Last post
By alice on July 6, 2010
In case anyone is still around, I only just realised that the last post below, which has been at the top for a very long time, is called “Is suicide a rational response to life’s difficulties?” which kind of looks bad considering it’s the last post here and I’ve basically gone away.
Still, never mind, I am not dead, or even slightly suicidal. I have actually already made a whole new blog that suits what I’m doing now much better. It isn’t ready to launch yet but definitely will be at some point, which is a promise of limited usefulness to anyone reading here, but the truth and nothing but. Despite not having blogged as myself (as opposed to my business) for a very long time, I love fun, informal, interesting blogging and have no intention of stopping. I just needed a long time to figure out how to blog in a way that is really going to be valuable for me and for anyone reading, which might sound easier than it is. Or easier than I have found it to be. Or just plain difficult. I don’t know: what I do know is I’m looking forward to being ready to launch and am entirely confident that it’s on its way.
And that suicide is not the answer to life’s problems 
I’ll post the link at the top of this post when it’s ready. Cheers!
Is suicide a rational response to life’s difficulties?
By alice on February 11, 2010
At what point does suicide become a reasonable response to unbearable emotional or psychological anguish?
Talented, intelligent, successful friends Isabella Blow and Alexander McQueen both did it, a few years apart.
McQueen’s last fashion show was inspired by the wonders of evolution, and “evolution” has come, for many though not all, to mean “the scientific refutation of the religious worldview”. I just read Meghan O’Rourke’s New Yorker article Good Grief: Is there a better way to be bereaved? about how people deal with loss, which concludes with this quote from Emily Dickinson poem about observing bereaved people:
I wonder if it hurts to live—
And if They have to try—
And whether—could They choose between—
It would not be—to die.
O’Rourke’s article discusses the modern Western idea of grieving as a sort of mental personal growth process, and her conclusion is that this approach is perhaps a way to deny death, by turning it into a useful part of life. Which begs the question of whether it might not be more rational, when confronted by the reality of death, to decide if you can’t beat it, then you may as well join it instead?
And then there is Penelope Trunk’s piece today, arguing that real life is mostly not about redemption but ongoing struggle:
Why don’t more people kill themselves? Life is very hard. And there is no sane reason to believe it will, at some point, get easier. So why do we keep going? I don’t know. This fascinates me.
I can’t find a really strong argument that life is about redemption. I happen to believe it, but my arguments are spiritual, not rational. (And I’m glad to believe it- on a practical basis, that’s the kind of belief that helps you get through real life problems! But I can’t persuade you of that, if you’re looking for a rational argument. Whole other paradigm-set.)
Traditional Christian teaching was that suicide was a sin. From compassion towards people who feel so awful that they want to die, we now generally regard that kind of judgement as a bit inhuman. We don’t bury people who took their own life in unconsecrated ground with minimal shameful ceremony anymore.
But various religious schools still teach that killing oneself is wrong and to be avoided, because life is a gift from God; and people are still very open to being socialised by religious schools. Of course, they may have a worse time living in grief and mortal fear for their souls, than they would have had by ending it all sooner: I am not saying here that religious schools are right even if any of them do prevent suicides.
However, once you remove the moral objection to suicide, what cultural imperative is there for people to struggle through extreme emotional pain, or extreme physical illness, by the same token? Is “life” itself really so great that wanting it at pretty much any cost is really, truly rational- or are we dependent on our animal survival impulse to keep us going? And isn’t that animal impulse a rather egotistical thing, for a species with consciousness of the relative insignificance of the individual- rationally speaking, anyway?
thoughts on biz “about” pages
By alice on February 8, 2010
It’s de rigeur these days to have a “story” for your business. The story is a history of how you came to be a business, but its purpose is to connect people with you, make you seem human and real and like you’re doing more than just trying to make a buck selling cakes etc. A lot of businesses have some other theme to their “about” page, describing what they do, or what’s important about them, or using some other way to be human and connect.
