Tom Selleck may be onto something
Tom Selleck is on the cover of People magazine.
The issue is dated April 29, 2024. Not April 29, 1982, around when the actor became a household name and kids like me watched “Magnum, P.I.” while fantasizing about driving a red Ferrari with a sidekick named Higgins.
People’s cover line: “The ultraprivate Blue Bloods star reflects on his ‘accidental’ five-decade career, his 37-year marriage and why he’ll never take happiness for granted: ‘It’s been a long road.’ ”
An accompanying story: “Tom Selleck Has Never Sent a Text and Doesn’t Email.”
It was like reading, “Tom Selleck Has Never Used a Flush Toilet.”
How can anyone, let alone an actor and pitchman for reverse mortgages, avoid tech in 2024? Mr. Selleck has a secretary, so that probably helps. And he told the magazine his wife, Jillie, occasionally sends texts on his behalf. What an angel.
Next time my wife complains about something, I’m going to shoot back with, “Just be grateful I don’t dictate texts. Do you want me to grow a moustache?”
I’m intrigued by Magnum’s vaguely Unabomber stance, mostly because technology is causing me to do a lot of doomscrolling. Forget email. AI scares the daylights out of me. The reason? Experts can’t agree if it will or will not destroy humanity.
Yeah, just that. I heard an expert recently peg our extinction odds at 50-50. Pleasant dreams. What’s crazy is how our potential demise is discussed so casually. Sportscasters read final scores with more gravity.
This never happened with other advancements. When Gutenberg invented the printing press, he never said, “This will transform literacy! Or it will kill us all!”
It’s a shame People didn’t press Selleck for more details on how he manages to exist in the modern world as a neo-Luddite who shuns digital communication. It would be instructive.
For most of us, email and text are necessities, right up there with water and oxygen. Selleck’s only explanation was that he “has a hard time writing things down.” How did he write his upcoming memoir, “You Never Know,” which is the reason he is on the new People cover? Is Jillie also a ghostwriter?
But he’s not the only celebrity to give hot tech a cold shoulder.
BuzzFeed published a list last year of luminaries who do not use smartphones. This included everyone from Michael Cera to Ed Sheeran, Elton John to Sarah Jessica Parker. Christopher Walken has never owned a computer, which maybe isn’t surprising when your soul is a semiconductor and you can converse telepathically with ferns.
My favourite tidbit: Dolly Parton “primarily communicates through fax machine.”
Amazing. Dolly is like the pharmacy at Shoppers Drug Mart.
Is tech a seductress that is tempting us to sleepwalk off a cliff?
I would encourage every parent to read Jonathan Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” Mr. Haidt is an insightful social psychologist. His frightening thesis about the deleterious effects over the last 12 years as “play-based childhood” gave way to “phonebased childhood” should set off alarm bells in households and schools everywhere.
My daughters will sometimes text me while they are in class. It’s crazy. When I was their age, I wasn’t allowed to bring a calculator to school. Of course, when I share such generational comparisons, they roll their eyes and giggle.
They can’t get their heads around yesteryear. It’s like I’m saying, “When I was your age, I spoke to my friends via carrier pigeon and went to the mall on a Brontosaurus.”
Haidt provides a number of proposed remedies in his book, including age restrictions on social media and smartphones. These are sensible ideas. But it almost seems too late. We are too far gone. An average teenager is not Tom Selleck. My daughters are more attached to their iPhones than they are to me. All the sidekicks are now on Instagram and Snapchat.
So what can we learn from Magnum? Maybe nothing. If you removed texting and email from my routine, I’d have about 14 extra hours per day. I would also be unemployed and friendless. But maybe this isn’t all or nothing.
Maybe we just need to reduce* the time we spend online (*excludes thestar.com so please visit hourly and tell your friends to subscribe). Maybe we need to cut back on social postings so there is more time to socialize in person.
Maybe we need to kick our phones out of our bedrooms before going to sleep. Maybe we need to stop compulsively checking for notifications. Maybe we need to see the real world as the true screen.
I don’t know how you do it, Tom Selleck. But I admire you for doing it.