Doesn’t anyone but me want to be less connected? No, I don’t mean less connected with friends I’ve recently rediscovered or from friends I never lost and like to keep up with; I mean from people I don’t really like and have no need to know so much about…I mean those people I’m following on Facebook and on Twitter and on all the other new and snappy ways to keep in touch. I’m not really a very social person, so why am I fiddling with these social-networking sites?
I like to drop out. I’m a dropper outer. I want to be able to disappear—which is something I occasionally do. I go quiet. I don’t call. I don’t answer. I don’t report when I duck into a coffee shop and read the paper. I love that time between work and home when no one expects me and no one’s looking for me and I can go and do whatever…which is always something completely mundane but important.
I resent the fact that our society has practically eliminated the possibility of really dropping out. I don’t want to be so trackable, and I think a person should be able to ditch it all if necessary. It should be a right of being human. Frankly, I think it would make us a more responsible society if we had the choice to hit the road. Reverse psychology. We’d stay.
Things that can be traced if you were running away from home (which I’m not, but I’d like to be able to if I wanted to): credit cards, cell phones, car, checks, bank withdrawals, rental cars, airplane tickets, prescription drugs. It’d be hard to escape. Even if you hike deep into a national park—the last of our wildernesses—you’ve got to get a permit to camp. Which means leaving your name with the proper authorities and sticking with an itinerary. It’s not natural.
Maybe all of this comes as a result of an overbooked December calendar; or maybe it’s a result of watching “Into the Wild” this weekend; whatever the impetus, I’d like to see a society in which people who needed to get some space could just walk off while others would shake their heads in that universally understanding way and say to one another, “She left. She must have needed to go away” and then go on with their own lives. But who would take care of the loose ends…like the pets and the Christmas lights?
And, no, I’m not leaving. But I am going to decline a party invitation or two.
