Penny Wiseacre

The Internet is not the problem. Your brain is.

So you're giving up the Internet? Did you think through what you'd do without all that time spent being "busy" with social media, RSS feeds, smart phones and so on?

It seems as if Paul Miller, the Verge writer who went Internet Celibate for a year, did not. To be fair, it's hard to sum up a year of radical disconnection in less than 3000 words. But Miller's conclusions really don't address the underlying purpose of saying "No" to something. You say "No" because you need the space and time to figure out what you want to say "Yes" to. Miller didn't. And what rushed into the void wasn't pretty:

I'd learned how to make a new style of wrong choices off the internet. I abandoned my positive offline habits, and discovered new offline vices. Instead of taking boredom and lack of stimulation and turning them into learning and creativity, I turned toward passive consumption and social retreat.

It's evident that "the Internet" wasn't really responsible for these behaviors. It may have amplified and enabled them, but it didn't create them. And instead of teasing out the ways in which the Internet lets us slide into false productivity and false achievement versus how we do that offline, Miller just shrugs, "Eh, I'd suck with or without the Internet."

There's growing evidence that suggests constant connectivity affects how you think: Your capacity for woolgathering and creative leaps in thinking erodes; your impulsiveness shoots up as your patience and ability to delay gratification fall; your concentration and focus suffer. In other words, all the interesting, cool thinking you do that makes you giddy to have a working brain that helps you perceive the world in awesome ways? Not so easy if you're online all the time.

What I'd like to see now is an examination of how people recover or retrain their brains after Internet overindulgence. I would have loved it if Miller had approached his sabbatical as an experiment in re-engineering his brain, or even an experiment in saying yes to a different way of thinking.

But I should not be surprised with what we got. After all, if constant connectivity wrecks your ability to think rigorously and well, how can someone in the thick of it think their way clear of it? In some ways, it seems that Miller never really gave up the Internet. He just took a year off from checking his mail.

The next shooting, these people need to answer to the next of kin

When -- not if, when -- there is another mass shooting that kills adults dedicated to improving other people's lives, that rips apart young couples, that leaves parents breathless with the shock of realizing they've had pairs of shoes that lasted longer than the brief window when their child was alive ...

The next time the death toll can't be counted on one hand, I hope someone rounds up every one of these senators and buses them to the awful, echoing hall where the next of kin wait for news. And I hope every one of these senators has to personally face every one who lost someone and say, "The rights of the gun lobby to continue business as usual will always outweigh the rights of Americans to move about the public without fear of being gunned down."

 
Here are those people who voted down today's gun-control amendment. Let's make them own their words the next time Sandy Hook happens:

Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
Kelly Ayotte (R-NH)
John Barrasso (R-WY)
Max Baucus (D-MT)
Mark Begich (D-AK)
Roy Blunt (R-MO)
John Boozman (R-AR)
Richard Burr (R-NC)
Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)
Daniel Coats (R-IN)
Tom Coburn (R-OK)
Thad Cochran (R-MS)
Bob Corker (R-TN)
John Cornyn (R-TX)
Mike Crapo (R-ID)
Ted Cruz (R-TX)
Michael Enzi (R-WY)
Deb Fischer (R-NE)
Jeff Flake (R-AZ)
Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND)
Dean Heller (R-NV)
John Hoeven (R-ND)
James Inhofe (R-OK)
Johnny Isakson (R-GA)
Mike Johanns (R-NE)
Ron Johnson (R-WI)
Mike Lee (R-UT)
Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
Jerry Moran (R-KS)
Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
Rand Paul (R-KY)
Rob Portman (R-OH)
Mark Pryor (D-AR)
Harry Reid (D-NV)
James Risch (R-ID)
Pat Roberts (R-KS)
Marco Rubio (R-FL)
Tim Scott (R-SC)
Jeff Sessions (R-AL)
Richard Shelby (R-AL)
Johon Thune (R-SD)
David Vitter (R-LA)
Roger Wicker (R-MS)

 

5 things you can do online before you drop dead unexpectedly

I will never say it was lucky that my dad died suddenly, but I will say the experience provided many unexpected learning opportunities that I feel lucky to have had.

What "Gone Girl" taught me about slacking on the housework

Yesterday, Jonathan Chait suggested that maybe women could get over their disgruntlement over doing more housework than their male partners by just ... well, by just doing less. Or as he put it:

Women in general just have higher standards of cleanliness than men do. People who care a lot about neater homes spend more time cleaning them because that makes them happy. And while I agree in general that domestic life requires more gender equality, the housework problem has a partial solution that’s simpler and more elegant: Do less of it.

Let us skip-hop around the stereotypes innately baked into the assumptions about hetero partnerships here and break down the risible assumptions in the passage above. Then I will explain how they tie into last summer's breakout novel, Gone Girl, which will eventually be used by time management consultants as an inspiring story about the power of a well crafted to-do list.

Tech is parenting is you're doing it wrong always

After I had Trix in fall 2010, I spent a lot of hours planted in the glider, on account of having an infant who refused to be put down for more than a few seconds. (At left, the typical result whenever I put the baby down for even a diaper change.) Since I was a tad wary about the effects of cortisol on Trix's plastic little mind, I figured, what the hell, I'll just hold the baby until we figure out how this works.

(Oh, that cortisol/brain-damage business. As KJ Dell'Anotonia writes, it's "the headlines and the easy takeaways that stick with sleep-deprived, anxious parents.")

ANYWAY. Baby stuck to my side 24/7 + nursing on demand every 90-120 minutes = the most profound sleep deprivation I've ever experienced, with an unsurprising drop in my ability to concentrate on anything. I'd try to read something on my Kindle and words would literally float around. But I needed something to entertain the bored jibbering monkey in my forebrain.