I feel that the goal of this page is sharing who you are- it’s “about you”, after all. But it isn’t easy to get right. I hate my business story at the moment. I’ve written a few, and they all start to feel silly after a while. Maybe they just go out of date or maybe they are just silly. Trying to write a business story that isn’t silly is like trying to write a CV that makes you look good without being pompous. Tough.
Common mistakes of small biz “about”/ story pages I have noticed:
1. Being too personal- eg. your whole life story with photos of your travels and tales of your spiritual growth. May not have much to do with cakes really.
2. Being too impersonal- basic facts about what you do, with no sense of the human being behind the widest ever range of punk rock hot-dogs in your town.
3. Missing out the best bits of who you are. You have 3 awards for “best drag show venue in town” but only talk about your authentic beers hand-brewed in your back yard for 38 years.
It can be hard to find out your own best things, which aren’t necessarily just making cakes or beer. Who are you anyway? Hugh Macleod’s new slogan sums up what it’s all about, but figuring out who you are is paradoxically an ongoing process as well as a deep and simple one.
Minor diversion: there’s a brilliant show on the Logo channel called RuPaul’s Drag Race 2. It’s a project runway-style competition for drag queens. But all small biz and marketing people should watch it, because drag queens are about nothing if not branding and entrepreneurism. They are multi-talented, and they know how to fill in the gaps in their talents with personality. Drag queens absolutely exemplify the idea of knowing and selling who you are. They do it in a creative way that involves invention and reinvention. Some people call that inauthentic, but I think they’re missing the point: why would the everyday drudge be more authentic than the life one chooses to create? RuPaul said on this week’s show, “Remember who you are- and always deliver!” Quite so.
Quote from Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother: you are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed of being.
4. Trying too hard to look cool and groovy. Quirky photos and jokey captions and unrelated worldwide travelling photos can be charming, or they can make you look a bit naff. Although, does anybody else think that except me? Maybe not. Coolness is vastly over-rated, on the whole. I may have to take this one back.
***
I’m not saying everyone who does any of the above necessarily effed it up (RuPaul’s catch-phrase = “Don’t beep it up”). Just that they are things I’m trying to avoid myself. It’s usually better to put something out there than to try to maintain some uncrackable facade, and anyway you can always change it later if the cracks get too bad. Thank God!
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the new underwear dichotomy
By alice on January 28, 2010
Belle shows her box of family photos to a friend who has just been swimming
Gok Wan of How To Look Good Naked (which should really be called How To Stop Hating Your Body And Just Be Beautiful) says this: all women need two types of underwear, attractive bedroom underwear, and magic reinforced-bodyshaping underwear. You can’t really argue with Gok because he is such a nice man, but my gripe is really with the whole underwear industry rather than Gok, and it is this: what is wrong with just the one type of underwear, both supportive and nice-looking at the same time? Wouldn’t Nice Yet Effective lower layers be much better than split-personality-disorder chopping and changing, not to mention saving half of our underwear budgets? (Saving money is not everything, but some of us are trying to have a recession around here while we still can. Thank you.)
The main thing that baffles me is our new willingness to go around squished up, which is basically not very comfortable, and oddly reminiscent of days gone by, before Women’s Lib was invented. Many people have now forgotten this, but once upon a time, when I was a little girl, there was a mythical feminist fashion called “burning your bra”. I never knew anyone who ever actually did this, admittedly, but it occurs in the French Art Film about a housewife-turned-Lady of the Night (or rather, due to her marital commitments, a Lady of the Afternoon Between 2pm And 5pm). Belle de Jour At some point I forget, feeling ambivalent about her new hobby, Belle removes her undies and plunges them into the roaring fireplace. As a metaphor it’s quite confusing and probably not feminist at all, but the point is, the sort of underwear women wore in those days was often quite restrictive and uncomfortable, rather like the modern support-bandage corsetry, and people thought it quite natural to get fed up with all of that and suddenly break out and do whatever you liked instead. Even if what you liked included going about with a slightly plumpish tummy. And for many years, this did not seem like a very big deal, but finally the old restrictive undergarments came back, and not because no decent man would marry an uncorseted young maiden- just because women wanted to look more shapely. Early feminists must be turning in their graves!
