Getting There

One of the great questions of childhood is, “Are we there yet?” Usually asked on car trips, it gets to the heart of kid life, the qualities of which are: Impatience. Having your time and space hijacked by grownups. A desire for arrival as opposed to journey (kids are not process oriented when others are in control, but when they’re deciding/creating, they are process geniuses). The need to declare yourself and your autonomy- to say, “Hey you, adult driving this car who I call mom or dad. I matter too. Now, when does this tortuous bit of not knowing pay off with some fucking results?!” You could make a case that “Are we there yet?” is ground zero for the kind of thinking the masters say we must unlearn, though most of us never do, forever rushing toward a destination, still under the illusion that arrival will fill the hole within. But this is not a Buddhist parable or an “It’s about the journey not the destination” treatise, or maybe it is, but not only. What I really want to talk about is the modern world, and the answer a child now gets to “Are we there yet?” which is a parent looking at a large screen on the dashboard and saying, “We will be there in 74 minutes.” That is if the kid doesn’t have his own phone and isn’t already navigating from the back seat.

These thoughts came to me as I was driving home from the farmer’s market, the screen in my car telling me I would be home in 8 minutes, which made me think about information and the glut of it we have now, which got me thinking about the joys of both knowing and not knowing, which led me to that childhood question, and the difference between a kid hearing “Soon” or “Not for a while” or “We’ll get there when we get there” (Taoist wisdom repurposed as parental annoyance) and hearing something concrete like time down to the minute. Is this “synchronize all watches” specificity a good thing? Do we like GPS, i.e “human progress”? Is the goal to take as much uncertainty out of life as we can?

Well, I got bad news for the arc of history, because uncertainty is here to stay, and the earlier you get good with it, the better. (Uncertainty/living in the unknown is the apple cider vinegar of modalities. We know it’s good for us, we just don’t like actually drinking it). Also, it’s important for kids to see that their parents don’t always have the answer. That adults are pretty much as clueless as they are, just bigger. That boredom comes and goes and if you know how to look out the window with curiosity or play “I’m Going on a Picnic” (a travel game from my childhood) you can get so immersed in the moment that arriving spoils the fun as opposed to being it. Then again, if you’re in a strange town on vacation and your daughter gets stung by a bee and goes into anaphylactic shock and you need to rush to the emergency room, GPS is the single greatest thing that ever happened to mankind. (Why do I need to always push back on my own thinking? I don’t know, except I come from a family of left-leaning historians and am a natural Hegelian by blood.)

I think my real question is, what is all this knowing and information doing to us psychically and emotionally? It feels like part of the digital/AI mandate is to make uncertainty obsolete, and it not hard to see these phones not as communication devices or small computers, but as certainty machines. Let’s just examine the difference between buying heroin (one of the great anxious making endeavors) in 1996 and 2006. 1n ‘96 you sat waiting for the dealer at a gas station or a Burger King like a character in a Greek tragedy (or comedy, depending on how sick you were). You were in the hands of fate, watching traffic like a fortune teller reading tea leaves, searching for the car that would cure what ailed you. If the dealer was late, you started cooking up awful scenarios; the not knowing where they were or if they would show making you even sicker than your junk lack. In 2006, you’d just call or text them, “How much longer”? Your jitters calmed when they told you there was an accident on the 10 and they’d be there in twenty. Do we like this lack of mystery? This ability to assure ourselves and calm our nerves. Do we really need to know that our Uber driver just turned left on Pico and is “.4 miles” away and watch it like a video game? What is this doing to us in terms of expectations, and how much more of a gap is it creating between the digital certainty of our outer lives and analog uncertainty of our inner ones?

I often talk to friends my age or slightly younger and we try to imagine being a teenager with your parents having the kind of access to you and your whereabouts that these phones allow. From a Jungian perspective it is it not hard to see the smart phone as an anti-individuation device; a digital umbilical cord that needs to be snipped. I may be an extreme case, but a huge part of who I am and what I have to offer is a product of what I learned roaming the parentless wilderness that was late 1970s New York. Sure, we may have been too un-herded for our own good, but at least we got to find out where the line was without our parents checking in every hour to see if we were stepping over it. A parent asking a sixteen-year-old to give them their PIN so they can track their whereabouts is not just a boundary infraction, it is a literary violation. A desecration of not just the young storyteller, but their story. I get that it’s for safety, but which safety are we talking about? The kid’s physical well-being or a parent’s emotional one? The biggest threat is not where teenagers are physically going but how this information/social media free for all distorts their thinking and sense of self. Consider a dad who always knows where their fifteen-year-old is, but it totally unaware that they have suicidal ideation.

GPS is a powerful weapon (not to mention its dark, surveillance-oriented cousins) especially in terms of destroying a “The first step of the journey is to lose to the way” mindset. Being told by an automated voice what turn to take is a strange mix of reassuring and numbing. It’s like having your math teacher stand over your shoulder as you work, saying, “That’s right, very good, now do this, be careful of that.” Sure, it’s comforting, but it also slowly erodes self-reliance and the intrepid spirit within. No one should be denied the opportunity to get lost. Being lost is holy. It teaches you to think on your feet and improvise. When to trust and distrust your intuition. It is also proof that the state of lostness is temporary, which is a very good thing to know, because being lost (at least internally) can feel intensely permanent. What great story, myth or fable does not have a hero who at some point loses their way?

I know it’s tough to remember, but there was life before GPS. The world was not pure chaos (any more than it is now). People got where they were going, the mail was delivered, packages arrived, the freeways were not littered with pileups as bewildered drivers checked unwieldy maps. Folks stopped and asked for directions, engaging in the ego humbling act of saying, “I don’t know. Do you?” How can anything that keeps us from asking for help be good for this ongoing collective project, which human society, for better or worse, seems to be. Don’t get me wrong, I love clarity and strive for it in my work, but sometimes a little opacity is nice. I spent almost twenty years of my life high on dope, I don’t want to spend the rest of it narcotized by information. Call me old fashioned, but I’m not ready for “Are we there yet?” to be erased from the lexicon.