We can’t even know ourselves, so how can we know each other?

Even our nearest and dearest don’t know all of our preoccupations, not because we don’t want them to, but because there are too many facets to any life for all of them to be shared.

On the other hand those close to us know us in ways we don’t know ourselves.

Most of us have battled the same issues all of our lives. If people who know us well could have told us all along what we were doing wrong, would we have listened? Probably not. Would they have been right? It’s true they might have been able to analyze our faults for us, but would that have enlightened us and enabled us to correct them? More likely it would have just hurt and undermined us and damaged our relationship. They don’t know what it is in us that keeps us doing the same annoying or self-defeating things over and over, and neither do we. And we all have a sense of privacy that would like others to mind their own business. What we really want, and need, is for our loved ones to ignore the flaw and love us anyway. They don’t have to agree with us.

So how can we put up with each other’s occasional crazy-making traits and be genuinely kind and tolerant and still honest and not be walked on and not hurt the other person?

Accepting each other as we are is sometimes the hardest thing we have to do.

I was upset when I first heard that the teaching of cursive writing is being phased out in many schools. I couldn’t imagine a grade-school education without it, and I didn’t see how in the world we could get along without that link to our tradition. Had anybody thought this through? How will people sign their names in a unique way that identifies them? I know we have computers, but how will we write things that need to be more personal? How will law enforcement get along without being able to use handwriting to identify forgeries? And in a few years nobody will know how to write or read cursive, and then what happens to all the old historic documents that are written in it?

Besides, I loved writing in cursive and had filled many a notebook and journal and written hundreds of letters with it over my lifetime. Learning to write in cursive was a grade-school milestone and a personality marker as well.

It turns out, according to what I read on the Internet, that cursive has needed to be phased out because teaching it was just too time-consuming for teachers when printing worked just as well and they had so much other material to cover. I read argument for both sides, some educators saying that learning to write in cursive stimulates students’ brains and helps them to develop motor skills, others arguing that cursive had been invented mostly for practical reasons, such as to make writing go faster, and involved little benefit to students and a lot of wasted time, since students are still taught to print. These experts also said that all the objections had been considered in the decisions to discontinue teaching cursive, that anyone can learn to read cursive even if they don’t know how to write it; and that a signature written in cursive handwriting has no more legal validity than any other kind of written signature.

Still my own thoughts on the subject were that cursive handwriting was the last remnant of personal identity left to us, our signature the one thing we could do that was unquestionably our own, except our fingerprints. We could identify the handwriting of people we knew; it was a strangely reliable sort of knowledge. And our signature could identify us, could be our passport to privileges and trusts nobody else could touch. How could society get along without it? I really did wonder. And I really did resent the idea, the same way I’ve resented a lot of things the digital age has done to my early assumptions and learning.

But the truth is, I can’t remember the last time I saw anything written in cursive by anyone in my family except me.

So which philosophical point of view do I believe the most—hang on to what’s getting away, or don’t try to hang onto anything because it doesn’t matter?

I have a computer at home and I use it, but I will never be as proficient on it as my younger relatives. And I still use cursive in my own life all the time. But I watch the kids in my family, my grandchildren—so brave, so funny, so smart, so quick, so ready, so full of knowledge I don’t have and never will have, and I ask, why would I want them to write in cursive?

I would like to talk to young wives and mothers about what I call “side time,” meaning the times in their day when they can pay attention to things other than their mandated work schedule. I would like to talk about how crucial this is to human relations, to raising children, to creativity, to health. About how allowing for it in their lives is not laziness or shirking but a human necessity, and about how much is being lost for lack of it.

But then, I expect they already know what I want to say because they think about it themselves.

It’s frustrating when I read a book that I know my adult daughters would love and maybe need, and they don’t have time to read it. It isn’t just that I want to share it with them. It’s that they can’t have the experience of reading it, or anything like it. They’re preoccupied with the necessities that surround their full-time, hard and demanding outside jobs or careers. Their evenings and weekends are spent on the laundry, the grocery shopping, the maintenance of house, car, everyone’s health, the errands and appointments. They have little or no energy left for reading, thinking, conversation, or family life, let alone for projects of their own. Week after week, month after month, year after year.

This is not a life that suits them. It’s survival mode. They need more.

I , being old, of course can remember when it was one person’s job in a family to take care of the family’s home life. That person wasn’t expected to earn money too. In addition to the chores mentioned above, she had time to listen, help with problems, make family occasions special and family crises manageable, join with schools and the community to enrich life for everybody’s children, and even to have creative projects of her own. In short, she made a home.