Also I am not sure how one is supposed to get the magic pants off and replace them with the pretty flouncy things in between the evening-out and the bedroom. Not only would this take quite a long visit to the dressing room, involving totally removing then replacing your entire outfit, but surely any chap-in-question would notice the appearance of sudden extra wobbly bits and wonder what was going on? Admittedly, men tend to be a lot less bothered by small amounts of flab on a woman than women are. So perhaps magic pants are more for ladies’ vanity than for alluring the opposite sex. But still, why not make underwear that satisfies vanity in terms of both support and aesthetics?
I’m not against magic pants- no reason why we can’t squeeze ourselves in if we feel like it, in my view. I just think there should be prettier ways of doing so than superthick tights that go all the way to your armpits, and the like. For instance, these days, wedding dresses seem to consist entirely of Victorian underwear- a corset with many petticoat skirts attached- (I know, I’ve been watching this show). This sort of thing was of course originally designed to shape the body in the desired way, and it still does that. Brides will pay a lot of money to look their best. So, why can’t the reverse also happen- with undergarments looking nice as well as doing the supporting? Why can’t some of the pretty designery underwear get treated to a bit more lycra- does it all have to be designed for size zero teens with no chests? It’s silly.
Me, I’m too lazy to make myself uncomfortable on purpose, for any reason of mere appearance, with the single exception of high heels, in the very limited cases of only needing to walk from the car to my seat inside the building- enough suffering for any woman, surely. But if I were ever tempted into shape-wear, it would need to look (a) not extremely hot (this is Texas) and (b) less medical. However, the girls in Belle de Jour are clearly reinforced- you can see how pointy they are even when fully dressed- and their whole job is to look good sans dresses. Well, not their whole job. You know what I mean. But a significant part of it. So I think we can learn from the example of Belle de Jour’s clothing department, and stop forcing women to live the modern divided life of double underwear identity!
This is the trouble with fashion, it tells us what to do and makes us think we wanted it when we didn’t. Funnily enough, the Buñuel film has something to say about that sort of behaviour too… but I can’t go into that, this post has gone on for long enough already. Goodnight!
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intelligentsia v. intellectuals: where are we up to now?
By alice on January 14, 2010
I’m reading this book on the Russian revolution. It’s very interesting and readable, and not too long (406 pages- well you know, Russia is a big place). The third chaper, entitled “The Intelligentsia”, I found rather alarming- not only were some of the tenets of socialism and/or communism noticeably reactionary and ill-considered (by all means go ahead and invent secular government, but deliberately terrorising the peasants and working classes into “agreeing” with you? That’s not what I would call “democratic”): amazingly, many of the same concepts are almost identical to ideas we still hear voiced by all sorts of people in the public and political eye even today! Can you believe it?!
/end satire
On the other hand, to adopt a more merciful tone towards humanity, it takes an awful lot of effort to create a political movement; and most people basically are not going to notice the holes in their thinking until challenged by an alternative body of thought/ active group of other people, that can present a more convincing case. Easy for me to criticise all sides (oops, that’s my personal politics outed), much more tough for anybody to create a proper, workable set of ideas that can actually gain public support and improve a country’s success in all required areas, in practice.
Anyway, here’s Richard Pipes on the difference between the “intelligentsia” and “intellectuals”:
Why use the foreign-sounding “intelligentsia” when the English language has the word “intellectuals”? (…) to distinguish those who passively contemplate life from activists who are determined to reshape it.
Interesting distinction. But doesn’t it seem that today’s political climates demand adherence to existing popular/party lines, which necessitates intellectual compromise- or just being dumb in the first place? Is this one of the drawbacks to our current ideas/systems of democracy?
