It’s complicated!
On family, technology, and retreat. Also, raising human children in a digital world. Also, funny stories about my dad. It’s long!
I grew up with an immigrant father who fell madly and deeply in love with contemporary American culture—the independence, the bravado, the consumerism, the technology.
This was the 1980s and 1990s in suburban Long Island. I spent many aimless hours of my youth following him around the big-box stores of the time—PC Richards, CompUSA, RadioShack, Best Buy— hiding my face in embarrassment as he tried to haggle the retail price down on brand-new-to-the-market desktop computers, digital cameras, cordless phones, gaming consoles, speaker systems, and DVD players. Oh, and also multi-disc CD players, modems, and beepers, and definitely laser and/or inkjet printers. And probably everything else that ever came out ever.
“Dad! Oh my god, stop! That’s just the price!!” I would squeal.
“Uh-huh, we will see,” he would reply in his thick accent, his squinted eyes fixed on the poor, unsuspecting twenty-something-year-old employee.
I’d sigh. They never even stood a chance.
We’d walk out the door with floor models or boxless surplus from their stockrooms paying much, much less than retail price. My dad would gleam and gloat, equally excited for his haggling victory as he was about his brand new, sparkly, shiny toy.
We had everything possible growing up. If it was on the cutting-edge, my dad wanted it and ultimately got it. He saved for, traded for, and haggled for new models, and fixed various secondhand machines himself. A mechanic by trade, he loved tinkering with any gadget or gizmo to open it up, take it apart, and figure out how it worked. To this day, he still gets starry-eyed with pride that we had a Commodore 64 before anyone else on the block and, years later, AOL in the very first month it was released.
All this new technology was omnipresent and unquestioned in my young life and childhood home. It was the order of things—it was good, and always cause for excitement and celebration. To awkwardly paraphrase David Foster Wallace, it was the water we swam in, all-consuming and thoroughly mundane in equal measure.
I mostly loved it too, at the time, because it was all that I knew. We didn’t know where it was all heading, though I’m sure that wouldn’t have stopped my dad. I recently asked him about his pure, unadulterated love of new technology, and he said, “I’m just a magnet, I can’t stay away!” He really, truly is. To love my dad (which I do, wildly) is to love his technology obsession, but I absolutely cannot say that I love his technology in the same way.
While my dad is the bright-eyed captain of the tech-is-good-train, I am the dirty, broken-down passenger trying to escape through the back window. While he keeps up with every new gadget and doodad, I use a broken iPhone from the Trump administration, haven’t posted on social media since 2021, keep my phone on mute at all times—to the chagrin of anyone trying to get in touch with me—and still just paid $29.99 for a random app called JOMO (“Joy Of Missing Out”) in my latest attempt to further lower my screen time.
(My dad’s love of tech has remained vibrant and strong, often leading to completely insane gifts to my son like a walking, talking, dancing robot that says “Hello, master!” when you turn it on. It is WILD. Also, when my son turned one, my dad bought him an adult-sized metal detector? Like??)
As we all know, technology—and its grip on our lives—has spiraled out of control since my childhood days of the 1990s, with smartphones being the major culprit. Deliberately addicting and utterly suffocating in their ubiquity, I know I’m not alone in having a very complicated relationship with them, and with basically the entire internet in general. On one hand, hello hi, I’m writing this on the interwebs and you are reading it! There is utility and enjoyment here. But on the other hand, kindly watch the first 30 seconds of this Portlandia skit below for a glimpse into my melted-wax-candle of a brain:
As a *geriatric millennial*—a horrifying term, I know—I distinctly remember and appreciate the world before all the noise, but I also grew up with it and within it. Its impact on my life is inescapable and undeniable, partly because of my dad’s unyielding zest for the stuff, but also from simply living in a culture that, for better and for worse, embraces all new technology with open arms.
For better and for worse. I’ve undoubtedly experienced both sides.
Tech for the better: I never would have solidified deep and lasting friendships with the girls who are still my BFFs if we didn’t spend our teenage years chatting about cool music, nerdy clothes, and dumb boys on AIM (and then on every subsequent social network, including forgotten oldies and goodies like LiveJournal and MakeOutClub, up through my personal favorite group chat of today). I also would not have met my husband (OKCupid, 2011, pre-apps, writing each other long, flirty emails from our laptops 🥰), which is utterly unimaginable to me now. I also love my neighborhood Buy Nothing group, annoyingly located on Facebook.
Oh! And maybe most importantly? Sometimes a TikTok will cross my feed that is so funny and true that I guffaw out loud in a wholehearted laugh-cry, fat tears streaming down my face. In those moments, my faith in humanity is restored, and I remember that people are creative, and funny, and kind, and good, and that we are all the same at our core. Like, I’m sorry, but you can pry that from my cold, dead hands.
So yeah, it’s basically impossible for me to be a digital minimalist at this point.
But but but.
Tech for worse: I hate it here. I hate it so much. I hate how I feel on it: suffocated, distracted, and overwhelmed. I hate how much time, energy, and attention it takes from me. I hate how out of control I can feel using it, as if my own thoughts and actions are stolen from me. I hate how I constantly feel behind because there’s always something else to look up, check off, read, watch, or consume.
I hate how little regulation there is, how much more pointless work it creates, how distracted we all are all the time, how we are just lowly pawns in the tech companies’ consumerist game. It’s doing terrible things to our children and teenagers, the horrifying results of which are only just being discovered. It’s damaging our social fabric at large. And omg, WTF are we even doing with AI?! I do not trust us with it! Do you?!