Many of us felt constrained by that arrangement, maybe even demeaned. Long before today’s generation of young women came of age, women advanced into the working world with careers of their own, and there were corresponding changes in the family dynamic. Then technology revolutionized work, the economy, and social norms in unforeseen ways. Nothing and nobody ever took the place of that stay-at-home mother.

Of all the many factors that have changed our way of life so much in the space of a couple of generations, it seems to me that the cruelest effect has been robbing women, and families, of free time. So much more expectation is piled on every able adult in the job world that leisure isn’t even in the equation any more.

I don’t see any lack in my loved ones; they are doing magnificently. I just see the lack in their lives of a dimension families used to be entitled to, that everybody needs and that I think they would love to have. I just hope they will always accept every possible opportunity for a measure of freedom and leisure, as a priority and without apology.

I wish them, and everyone, more side time in their lives.

“The Singularity” means different things to different science-minded people, but the definition most familiar to me is something like “the point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and takes over.”

And I say that’ll be the day. If the “intelligence” of computers were that impressive, surely some of it would have trickled down to the technology we’re all stuck with every day, that can’t respond to the ambiguity in almost all human interactions.

But then, maybe it isn’t intelligence that will be taking over. Maybe computers will succeed in negating so much of our intelligence that humankind will function like a cheap toy robot and nobody will mind. Look how much of our common sense we have already had to abandon to computers as we try to get a question answered or a mistake corrected or an appointment changed.

We humans were doing fairly well in the old days, with reading and writing and math, tools and machines and ideas. Brains and talent were the abilities we prized. We expected our exchanges to make sense. We expected questions to be understood and answered and for the answers to match the questions, because human brains were in charge and that’s just how they work. We were making a lot of mistakes but we were building something; we were learning.

But when technology advanced to the point where computers with their speed and memory capacity could be programmed to do many things faster and better than humans can do them, they began to seem like more than machines. Innovators’ respect for them went wild, and to make the most of what computers could do, they willingly ignored the fact that the devices couldn’t understand a word anyone said, let alone any nuances of anyone’s words, unless they had been specifically programmed to react (not respond) to them. We—all of us—have now had to make accommodations to those limits. The work world changed, human interaction and its satisfactions were largely phased out along with many human habits and skills, and a new set of standards and priorities took precedence—along with new generations. It’s no wonder that, in some minds, as the possibilities progressed, the idea of a superhuman kind of creature—sort of an Artificial Intelligence monster— began to haunt imaginations. Would it take over the world?

Of course we don’t need to worry about computers being smarter than we are. Computers can be taught to do all kinds of things, but whatever they’re doing, it isn’t thinking. They weren’t ready to run things and they never will be. A computer can’t really answer a question, understand a train of thought, or make a decision; a computer has no intelligence. All it can do is elaborate on its own human-generated abilities, making them more and more complicated but never providing a new insight. A puppy has more talent. Computers lack interest, intuition, empathy, and maybe most revealing of all, a sense of humor—all components of human intelligence.

I know it’s a different world now, but I’m homesick for the one we’ve lost. I just wish we could find a way to slow down, continue to develop our own brains, learn somehow to manage our conflicts, and face what it will take to keep us from destroying ourselves.

I love email. What ever happened to it? You could type it on a real keyboard, you could read it in clear print, it was private, messages were as long as you wanted them to be, you could save them, forward them, search them, print them, send attachments with them, file them with their replies.

But they have gone the way of the postal mail that used to have such a big place in our lives. These days, my incoming emails consist mostly of promotions from online merchants, political and charitable bulletins with requests for donations, and the online ghost of my city’s formerly robust newspaper. When I do get actual personal emails from family or friends, they tend to be beautiful photos or collections of funny sayings, which I enjoy, but rarely any personal message.

What are my former correspondents doing? They’re texting. They’re tweeting. They’re posting on Facebook. I’ve tried all of these and found nothing I like or trust the way I do email. And tapping character by character on a tiny picture of a keyboard can’t take the place of using all my fingers to say what I think before I forget I was thinking it.

But that’s the problem. Everybody’s now using their smartphones for things I still do on my computer, or my landline telephone, or my calculator. Or they ask Google or Alexa or Cortina or Siri for anything they want to know. Nobody seems to be as bothered as I am by tiny print and tiny keyboards, tiny buttons and miniature screens.

No matter how determined we are to keep up as we get older, there’s an aptitude gap that just comes from different background experience. Things we used to be good at aren’t used or needed any more so our expertise doesn’t matter. I know how to run a mimeograph machine, look things up at the library, make cookies from scratch, but who cares? Even the computer skills I learned when I was working are obsolete now.

All the signs point to the fact that I’d better learn to text and tweet, and meet the gang on
Facebook. Those options must be fun or the people I miss wouldn’t be doing so much of them. And yes, I realize that some of them are even as old as I am.