The Great Indoors

According to a recent Pew Research Poll, the average American spends only 72 minutes outdoors a day.  It is a stunning factoid when you consider two things: there are 1440 minutes in a day, and for the average suburban New Yorker, at lest 25 of that 72 is pissed away waiting for the train at 7:30 am.  The rest of those precious seconds are spent behind environmentally unfriendly drywall and under asbestos ceilings.

A more intriguing fact is that only 2 percent of the United States is paved.  It feels like 80 percent of New York is black asphalt, and without the foresight of Fredrick Olmsted, it would be.  He designed the only oasis one can escape to on the island: Central Park. Where else can you throw a Frisbee, smoke blunts, read a book, and carouse with adorable European backpackers?

What’s hard to fathom is the rest of the equation: most Americans spend roughly 1368 minutes a day indoors.

What’s worse still is that of the rest of the country that isn’t paved, only 2 percent is protected as wilderness. To my knowledge, nothing that’s paved is protected, because if it were, Disney would not have bought 42nd street and turned it into a mall of neon illuminated crap to buy.

Don’t ask me my source on this, but it’s also been said that 75 percent of Americans use billboards as their primary source of information. A drive through rural Pennsylvania will give you a better idea of what this information consist of, but open the New Testament, stab a paragraph, and read it as if it were written in capital letters for an idea.

Guestimate: In a country of 300,000 million, at least a third of us are reading at a 4th grade level.

Finally, there are statistics putting the average number of people murdered in US offices each month at 20, bringing us full circle to our first stat: people spend far too much time indoors.

One can conclude that if we spent less time in cubicles, and more time naked in a lake, for example, or clothed on the Appalachian trail, we would likely live longer.

There’s a temptation among the some of the enlightened to throw caution to the wind, move life off the grid and read Ayn Rand again. The intellectual allure to attempting a zero carbon footprint life is also tempting. Existence sans plastic, mortgages or news cycles. Hand made fires to cook on and heirloom tomatoes you’ve grown from seeds.

The obstacles to dropping out would seem titanic at first.  At this stage, how is anyone supposed to live without detergent, shampoo or the NFL Sunday Ticket? The biggest adjustment, however, would be what to do with the time.  You might find yourself reading more, gardening sustainable, raising free range chickens and learning star patterns for future navigation.

Certainly, you’re concerns would become a lot more fundamental. Once you’re off the grid, and the sun goes down, power is limited to what you were able to store. Or in this case, absent.

Without power, hand scrubbing your laundry becomes an hours long endeavor. Can you make that banal activity into a pleasurable ritual, instead of a routine? Could joy come from the time it takes?

When you’re entrenched in modernity, the thought experiment alone feels seismic. But imagine the plus side of living free from it all. Of upending all your current values, starting with the unequivocal end of materialism.

How would we get their as a nation, one wonders? An Amish or Mennonite President would do the trick. All we need is the right candidate.