I won’t attempt to answer that.
Another interesting point:
The existence of such an intelligentsia created, in itself, a high risk of social upheaval. For just as lawyers make for litigation and bureaucrats for paperwork, so revolutionaries make for revolution. In each case a profession emerges with an interest for promoting situations that demand its particular skill.
I like this theory of organic self-growth, which explains why human societies must constantly monitor and criticise themselves, and make adjustments to being healthier. This is why I’m not a hardcore conservative. Change is important.
Not that governments are necessarily the best institutions to bring such change about: one of the worst legacies of Russian revolutionary thinking, it seems to me, is that so many of now genuinely consider The Government to be responsible for everything that goes wrong, and the only possible source of anything ever being pout right. Yet the biggest modern vehicle for social change right now is the internet. Surely the thought of George Bush and Gordon Brown assuming charge of our laptops would be enough to make anyone shudder in his Red-Army-Chic boots.
Tags: history, politics, Russiaupdate on my update (plus: sharing what pops into your head)
By alice on January 14, 2010
So, after careful pondering and intense inner debate, I have decided to… leave this blog more or less just as it is, and put my new blog ideas in totally different parts of the internet. Mad Housewife will continue to be the spot for occasional, rambling and/or intellectually ponderous articles that have no unifying theme or identifiable reason for existing, other than being interesting to me and who knows maybe a couple of other people who like them too. The title remains despite not really describing me very well these days, because… well, it’s the url too.
And generally I’ll continue posting under-140 and under-420 character thoughts on twitter and facebook, because that’s what the internet is for, right? Processing things that pop into your head.
Because, you know, there are people on the internet whose heads seem to consist of nothing but stuff that perfectly fits into their career aspirations and business brands, and whose every little thought, by remarkable serendipity, seems to be something that will bring in extra sales. And there are people who just don’t share what pops into their head on the internet, they inflict it on their family and friends instead, or maybe spend hours every day in deep meditation achieving perfect mind-soul balance. And my feeling on what to post and what to keep schtum is basically: whatever floats your inner-tube. I can’t get motivated about being either market-perfect or perfectly-dignified, when it comes to conversation: my main goal is to get everything that comes into the brain back out again, so it will leave me alone. And if that means twittering lunch, facebooking a headache or waffling endlessly about philosophical theory on this blog, then so be it. (And if any of that denotes that I am bonkers, readers have been warned in the title already!)
Onwards and upwards! And please do have a very happy and fulfilling 2010 if I haven’t wished you one already 
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New York Times on British stuff
By alice on January 12, 2010
I love how the NY Times seems so old-fashioned and posh now, compared to any British newspaper you could mention. Here it is on the British press, the British snow, and a couple of shows currently on in London:
The local papers, with their usual love of understatement, are advertising the big freeze as life-threatening. (Temperatures are as low as in some parts of the Antarctic, they are fond of pointing out, though the snow has all but disappeared in central London, and the air feels almost mild to someone newly arrived from New York.) But both the Comedy Theater, home to Ms. Knightley in a modernized version of Molière’s “Misanthrope,” and the Menier, where Ms. Outhwaite has the title role in “Sweet Charity,” were packed with the dauntless.
Since the heating in London theaters in a cold wave is on a par with their air-conditioning in a heat wave, these audiences were unlikely to go home with warm hands. As for their hearts, well, Ms. Knightley, in an earnest West End debut, does inspire a certain parental warmth.
Ah, they’re so… genteel! (But I think that “parental warmth” thing is supposed to be more fatherly than motherly, you know.)
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is life passing you by?
By alice on December 20, 2009
Still officially closed, but this really struck me and I had to write about it- from Mariella Frostrup’s agony aunt column, a response to a woman in her twenties in a commitment-ambiguous relationship:
I get so many letters from people my own age who feel that life is somehow passing them by, that excitement is eluding them, and that their gilded youth is crumbling around their feet as they stack the dishes and struggle to pay the bills. Make sure you make the most of every minute of your youth and that the people you spend time with, friends and lovers, are worthy of the investment you make in them.
