Why Australians are in desperate need of a digital detox

A funny thing happened when I got home from work last night. Then something rather sad happened.

As I drove into my street I noticed there were no street lights on. Every home engulfed in darkness.

Great! The power was out.

When I walked into the house, there was a dull glow from the lounge room where my wife, 22-year-old son, 18-year-old daughter and three-year-old cavoodle were sitting around a small torch.

No lights, no TV and no heating. But there was something: conversation.

This is not to say we don’t speak in my house, it’s just unusual that all of us would be in the one room at the one time actually sharing stories as to what we’d done that day.

My wife then decided it might be fun to play a game. What the?

So, amid a few quizzical looks between myself, my son, my daughter and even the cavoodle, up jumped my wife to start a game of charades.

One by one we got up and made complete fools of ourselves, laughing our way through one random clue to another.

From films, to books, to music and movie stars… we hopelessly covered just about every spectrum.

It’s not that we’re a dysfunctional family, not by any stretch, but as we were laughing I was trying to recall the last time we’d done anything like this as family.

Then something really sad happened.

None of us expressed our disappointment at the time, but I suspect we all felt it.

The power came back on. In an instant the house lit up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

My son’s feet barely touched the carpet as he bolted up the stairs to his room to resume his Playstation battle with a mate… my daughter was in tow, heading to her room also.

My wife and I then started scrolling through the TV menu to see what was on. The cavoodle curled up on the couch to start snoozing.

So annoyed was I that the power had been restored, I actually contemplated heading outside to flick the switch to simulate another outage.

But what it reinforced to me was how technology has now taken over the lives of Australians and how the art of conversation has been eroded.

There’s nothing more demoralising to see children at restaurants, with their parents, glued to their phones or iPads.

Even more demoralising is seeing the parents glued to their devices. We desperately need a form of digital detox to restore the balance.

Few of us could actually go through a day with checking our phones, the withdrawals are akin to trying to give us smoking.

The difference is: kicking the smoking habit is a hell of a lot easier.

It’s a real challenge that faces almost every Australian household, but I suspect in the case of my home there’s no turning back.

The best I can hope for is another power outage.

Sooner rather than later to be honest, because I’ve got a ripper charade:

-           Song

-           Six words

-           Fifth word: (clue) not forward

-           Sixth word: sounds like “mime”