It occurred to me today that we get disconnected as we get connected.

I was just sitting across the table from my son, as the two of us were eating breakfast. My son was scrolling on his phone, through all of the posts that he follows, on all of the different social media platforms that he uses. He would occasionally show me something that he thought was funny or cool, and I was just enjoying being around him.

At one point, he found something online –presumably something that he found somewhat dubious– and he said out loud, to no one in particular,

“Is this real?”

And then he was off, searching for some other piece of corroboration to confirm what he was seeing. The moment was there, and then it was gone. As it passed, I thought to myself, “I know of nothing more real than this.”

Of course, his question wasn’t aimed at what I was paying attention to. Because I was enjoying us. I was enjoy the connectivity of being in that moment –that series of moments– with my son, interacting (even if the interactions were somewhat technology-laden).

The problem is, for so many of us, so much of the time, we forget what’s real. Or we become confused by what is not.

* * *

We receive more information, in the twenty-first century, in a matter of an hour than previous generations were processing in a matter of days. Information comes at us from all directions — it’s everywhere. Because of this massive influx of data, we are forced into practices for dealing with that tidal wave that influence what we end up believing and how we perceive the world around us.

Sometimes, those practices are not good practices.

Take social media, for example. If you’ve been living on the dark side of the moon, perhaps you’ve missed the role that social media has been playing in modern society over the past few years. In the past twelve months, social media has played a significant role in the dissemination of information about the pandemic, about the dangerous political climate in the nation, just to name a couple of issues. But, this isn’t were the problem started, necessarily.

The information age that we find ourselves in has been made possible, in no small part, thanks to the invent of the internet. Via this tool, information is not only readily available for us to peruse, but it has been engineered to get ‘pushed’ at us, so that it isn’t any longer a choice, for many of us, whether or not we are consuming information. These days, we are being force-fed information. While it’s certainly one thing for me to be able to pull up the internet to find out when the Dolphins are playing this afternoon, it’s entirely another thing for my phone to send my a notification that Wal-Mart is having a sale on bananas. But, if you don’t know how to disable notifications on your smart phone –in an attempt to quiet the noise– I’d bet a pretty penny that you’re not alone.

But, this isn’t were the problem started, necessarily.

We’ve been processing significant amounts of information –more and more significant– for about the last century or so. Blame the television, blame the radio, blame the advertising and marketing machines at work in our society, blame whomever you’d like. But, we got here, not by signing a waiver that stated that we were all okay with being inundated with massive amounts of data, but rather by taking small steps in this direction over time. If you, at any point in your life, have thought to yourself –when it comes to the topic of information inundation– “Stop this train, I want to get off.”, I’d bet a pretty penny that you’re not alone.

Since we are all, to greater or lesser extents, overwhelmed by information, the question then becomes “What are we going to do about it?” or “How is this detrimental?” or “What can I do to be sure that I am bearing up well under the overload?”

There are a few answers. My son, sitting at the table this morning, illustrated one of them to me.

Learning how to corroborate information is now a critical skill. I don’t know if you’ve been watching the news lately, but it seems like there are new examples of the detrimental effects of failures to corroborate information popping up every hour or two. While I suspect that we could all stand to have a little bit of training on this, and while I also suspect that there are people who are going to be better at it than others, I am also afraid of this truth:

I think there are people who don’t want to know that they’re being lied to, primarily because the lies sound better than the truth.

* * *

My family is a family of five, if you didn’t know — my wife, my twin daughters, my son, and me. And, since we are all pretty tech-savvy people, we end up having a house full of devices. Between smartphones, computers of different sizes and shapes, video game systems, and televisions in different places, there are so many options for all of us to be connected to something in the building that is our home.

As a result, we often end up disconnected from each other.

But we understand that it’s an issue, and we try to do things to combat the problem, to take time to be connected with each other, but we also –each of us– enjoy being connected to the information that we like.

Now, pan the camera out a little bit and look at a bigger section of things. If my family, a group of people who spend a lot of time with each other as necessitated by our living arrangement, have a hard time connecting with each other, then how can we, as communities and neighborhoods, as towns and cities and villages, not be suffering from a lack of connection among us all?

I have a neighbor, for example, whose home is close enough to mine that I could hit it with a rock thrown from my driveway. This neighbor and I have interacted –in person– once or twice in the last month. But, via social media, I pretend some level of connection because I know what they are choosing to post about online, and they know what we are choosing to post about online.

Is that connected? Some would say ‘yes’. I would probably say ‘no’. Maybe the more pertinent question to ask is:

Is that a real connection?

Am I really connected to two dozen of the people from my high school graduating class? Am I really connected to my aunts and uncles and cousins? Am I really connected to that girl I dated in middle school, to those guys I palled around with in college, to those former coworkers from my former place of employment?

Do I really have 671 friends?

Really?

* * *

If I had a dollar for each time I’d scratched my head in the last twelve months and thought to myself, “Really?”, I wouldn’t need to ask whether or not my stimulus check has been deposited yet, that’s for sure.

Have you recently done the same thing? You saw something or you heard something or you read something, and you thought, “Really?”

The question of what’s real in our world seems to have, at some point in the recent past, gotten more difficult to answer, at least it has for me.

I think I need to get back to relationships, and not the ones that I pretend to have on a social media platform, either. If there is anything that’s real, I suspect that relationships still are.

So, drop your phone. Disconnect from your current streaming binge. Close your internet browser and put the laptop to sleep.

Find someone, close by, and connect to them.