I wonder a lot about what people my own age are doing, supposed to be doing, think they are doing and generally what the norm is, these days, for a woman in her forties.
The expectation has definitely changed since my parents were my age. I doubt most adults from their generation would even have considered such a thing as “excitement”, either in their youth or in their middle years, but if so, accepting its passing would absolutely have been expected with the birth of children, although perhaps as they grew older one might enjoy a little more time to oneself as they became more self-sufficient and spent more time out of the house. Youth has always been something to mourn, of course- if not the years themselves (if you feel like me on this, here’s Gogol Bordello’s I would never wanna be young again), then the feeling of immortality that goes with being young and not yet having faced the alternative.
But these days, people over forty can and do dress like twenty year olds, or, more appropriately, we enjoy and appreciate our own kind of beautiful, and the things in our lives that took us two decades to establish- emotional stability and the freedom that brings; truly adult relationships based on real love not what-ifs or exploitation; managing your family in a way that suits you rather than feeling pulled from pillar to post all the time; knowing what your career is and how it’s going; knowing what you want in general, having real priorities and goals.
We even have our own burgeoning style-culture, I think: it may have started with plastic surgery, the quest for age-free bodies and a desperate denial of maturity but now there are plenty of beautiful, alluring, successful women my age who dress appropriately and beside whom the next generation of twentysomething film stars now look relatively less deep, interesting, wise, experienced and womanly, in a way that is just as it should be. Girls can now be girls, and women can be women. The glories of youth now are about looking good in fun, often silly, experimental clothing, and the attractiveness of fully-grown womanhood is all about sexual self-possession and exuding inner strength of a specifically female kind. Madonna is the most famous one, but Nigella Lawson really has it in spades. But there is a whole new generation of successful middle-years women, who embody this new image of middle-years womanhood
But I’m writing somewhat aspirationally. To what extent does the New Successful Womanly Woman over forty represent ordinary people? For me, this idea has seemed out-of-reach, realistically translatable and a concept worth living, at different periods in the last few years. (NB I define success as meeting your own goals- these don’t have to be career-oriented if your pursuits are family or philanthropy instead). Any genuine, inspiring model is going to be about values not past-achievement, so you can always start doing those right now: being yourself, possessing your power, knowing your goals/dreams, living well are the main things. But some of us are still apparently chained to the kitchen sink, and various other things (the mortgage being the most complained-about trapping of feminist liberation), while doing our best with the above. What to do?
Well, I don’t know. More “date-nights”? Relocation and/or downsizing (perhaps near the grandparents/ free babysitters)? A change of attitude? A dishwasher? For excitement, my husband is building us a new breakfast bar this morning; you would not believe how excited it is possible to become about a breakfast bar when you’re 42. I am beside myself with bliss, convinced it is a miracle from the very Hand of God. Also we went to a Cuban (well, “Cuban”, really,) restaurant last night… and talked work. A mojito and a brainstorm about business is my idea of serious fun.
So here’s what I think: there is a sort of hurdle to get over, when you realise the numbers 2 and 3 are only going to be appearing in your age at decadely intervals from now on, in terms of reaching a point in your life where you feel OK about everything. When you’re young, it’s OK not to feel OK about everything because there’s still so much time for it to change. (Maybe some of it will even change on its own! Young people- I don’t recommend that approach.)
When you’re older, your standards go up, and you want to feel at least OK about everything, and pretty good about some of it, at least. So you have to take a good hard look at the stuff you feel bad- yes, BAD- about, and deal with it. Change it, adjust it to fit, come to terms with it as-is, whatever. But you do need to deal with it, whichever way is best for you, or it will be hanging there like an albatros ruining the next bunch of years and only getting increasingly rotten, until you do deal with it, and by then you will be regretting all that extra time it went unsorted.
