. There were always the classmates with older siblings arriving at school sporting the latest trend. There was always the cool crowd, detested by some but envied or emulated by most. Kid life was never all that easy as we sorted our way through the trash to find our true values. If we were lucky, we had good friends. If we weren’t so lucky, we had good books to read.

I’d considered renting a bike today, to go on a ride with Ezra. But I can’t look up where to rent a bike, so that probably won’t happen. Back in the day, I’d have used a phone book, but now there’s no such thing because everyone uses the internet.

If said internet ever returns here, I’ll publish this and subject friends and family to my rant, when all they want is a few pictures to make them wish they were here. 

*Don’t tell me about your frequent and wonderful conversations with your long-term spouse; my tongue is firmly in my cheek.

 

Update: turned out the router is “broken” and a replacement will take several days to be delivered. I’ll be gone by then.