2. We want to create more than we consume. So we fill the center of our home with things that reward skill and active engagement.
2
Shaping Space
2. We want to create more than we consume. So we fill the center of our home with things that reward skill and active engagement.
The best way to choose character is to make it part of the furniture.
Fill the center of your life together—the literal center, the heart of your home, the place where you spend the most time together—with the things that reward creativity, relationship, and engagement. Push technology and cheap thrills to the edges; move deeper and more lasting things to the core.
This was once natural, indeed unavoidable. Almost every home once had a hearth, the fire that gave warmth, light, heat for cooking—and entertainment too, with its dancing flames and distinctive glow. The Latin word for hearth, focus, reminds us that fire was once the center of our homes.
Fire is a marvelous tool—one of the first human tools. But it is not technology in the sense I’m using the word in this book, with its easy-everywhere simplicity. Fire is dangerous and difficult to work with. Tending a fire, outside or indoors, requires skill, work, and care.
At the same time, fire is mesmerizing and beautiful. It is one of the only things in nature that glows on its own. Almost everything else merely reflects the light that comes from the fusion reactor conveniently located 93 million miles from our planet—still so bright that we can’t look at it directly. But terrestrial fire generates its own light, and our eyes are drawn to it, watching it play and dance.
Today, we have furnaces instead of hearths. Furnaces warm our homes effortlessly, but they do nothing to concentrate our energy, relationship, attention, and delight the way the hearth did. They ask nothing of us (except prompt payment of the monthly heating bill) and they give us one simple thing: easy warmth everywhere. Reflecting their unrewarding and disengaged nature, we put them somewhere out of the way, in a closet or in a basement. Rightly so; a furnace is a boring thing, and usually ugly too.
But homes still need a center, and the best things to put in the center of our homes are engaging things—things that require attention, reward skill, and draw us together the way the hearth once did.
Gathering Spaces
Where in your home do you spend the most time as a family?
Is there another place where you spend almost as much time?
n = 1,021 US parents of children ages 4 to 17
So here is a simple test of whether your home is a techwise space: find the place that is its emotional center—the place where your family spends the most time and the most energy—and take an inventory of what you see there. Are the most visible things more like a hearth or more like a furnace?
Spaces without Devices
Our own home is a smallish building, with three bedrooms on the second floor and an open living space on the first floor—living room, dining room, and kitchen all flowing together. We’ve worked over the years to arrange that space according to this chapter’s commitment: filling it with things that reward skill and active engagement. When I stand in the middle of our first floor, here’s what I see:
• works of art on the walls, most of them original work by friends whose craft and calling we want to support
• books—hundreds of books, even though we only keep the ones that are rewarding and worth rereading
• a few (impressively hardy) houseplants
• a grand piano and a string quartet’s worth of instruments
• the space in front of the window where, through all of our children’s early years, we had a wonderfully indestructible “craft table” at a child’s height, with art supplies, paper, and whatever project they were pursuing at the time (it’s now in the attic, awaiting the arrival of grandchildren)
• a cabinet full of board games
• a fireplace we were lucky enough to acquire with the house
• a dining table, with candles on the table and in the chandelier overhead
• an oven and stovetop, which require someone to take the risk of creative cooking
What do these furnishings have in common? Some are basic and essential—the dining table and the stove. Others, like the art and the piano, are in one sense totally optional. But all of them require skill, sometimes a great deal of skill, to deliver their rewards.
Our house is hardly a technology-free zone, however. I can also see plenty of easy-everywhere technological devices:
• a charging station for our various electronic devices
• two pairs of bookshelf speakers, connected to a wireless music system
• a dishwasher
• a microwave oven
• invisible but vital radio frequency signals carrying cell and Wi-Fi data
• a refrigerator
• electric lighting
• heating and air-conditioning ducts, controlled by a thermostat
Where the Good Stuff Happens
Where do most leisure or entertainment activities happen in your house?
Select all that apply.
None of these items requires us to have any real skill to use them, and each of them makes our lives more convenient without demanding much of us. There’s plenty of easy everywhere in our lives and in our living room. The refrigerator, lighting, and climate control seem indispensable to us (though billions of people live without them today). The other items are awfully nice to have, and the music we play through our speakers often gives us genuine joy (and the occasional spontaneous sing-along).
Though our central living space is by no means technology-free (as if any space can be that in an age of Wi-Fi and cell phones), it is still true that almost all the devices on our first floor can be—and regularly are—replaced by thoroughly nontechnological items.
Where do most creative activities happen in your house?
Select all that apply.
n = 1,021 US parents of children ages 4 to 17
• The bookshelf speakers provide music, but we can also sit down at the piano or pull out the violin and make our own.