I constantly make “be on my phone less” a resolution. I am forever seeking the next trick, hack, or tip to finally put the phone down, be more present in my life, with my family, and with my own thoughts.
So yeah, for better, for worse— it’s complicated!
And of course it is more important than ever because it’s not just about me anymore. I’m trying to create a balanced and fulfilling life for my kids, one in which they are successful in this life of bleep bloops, but also, at the very least, can hopefully stay human a little and not turn into cyborgs?
How do I balance this? How do I let them engage with this modern world, while also helping them stay connected to their innate humanness?
I know that I do not have my father’s unadulterated enthusiasm for it all. I know that I don’t want my kids to become screen-gobbling zombies. I know that I don’t want ME to become a screen-gobbling zombie, but it’s all so intertwined into our daily lives that there is no escape from it. We use it for school, for work, for fun, for our social lives. To again reference basically the only David Foster Wallace line I have memorized: this is water.
So what do we do? I definitely don’t have all of the answers, but I may have one.
Enter: The Big House!
We have recently returned home from our family’s annual retreat in the wild and wondrous mountains of Virginia. We have gone for the past six summers(!), staying for over two weeks in an old home on a large piece of farmland, right on top of a gorgeously swimmable and laze-by river.
What makes this our retreat—and not just a trip or a vacation or a stay—is that it has no phone or internet service.1 We exist there in a way that starkly contrasts how our modern lives make us feel— rushed, distracted, and stressed. It shows us that there is another way, at least accessible sometimes, where we are connected, present, and calm.
My whole family is obsessed with it.
We call this place “the Big House” which is a bit funny because it’s really not that big. I think we really call it the Big House because of the extra large impact it has on our familial psyche.
When we enter the Big House, it takes us a few days to shake off the city and to rid ourselves of the buzzing backbeat of pings, updates, notifications, and alerts. Usually by Day 3, we are officially on “Big House time,” where we can feel our shoulders drop, our breaths deepen, our patience increase, our laughs quicken, our creativity bloom, our connections strengthen, and our attention expand.
Life slows down and then opens up on Big House time.
We swim and lay by the river for days on end, play hours of card games, read a wild amount of books, tie-dye a thousand shirts, complete 500-piece puzzles, play catch with all sorts of sport balls, embark on small mountain town adventures, cook and eat and rest and stargaze and gobble up s’mores by the campfire. We do nothing, we do it all.
There is a telling moment from this past year that I’d like to share.
I’m sitting by the river, the grass around me dappled with pale sunlight. My older son is lying next to me, his head on my lap, telling me a long, incredibly boring story about Ninjago or Pokémon or Sonic the Hedgehog or something. He is really getting in the nitty-gritty there, like deep in the weeds, but I’m not bored like I may usually be back at home, with my brain itching for release, zoning out, eyes skittering, glancing away, wondering, desperate, where is my phone? No, I’m actually not bored at all; I’m riveted! There is literally nothing else pulling my attention away. There is nothing else I would rather be doing than listen to my son explain convoluted plot points about a stupid TV show.
I look at him, and tears come to my eyes because he is my boy, and he is talking to me, full of language and ideas and thoughts. Oh my god, he is so smart and funny and cute and I love him so much. Look at the water and the trees and the grass and this light. Look at my boy, in this light, talking to me, and look at me listening to him. My boy! In this light!
It’s a moment in time that passes quickly, but it remains with me. I have endless versions of this moment at the Big House. It’s the feeling of being so completely present—a feeling of zeroing in and expansion at the same time, a feeling I so rarely have when I’m in the go-go-go of regular life. I know I am only gaining access to it so easily and frequently because I’m on Big House time, because I haven’t logged in or replied or double-checked or refreshed a page in over a week. My mind has been reset to factory settings: clear and unburdened in the best ways.
These transcendent moments pass but I try, try, try to bring them back home with me to New York, back to the loud city, back to the mad rush—back for when my brain again turns to distracted, digital mush.
We couldn’t do the Big House thing full-time—it’s just not realistic. Our regular, tech-saturated life will always return, but can we do it for two weeks? Absolutely! I selfishly want to because I simply enjoy it so much (I read a book a day most days! I mean, that alone!), but I also want to gift this experience to my boys. I want them to know what it feels like to have the expanse of time, space, and attention that we all give and receive there. I want them to know how to be: how to be themselves in nature, how to be themselves in quiet, how to be themselves completely undigitized.
I also want them to know that their parents made this a conscious choice; that it was with purpose and design that we spent two weeks every summer of their precious and fleeting childhoods this way. I want this yearly sojourn to be an ongoing, intentional invitation for conversations as they grow up, so that the fog of technology that surrounds them does not go unchallenged. I want them to experience life, even just a little, without all of the noise, so that they can discover ways to amuse and nourish themselves sans screens. I can only imagine how much we will all continue to need it as the years go on.
We’ve already booked our two weeks for next summer, and we are going to bring that insane metal detector my dad bought my son next year. At age seven (not one!!), he will finally be big enough for it.
Have you ever done an off-the-grid retreat? Would you? Do you have any questions about the Big House? How do you navigate the technology of it all? Let me know!
Okay, there is a patch of grass deep in the yard that gets bars of Wi-Fi from the neighbors, but for all intents and purposes, we are fully offline!
UGH❤️!!
👍🏼❤️❤️❤️❤️