Give Me A Break

Something got lost when we modernized. Take Sunday. It used to mean rest, plain and simple. Shops locked their doors. Nobody opened for business, nobody clocked in. The day belonged to worship, to recreation, to the two R's: rest and relaxation. People napped. They read the Sunday paper start to finish. They stood around after church talking to neighbors, and later the relatives came over.

Darkness used to settle the question of work for you. Once the sun dropped, seeing well enough to do a job or get anywhere became a problem, so the whole operation wound down at dusk. You gave your eight hours to the day and the evening was yours to keep. That arrangement is gone. Most nights now get swallowed by whatever we failed to finish earlier or by some event we committed to. Schedules have swollen to the point where neither the kids nor the parents sleep enough, and the pressure climbs. The earners pile on overtime. A teenager apparently can no longer settle for a single after-school activity or a part-time weekend shift.

The strange result is that families barely cross paths. And when they do manage to be in the same place, it is often as two faces in a crowd of other parents rather than any real stretch of time together. Teens vanish into marathon practices and long work hours. The shared evening meal has quietly become a relic. No parent squeezed between obligations is going to stop and cook supper, so a lot of what gets eaten comes from a drive-through window.

Conversation has thinned out too. Hardly anyone pauses to catch up with a friend the way they once did. The hours that went to phone calls now go to sending a text and then waiting around for the reply, to scrolling whatever the social sites are serving up, to tapping through a game on some app.

Sleep takes a second hit from all of this. Teenagers (and I suspect plenty of adults) stay wired long past bedtime because the screens and the artificial light keep working against them. That glow suppresses the melatonin their bodies need to wind down and actually drop off.

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