In 2010, the American Academy of Pediatrics was sticking to its recommendation that children under the age of 2 watch no television, and that was one of the few parenting ideals I was determined to put to into practice. Since I had grown up on half hour chunks of television doled out on a daily basis, I reasoned that my kid would be well off with an equally disciplined media diet.

Women opting out: The classic LBD of lifestyle reporting

It had to happen. After two female CEOs -- Marissa Meyer and Sheryl Sandberg -- succeeded (albeit in different ways) of drawing national attention to things like "work-life balance as a concern universal to all U.S. workers" and "persistent gender inequities at all levels in the American workplace," it was time to move the debate away from a direction in which anything productive might actually get done. 

Time to divide and conquer! What works better than the twin loci of class feeling and feminism? 

Nearly ten years ago, Lisa Belkin penned "The Opt-Out Revolution" for the NYT, and succeeded in focusing a nation's ire on privileged women and/or the feminists who did/didn't defend them. This week, Lisa Miller's "The Feminist Housewife" wears that same rut in New York.

Because there really is very little that's new under the sun, let me predict what will happen next:

Decluttering: just another iteration of the Diderot Effect

Yesterday, the NYT published a fingerwaggy little piece talking about how much more ethical and fulfilled we'll all be once we learn that the real secret to life is living with less. Or at least, that was supposed to be the takeaway message.

What I got out of it was that life is pretty freakin' sweet when you have the kind of privilege that can let you diddybop around the globe without having to fret about student loan payments, or employment prospects upon your return, or whether a hospital bill will bankrupt you. You can afford to live lightly because you never have to think about the just-in-case.

How Marissa Mayer could be like Dolly Parton

(Because once I get onto a topic, I break it down: We've already discussed why there's no reason to expect a female CEO to be nice to working parents and how telework is only a symptom, not the disease, in an ailing company. Now comes the third and, I hope, final post on the Yahoo thing.)

Like a lot of Generation X kids, the VCR hit my childhood right at the moment when my brain was soaking up pop ephemera and incorporating it into my moral development, which would explain why I could recite entire blocks of dialogue from 9 to 5 by the time I finished fifth grade.

Yahoo's problems won't end when teleworking does

(Or, the follow-up post to "Marissa Mayer does not have to be a role model," where I unabashedly "borrow" all the insights other people had.)

We can all agree that flexible working conditions are a good thing, and they're the kind of good thing that should not be restricted to college-educated white collar workers. Flexible working environments offer health benefits to whole families while also fattening a company's bottom line. The mere announcement of flexible workplaces and work-life benefits can boost a company's stock -- another way to bolster the bottom line and keep shareholders happy.

But you know what really keeps shareholders happy? When a company performs consistently well -- or take very public steps to indicate that they're likely to perform well.

Marissa Mayer does not have to be a role model

Last Friday, we learned that Yahoo! will no longer permit remote workers to work from home. More damningly, the decree also means that staffers who have built their childcare arrangements around a day or two of telework each week have to come in all five days per week. Per All Things D: "Employees who work from home must comply without exception or quit. One top manager was told that there would be little flexibility on the issue."

So let's set aside the ample documentation that supports the thesis that telework is good for a company. Let's forget that 79% of employees who telework say they want to stay in their current gigs, compared to 44% who can't (and let's forget that employee retention is always cheaper than employee turnover). Let's ignore the fourfold increase in productivity -- surely good for a company's bottom line, no? -- and let's ignore the $6500 annual savings each teleworking employee yields for their company. (Source for all of the above:  The Society for Human Resource Management) Let's also set aside the evidence that flexibility on the job provides a competitive hiring advantage for attracting top talent and it provides a handy way to squeeze more work out of your workforce.

Truth is, those savings pale in what a company can save if they lose an employee and simply don't hire a replacement. Especially if that employee is carrying a few kids on their health benefits. So you make the workplace a little less family friendly, and soon the workers who prize flexibility (spoiler alert: They're not all women!) will be trickling out the door. Making the workers' lives tougher is a great way to reduce the workforce without having to resort to layoffs, which can be costly on account of all those severance packages, and spook a stock's price.

(I'm not saying this is why that policy came down at Yahoo! But I am saying it would be worth keeping tabs on the place to see how the employees with families feel about the new "present equals productive" paradigm.)

There's a tenor to today's coverage that I strongly disagree with, and it seems to center around the expectation that as a woman and mother, Mayer ought to be more of an advocate for working families. One story includes someone sniffing, "When a working mother is standing behind this, you know we are a long way from a culture that will honor the thankless sacrifices that women too often make." Another site mourned, "I had high hopes that a young, female CEO — one who was openly pregnant when she signed on for the job — would bring a fresh perspective and some more, well, trailblazing."

Why, why, why is Mayer expected to balance her job -- turning around a company with a noisome internal culture and a failing brand -- with Advancing the Cause? If a male CEO laid down a family-unfriendly policy, people would be all, "Eh, the C-level execs are all Craftsman toolboxes. Time to update the CV." But somehow, Mayer's expected to turn around Yahoo! and be a role model for women and be an advocate for working parents. 

Look, we can't all be Sheryl Sandberg. And we shouldn't expect everyone to want to be Sheryl Sandberg -- Mayer's made it clear from day one that she rejects the notion that she's obligated to advocate for "women's" working conditions.

Would it be nice if more American workplaces offered more flexible hours to workers in all manner of jobs? Hells, yes. It makes for a healthier workforce and happier families. Is it solely the job of female executives to carry the banner for work-life balance? No. 

So step off Mayer and keep an eye on the Yahoo! employee count. Her grand experiment in changing a company culture and boosting the bottom line is the real story here.