Every year our family spends a week with the extended family somewhere remote, by the sea, with an indoor swimming pool. And no internet or mobile connectivity. It's a bit of a shock.
Chatting to the pensioners and contemplating the hillsides and waves, it struck me how much of their time our grandparents must have spent alone; tending sheep or cattle, or maintaining their buildings and land, or operating machinery, or hacking coal from the walls of a mine - as it was for my grandfather and his. Although physically strenuous they permitted time where communication took second place to activity. Effectively, the workers suspended higher function thinking in favour of not accidentally slicing off a limb.
All of these activities would be regarded today as intense physical activity and they'd be punctuated by by periods of intense social activity. My grandfather would follow his shift in the pit with clog fighting in the showers - effectively kickboxing with wooden, steel-toed clogs - for small change. Then it would be time for serious socialising at the pub, where they'd sink six or seven pale ales before heading home.
Perhaps the life of the pit worker back then was an extreme example of routine social and physical exertion but I think it's no accident that in our neighbourhood there are so many people running every night. Strenuous physical jobs have largely been replaced with machinery or other types of employment, so those runners, cross-fitters, spinners, weightlifters and the rest are finding things in leisure our grandparents took for granted; self-reliance, pride, an extension of their day-to-day experience - and the opportunity for some communication downtime, some time to reflect and 'pick over the bones' of the day.
Similarly the tendency to use social media indicates our evolutionary need to be connected is being satisfied in new ways. The routine conversations, the day-to-day noise, is where the sublime is hidden.
Yet to find the signal in the noise you need to find time away from it. I believe the brain is fantastic at offline processing; working through the data it accumulates almost silently. Paul Arden in his short book 'How to Have Ideas' describes a period of downtime during which ideas surface as if by magic. I'm sure we've all had those moments. They can do this only if you're not constantly surrounded by noise.
Our ancestors had lives which allowed time for either an absence of communication noise, or if fortunate, periods of introspection and reflection. I think that in a world which would be unrecognisably noisy to them we need these periods more than ever if we're going to filter the data we accumulate to find the meaningful; to find the sublime in the routine.