• We can microwave our meals (which is great for making the best use of leftovers), but we can—and mostly do—cook them from scratch. For that matter, while I love our built-in dishwasher fiercely, every night we also plunge our hands into warm water and wash the pots and pans by hand. (OK, actually it’s usually the next morning. Or two mornings later.)
• Even the lights and the heat can be replaced by candles and fireplace. Some of our happiest times as a family have been spent on this first floor, lit entirely by candlelight and the glow of a wood fire. Why wait for a power outage?
• The Wi-Fi and cell signals are there, all right, but we can choose to ignore them, turning instead to conversation, music, books, or silence. Indeed, on Sundays (see the next chapter) that is what we intentionally do, all day long.
Only one significant technological part of life on our first floor can’t be replaced by a nontechnological equivalent: cold—year-round refrigeration for our food and air-conditioning for sweltering summer days and nights. Everything else is turned off regularly.
And all the most beautiful and striking things—everything that would start a conversation or capture a child’s attention—require our active engagement.
Priceless Things
The low-technology living room is not necessarily less expensive than the high-technology one (that grand piano wasn’t cheap). But we could have the same kind of life for almost no cost—and when we were younger, we did.
Two pieces of art in our living room are by friends who happen to be renowned painters. The rest, made by friends and our own children, cost little or nothing and have no resale value—but emotionally, they are priceless.
Today we have a grand piano, but when we first married, our piano was an ancient upright, salvaged by a friend who wanted to practice her budding piano-technician skills. (In many parts of the United States, people will literally pay you to haul a piano away!)
Candlelit dinners cost no more when we were in our twenties than they do in our forties. The wood we burn in our fireplace was salvaged from trees that needed trimming or removing. Simple meals cooked from scratch cost no more than quick microwave dinners. Some nights the wine at our table was bottled in France, but many nights it comes from a box from Australia.
What makes the things on our first floor valuable is not their price. Instead, it’s the way each thing asks us, our children, and our guests to bring creativity and imagination to life together.
So if you do only one thing in response to this book, I urge you to make it this: Find the room where your family spends the most time and ruthlessly eliminate the things that ask little of you and develop little in you. Move the TV to a less central location—and ideally a less comfortable one. And begin filling the space that is left over with opportunities for creativity and skill, beauty and risk.
This is the central nudge of the tech-wise life: to make the place where we spend the most time the place where easy everywhere is hardest to find. This simple nudge, all by itself, is a powerful antidote to consumer culture, the way of life that finds satisfaction mostly in enjoying what other people have made. It’s an invitation instead to creating culture—finding joy in shaping something useful or beautiful out of the raw material of the world.
Children, in particular, are driven to create—if we just nudge them in that direction. They thrive in a world stocked with raw materials. But too often, and with the best of intentions, we fill their world with technology instead—devices that actually ask very little of them. A cheap electronic keyboard makes a few monotonous sounds, while an expensive one promises to make all kinds of sounds, from trumpets to marimbas to organs. But actually, neither the cheap keyboard nor the expensive one has anything like the depth and range of possibility of an acoustic piano—or a trumpet or a marimba (if you are considering filling your living room with an organ, you probably do not need to read this book). A single pencil can produce more “colors” of gray and black than the most high-tech screen can reproduce.
For a child’s creative development, the inexpensive, deep, organic thing is far better than the expensive, broad, electronic thing. And yet we are constantly tempted to give them toys that work on their own—that buzz and beep and light up without developing any skill. Why is this, when children of all people can invent more buzzes and beeps with their own lungs and tongue and teeth than any toy will ever make? Because we are infatuated by technology’s magical character—and so are our children, briefly. But they quickly grow bored with devices that ask little of them and don’t reward creative engagement, and their rooms and our attics become cluttered with the plastic castoffs that provided only one day’s or month’s worth of delight.
Skip the plastic, skip the batteries, skip the things that work on their own. Or, if they find their way into your home anyway, put them at the edges. In the center, put the things that both adults and children will find endlessly engaging, demanding, and delightful.
Crouch Family
Reality Check
Of all the commitments in this book, this is probably the one we have kept most consistently. My only regret is that increasingly, thanks to Wi-Fi, by the end of the day our first floor is often littered with laptops, tablets, and smartphones—and with family members staring at one (or more). But most nights, we clear everything away in time for dinner. Once again most everything in sight is organic, colorful, textured, with the fractal variety of nature—the wood of the chairs and table, the deep blue of the tablecloth, the motley patchwork of book covers on the shelves. The sleek blank slabs of aluminum and glass are banished for a little while. Like dust bunnies, they will accumulate if we let them, but at least we know they are not in their proper place. The heart of our home is built around things older and better than the newest thing.