Marti's Night is Luau Night!

Marti ~ August 2008

This article landed in my inbox today and set me to thinking. It was just the other day that our middle school kids reported that they figured about half their classmates supposedly suffered from ADD. I had to ask myself how could it be that half the population has ADD? Has ADD now become a state of normalcy? And if so, how can we continue to deem it a “disorder?”

I suspect that it’s more likely that parents hold such high expectations for their children nowadays that anyone who isn’t absolutely focused, restrained, disciplined and motivated by society’s acceptable means may be termed difficult. They are too smart for boring classrooms, too creative for the inside the box thinking we demand of nearly everyone currently. Of course, I’m not saying in many instances the diagnosis of A.D.D. isn’t legitimate.

The author of the article, a noted M.D., suggests a sense of detachment lies at the bottom of it all, caused by our technological, info-tainment society where newscasters report horrific details of current events then shift light-heartedly into banter about sports and weather, as if no emotion is the best emotional response to what is going on around us. We mistake the proclamations made by a TV actor playing the role of president as policy. The author suggests we no longer know the difference between fact and fiction and take our cues from performers as to how we ourselves should behave and respond to real life.

According to the author, the kid used as example in this article, supposedly marked with A.D.D. and an identity disorder that leaves him on the “outside looking in,” is a result of all this packaged identity that pours out of the media. But I’m not sure I buy into that theory entirely, with all due respect to the esteemed professional who suggests it.

My generation grew up on TV, watching Leave It to Beaver and Gunsmoke, but at a certain age we learned to realize the difference between pretend and real. It seems to me that no matter what’s put before you on the media the bigger issue to developing a true sense of your own identity is to have the freedom to learn for yourself who you are by trying things and finding out what you care about and enjoy. Perhaps this kid just hasn’t found his outlet yet. Maybe he’s torn between pleasing his parents’ model of what he should be and gaining his friend’s acceptance in expressing his true self. How many people are allowed that freedom these days? Who has a chance when the minute you step outside the box you are put on drugs to curb the urge?

All kids want to fit in, most teenagers in particular. But I find that the range of acceptable is becoming so narrow that we send kids to therapists and put them on Prozac the minute they stray from the narrow confines of what constitutes “success” and living up to their presumed potential – which translates to our expectations.

Take me for example, and no, I’ve never taken prescription drugs. But I have been accused of being slightly weird so I can relate my own experience to the kid in the article.

Having been so very productive and creative lately – writing those scripts and developing products and such – I find myself suddenly in a self-imposed lull. I, like all sane humans, must do this from time to time in order to fan the flames later. If you keep running at such a high burn level it’s pretty obvious that you will – well, burn out. So here I am trying to avoid burn-out and finding I’m rather bored as a result. Instead of relishing the time off, lingering over a book or movie, splashing in the ocean and feeling good about the glorious freedom I’ve allowed myself, I feel a little addled, unfulfilled, and restless. As if I had ADD. Maybe I’m depressed…

Or, perhaps it’s just the result of the uncomfortable feeling that comes from having been constantly stimulated for so long. If I were a kid, I’d be required to suffer this imposition regularly; in the classroom, at the dinner table, on a bus, in church. I’d find myself getting fidgety when nothing much was going on. My brain would wander, searching for the high-level stimulation to which it has become accustomed, which it now prefers. I’d start throwing spitballs or shuffling or swaying – as I do in the grocery store checkout line even today. And my parents would tell me to stop it right now.

So like me, ADD kids may run from activity to activity, distraction to attraction to find at some point in the process they will either suffer burn-out, exhaustion or suffer boredom. In fact, most things in their lives may come across as boring and uninspiring. Often times when really restricted, the kid turns to drugs or alcohol to further numb the creative urges that find no home. Personally, I’ve chosen instead to just keep creating – and try not to let anyone stop me. I’m an adult now, so I can do that most of the time. But kids can’t.

I know it’s not just me feeling this way and I seriously doubt I would clinically qualify as having ADD. The cycle and its resulting trials appear to be society wide.

