I grew up on a road that bordered a creek. The creek was a refuge, a neighbor, and a conduit all at once. Sometimes the experience was solitary; wander alone and find something new, some hidden place or unfamiliar features. Sometimes it was communal; borders between yards became fluid as children from a half dozen houses adventured through that small slice of wilderness.
Whatever form such excursions took, they were always emergent. Organic. Unplanned. No two parents texted each other to make a playdate for their kids to meet in the woods to climb the giant slanted tree. They didn’t have a group chat telling them to gather at the drainage pipe that ran under the road. There wasn’t a private Facebook group or a Discord server full of threads for sharing tips like the location of a little pine sapling forest with a weird empty space in the middle that’d be just awesome for a secret hideout. We simply put on rubber boots and we went for it.
Fast forward twenty years. My children have been growing up on a road that bordered a creek. They’ve hardly set foot in it. It’s an expanse of trees that might as well be on another planet. And why would they? As near as I can tell, nobody else has either, despite the fact that small slice of forest sits between two quiet suburban streets, and is encircled by over 40 homes (I pulled up Google Maps and counted).
I’m fully aware that every generation has looked upon the next one with a mix of horror and confusion, throwing their arms up and exclaiming “kids these days!” I want to be cognizant of that impulse, stay humble, and not simply judge the current era by out-of-context standards. Different isn’t necessarily worse.
Lonelier, though? Lonelier is worse. I’ll go out on that limb. I’ll die on that hill. Change that results in a lonelier, more isolated world is change for the worse. Somewhere between the two generations, unplanned play went extinct. That is not just a change, that is a loss.
While the results are undeniable, I’m searching for the root cause, as I can’t believe that this degradation was intentional. I realized, looking back, that it indeed wasn’t. Just as nobody told us to go play in the woods, I never told my kids not to go play in woods. I didn’t tell them not to seek out other kids on our street. They simply…didn’t. The disintegration of social bonds was just as organic as their creation used to be; a product of a larger environment. We are all part of it, simultaneously making decisions that continuously reinforce it, while remaining ignorant to the shape of it. We built a wall around ourselves, brick by brick, without laying eyes on the damned thing.
This detail is important enough that I’m putting a pin in it. Looking at the story of the vanishing woods, I can come up with the first lesson.
Lesson One: Out disintegration was emergent. It was not intentional or planned.