This can mean upheaval. Maybe your marriage is horrific, your children are growing into hopeless uncontrollable nightmares, you loathe your career and you’re $50k in debt, with a serious drug problem. Those things happen. Maybe you always wanted to be an actor/ poet/ parent, or live in Japan, or maybe you really hate your hair. I think we all get these mid-life hurdles, and graduating beyond them is the key to feeling good and successful in your middle years and beyond. The key is dealing with them. Then, I think, you end up feeling grateful and happy right now, and not bothered about whether you made sure every last minute of your youth was wonderful, or not. The snag is, it isn’t easy, in fact may be the toughest thing you ever do, other than dealing with mortality. Much tougher than any amount of washing up. But being acquainted with this sort of reality is the stuff that makes you who you are. Which is what we’re looking for here- it’s where all the rewards come from.
May as well be positive and get on with it, I say…
blog news update
By alice on December 16, 2009
I will be overhauling all my internet stuff over the next few weeks, and fully intend to get blogging again as soon as that’s done. Basically, blog posts take me a long time to write- there’s no way round that, it’s just how my mind works these days- so they need to fit together with other work stuff in some kind of meaningful way, in order to be worthwhile. This means getting more focussed on the subjects that really matter to me (inspirations, creativity and my own artistic adventures), and (if new readers are ever to come here again) figuring out how to make them matter to other people too. Or, to put it a better way round, find the elusive shared ground where I can do what I want while also being relevant and helpful to others. Although some people do therapeutic blogging- hell, some people do therapeutic facebooking, which seems totally nuts for a networking place- that’s not my style. I’d rather just go out with my husband and brainstorm over a pizza.
So in the meantime, things are going to be quiet round here, as it’s much easier to refurbish a place if you move out for a little while. My other places on the world wide web (any and all of which may also be refurbished soon, but I’ll update this post if so) are:
Facebook
Twitter (@madhousewife)
Facebook Full English fan page- this is a fun page where I post & comment on various articles, videos etc, so do join it if you’re on the Facebook.
Twitter @fullenglishfood is currently not very active.
Full English food blog has occasional posts about British food and our products.
Anyway I’m not vanishing, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes and news will definitely appear here before too long.
Meanwhile happy winter festival holidays to all; may you chill out without becoming too chilly, and may all your victuals and beverages be great!
*fade out to the sounds of Lady Gaga singing a pumped up disco version of White Christmas or something similarly bonkers*
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digital natives and digital immigrants: how to feel more at home on the internet
By alice on December 4, 2009
(Thanks to Shefaly, without whom this post would never have been written for more reasons than one
I’ve spend endless hours of fun complaining about not being a “digital native”. If I were a digital native, I’m sure, the following would surely apply to me as they must do to everyone born after circa 2000:
a) I would always love being online and never find it frustrating, or irritating, or a time-drain, as I would come and go lightly without getting accidentally suckered into reading the Daily bloody Mail etc,
b) small tasks like posting a photo on facebook would come easily to me, I would not do as I just did and accidentally post the wrong photo because I couldn’t find the file where the other photos went when I was trying to be more organised instead of putting everything into an inappropriately-named file,
c) I would have six gazillion friends on Facebook,
d) none of whom would annoy me,
e) stuff would never randomly break down on me, ebay would be enjoyable, and all my shipping & handling costs would be free.
Right. It’s nonsense. Here’s what I think the real differences are between me and the younger generation, based on observing my kids’ internet use- they are not a bad two-person sample, with very different learning styles and online activities.
a) they are always confident and comfortable online, never grumble about hating the internet etc,
b) they expect things to go wrong sometimes,
c) when things do go wrong, they may get frustrated, or they may just leave it and do something else,
d) they never feel they are wasting time- they stop when bored, and being happily occupied is never considered wasteful!
e) they make much better use of youtube and other non-written sources of information, than I do,
f) they integrate their internet life and the rest of their life much more creatively than me, and draw no kind of line between them at all.