Have we lost our comfort level with those who are a little different? Where other society’s seem to embrace certain eccentricities, we blast them. Unless they happen to make a fortune with their weirdness, like Bill Gates or George Lucas – in which case they are heroes. (But still weird.) How do they handle this in other societies? What of those elements that having us flocking to Europe so we can sit at cafes and while away the hours sans guilt? I’ve noticed in Europe that there’s a much broader array of dress, mannerisms, quirkiness. We have to go overseas to indulge ourselves this way because if we do this at home we’d be called shiftless and odd, if not by our neighbors and bosses, then by our inner critics.

But those kids of ours - relentlessly playing video games and goofing up and making a mess and spinning around for no good reason at all but to get dizzy - they must have A.D.D. I think we simply envy their freedom. That’s why we give them pills to snatch that pure freedom away. We calm them down; make them get back to work; show them how hard it is to get to where we got.

Nose to the grindstone: I wonder if Europeans suffer from rampant ADD? Are they uncomfortable whiling away the hours doing rather mindless things that won’t add up on their resume or account in their paychecks? Don’t they feel ashamed shutting their louvers from 1-5 p.m. and letting all that potential business go to waste while they – ulp - nap? We Americans work, work, work to get more, more, more and have less, less, less when we actually get to where we thought we were going. And we are surprised the kids reject this notion of life?

At what point will the inevitable depression sink in as they, too, are caught in a meaningless quest plugged along by pills and promises? When the truth is, as my wise coach pointed out to me today, the happiness is always right there in the doing. Right there in spinning ‘round watching the clouds and carving images in the dirt with the toe of your shoe. Right there in the moment of creation. What comes from it later is just gravy, or merely to put gravy on the table.

This tells me that if you are not engaged in the very thing makes you happy in the doing, good luck, because the satisfaction and happiness likely won’t come later on either. Maybe the pride and sense of accomplishment will. After all, you worked so hard and deserve to be commended, but unless you loved what you were doing all along it’s very unlikely the payoff will make up for it. Perhaps this is what kids know and we’ve too often forgotten.

But there’s another aspect to this. We all need a story to tell and share. When kids spend a huge amount of time in a virtual world, to whom do they tell their story? What do they deliver over the dinner table when the question is posed, “so what did you do today?”

So Cut to the Chase: In another in-box notice from the wonderful webzine called “Conversation Matters,” I am reminded of the power of mini-stories. Over time, from Plato to Jesus, the power of relating a concept or idea via a proverb, story or myth, is the most powerful because people love to hear stories. They want to be reminded that someone else out there has experienced similar things. That’s why when you try to teach a lesson to a kid, or an adult for that matter, a story almost always illustrates the matter better. “Let me tell you what happened to so-and-so when he tried that…”

So why don’t we follow the example of the great masters and teach and share more via stories? Perhaps we’ve decided that stories take too long. But a good story is brief – two minutes max. Teaching kids directly, giving them instructions, problems, and tasks is likely not as effective in gaining their true involvement and attention as good, efficient story telling.

So many of the things my kids impress me with - insights, awareness, melodies of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, all the things I know I never introduced to them directly but they somehow know - they’ve learned from TV and video games, and very occasionally, from real life. They seldom note an unexpected bit of knowledge was gleaned from a lecture or a textbook. “I saw a special on TV,” or “It was on Cartoon Network” are more likely their cited footnotes. But we must be watching and playing the same things to have a connection to “what they are doing.”

In an interview recently, Sting cited the myriad entertainment choices we now have as a major loss to society – we are lost in the vastness of the former gathering place. Long ago we sat around a campfire and listened. Then we gathered at great coliseums to watch together. In our generation, we gathered round three channels of technology – the TV – and at least experienced as a family together this virtual fantasy where we learned things, directly or not. We had a basis for connection.

But what are your kids doing? How can they share the gains they made on a video game over the family dinner when their parents have no clue? What are our alternatives? If man lost his connection to his meaning when society shifted from agricultural – where the results were real and authentic – to industrial – where at least there was a product at the end of the day, where is our connection to one another in the age of technology?

As novelist John Steinbeck wrote, "We are lonesome
animals. We spend all of our life trying to be less lonesome.
One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the
listener to say - and to feel - 'Yes, that is the way it is,
or at least that is the way I feel it. You're not as alone
as you thought.'"

Maybe we may need more means to connect together in ways that all members of the family and society can tap into and be entertained. And it’s true that while everyone is off in their own corner tapping away at a keyboard, there’s not much interaction going on.

Which reminds me, I have to go…

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