When I am worried or anxious, when things look particularly bleak, I watch really bad movies. I’m not talking about the good kind of bad movies. I mean total crap. I do this because I cannot drink¹ and am too much of a control freak for hard drugs.² Lately—what with the state of the world being as it is and the fact that I am separated from my love by 3,000 miles—I’ve been on a real bender: I have recently introduced horrifically bad television programming into my regimen.³

Last week, in a moment of dire need, I queued up the first episode of Leave It To Beaver on my shiny silver Macintosh. To my great surprise, it turned out to be wonderful. Really, truly wonderful. Each episode begins with Ward’s voiceover telling us what we will learn over the next thirty minutes. A moral!⁴ Imagine that.

The language alone will slay you. Whether it’s June, straightfaced, saying,”Ward, I’m very worried about the Beaver” or the Beav insulting one of his classmates: “Violet Rutherford drinks gutter water,” the language cannot be stopped.

The most incredible thing about the show for me, though, is the pace of the Cleavers’ life. They are not harried or overworked. They are not thinking about the next IPO or all the unread emails on their Blackberrys. June has time to pack the boys’ lunches in the morning and Ward has time to take them into the garage in the evening to teach them how to beat up their classmates. And it’s not just the Cleavers. Everyone in town has free time. When The Beav’s principal hears that Ward is under the weather, she takes it upon herself to send flowers over to the house. When his teacher wants to get a message home to June she types up a letter and sends it home with Beaver. People actually talk to each other and have meaningful human contact.

It leaves me to wonder: where did all our time go? Are we dawdling it away writing emails, updating our facebook statuses, and tweeting ourselves blind? Is it possible that all of the things we’ve designed to make our lives simpler are in fact adding to our burden?

I mentioned to someone⁵ a few months ago how much I hate talking on the phone and emailing, feeling constantly obliged to check messages. He asked me a very pointed question, “What would happen if you just stopped?”

Me: Come again?
Him: What would happen if you only checked your voicemail and email when you felt like it?
Me: I don’t understand.

My first reaction was an overwhelming panic: I would lose jobs! My family would be angry! No one would talk to me again!

But I’ve started thinking about it more seriously, about dropping out of the technological communication stream. I imagine checking emails once a week, voicemails twice a month. I imagine feeling like I do when I’m on vacation, when my mind is finally able to quiet down.

I wonder if I would regain some of that lost time that the Cleavers seem to be swimming in. There’s no doubt I would send and receive fewer phone calls, curt emails, and text messages from friends and family. But my hunch is that I would write more letters, spend more time with people in person, and enjoy my life more fully.

Anyone want to try it?

I discovered the word Retrotech on one of my favorite blogs. I have not been able to find a proper definition for it on the interwebs, but I don’t believe I need to; I reckon it means different things to different people.

For those of you who Tweet from your iPhones, Mac OS 10.5.3 is retrotech.

For my fellow Luddites and nostalgists, I offer my favorite examples of retrotech for your consideration:

IBM Selectric I
Pong
Handwritten letters
Tin can phone
Lite-Brite
Shrinky Dinks
Photo booths
Skeleton keys
Records on vinyl
Books

If you have any of your own to add, kindly letterpress them onto a sheet of papyrus and send them to me via post. Or you can leave a comment below (sigh).