This last one is very important. We are all now beginning to realise that this is one world, not two, and our online and offline activities are all part of the same picture, and there is nowhere to “hide”! Many errors result from thinking you can be a different person in different spheres: integrity is about being real wherever you are. Going anonymous to attack people is wrong, and posting obscenities on facebook then blaming your parents for being nosey when they find them, is naive! If you’re used to manipulating people by behaving differently according to who you talk to, the internet will make you uneasy: it’s not possible to get very far here without saying quite a lot in full view, and being genuine. A lot of older people find that scary, I think. They just aren’t used to public speaking- which is what this is! Whereas there are still doubtless plenty of younger people who expect the older generation to stay indoors doing embroidery or playing cards forever, who will be upset when their desire to impress their especially badly-behaved peers comes up against their desire to have parents pay their college fees, or who may find themselves regretting their contributions to google images when they leave college and want a besuited job.
The real you probably needs to live in the real world, which includes internet and everyone else in the world. What matters is not the generation gap of today, but the way forward towards getting the most out of your own real life. And doing this requires realism and work.
Shefaly wrote here about Professor John Palfrey’s definition of the “digital native”, and reinterpreted his terms to coin the phrase “naturalised digital citizen”, which I think is more applicable and also sums up what I see as the only essential, non-learnable difference between digital natives and non-natives: that the former feel more at home here (and the implications of that attitude on what they do). The immigrant perspective is a minority view, because most people remain citizens in their original countries, but it can teach you quite a lot about these artificial boundaries between one thing and another, when none of those hard lines actually apply to you. One of the main reasons I moved to Texas was a very strong feeling, which is a terribly difficult thing to explain convincingly to people: yet feeling “at home” is important to our wellbeing, confidence and growth, and helps us learn and grow in a very profound way.
We are not citizens of the internet and/or the rest-of-the-world/ meatspace/ “real life”: we are citizens of the whole world, which includes both. We have access to both spheres, so our dual citizenship there is undeniable. My mother is a citizen of the internet, because she could go there if she learned how: but she is not a citizen of China, so would need a visa and only be allowed to visit. Some of us are making the most we can from what the internet offers us and learning all the time; some of us have more trouble with this than others; some of us take a more positive attitude towards it than others; some of us are in denial about what the internet could do for us and suffer as a result without ever realising this. Some of us may genuinely not have much use for online tools in our lives. And the latter don’t have to worry much, so far anyway, about becoming comfortable and confident and au fait with these forms of communication and information-finding.
And those of us who are here for better or worse may as well get used to it! Having said I’m not as comfortable as my kids are, I must admit that, however gradually, I do find myself becoming more “at home” online, and less peeved and frustrated when things go wrong, or seem too much for my limited abilities. A big part of that is ease at chilling out and taking breaks- which (perhaps surprisingly, if you haven’t noticed this before) also happens to be an important skill which true digital natives are actually really good at. Both my children are entirely happy to give up if something is proving impossibly difficult, or if they aren’t inclined to tackle something problematic online right now, and wander off to do something else, online or offline. The point is, the problem will still be there when you get back, and it’s never that urgent. Whereas people my age will struggle and complain, keep at it long past the point of fruitfulness, and generally rage against the machine to no end other than winding ourselves up. We actually feel bad about just leaving it. This way, we keep ourselves feeling alienated, almost on purpose, choosing to stay when the nature of the new world-with-internet is that, nearly always, there will be a new way tomorrow.
So I think the one biggest thing you can do to get more native online, given being committed to learning already, is simply to get better at leaving things. One thing we do know about the internet is, it’s not going anywhere. We may as well make ourselves as comfortable as possible. And one sure sign of being at home is, being confident enough to know that you can take a break, go away and when you come back, everything will still be just the same constantly changing, just as it always has been
