Wherefore art thou, serendipity?

Some say social media is making us less social and more isolated from each other; others say the opposite. Both groups can point to data and experience to support their claims. Recently, though, I watched a Dateline NBC program about this very topic, and it got me thinking not so much about the social trends in media, but of a word that seems to be disappearing from our collective consciousness: serendipity.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident,” and after watching the show, I realized how little happenstance there is these days.

The program was about four 20-something California women who were challenged to two weeks of “no digital communication.” They had to lock their smart phones, tablets, e-readers, laptops—the works—into a sparkly pink suitcase, banned from even looking at them.

Dateline cameras followed them around, capturing their predictable groans of “no phone, no life,” and “I feel like I have no idea what’s going on in the world,” and, of course, the fears that they were “dying a slow social death.”

OK, so it proved they were addicted to their technology. No surprise there.

But aside from their realizations that sans smart phones they actually “talked to each other,” two of their experiences made me question whether it was serendipity that was dying the slow death.

The first was when the women were given instructions to drive from Hermosa Beach to Runyon Canyon Park in the Hollywood Hills equipped with—wait for it—a map. As you can imagine, there were some…uh…difficulties. When the navigator suggested they “take this squiggly line,” I had some severe doubts. It was then that they made an unconventional decision. They stopped to ask for directions.

What made it significant was that they happened to stop at a flower shop to ask for help, and then, directions in hand, piled back into the car, but with something else in their hands. A huge bouquet of gorgeous flowers. That’s what I call a happy and unexpected discovery. A ride from point A to point B yielded a magical moment of beauty that, with their eyes glued to a screen, they would never have noticed.

Now some might say that if they wanted flowers, there are any number of apps that would have directed them to the right place. But the point is, they didn’t know they wanted flowers until the fragrance was right under their noses. It was a surprising twist to their day, and as they breathed in the scent appreciatively, I thought: It’s the sweet, unexpected, spontaneous things in life that just seem to smell better.

Later, when one of the women went to a bar to meet a friend, the show’s producers told her friend to arrive an hour late; thus, she sat alone and unoccupied. As she waited, with no mobile device to keep her company, she became more and more agitated and at one point said to the camera, “I may be having a panic attack.”

Unable to handle sitting by herself, she went to the bar and did something completely out of character—she struck up conversations with real live people whom she didn’t know. Within minutes she was engaged in conversation, and after a while the bartender came over and asked for her number. Since she didn’t have her phone on her, he wrote his digits on a napkin. Sigh. On a napkin.

For all you hopeless romantics, when was the last time someone slipped you a phone number on a napkin? Had she stayed at her table texting, tweeting and Tumblring, this magical albeit sappy old-
Hollywood scene would have been replaced by a few irritated messages about friends who stand friends up and some status updates about how bored she was.

A professor once told me to go to the library to look for books and articles instead of searching for them online. Apparently, we never know what discoveries lie on a library’s shelves. I didn’t know if I could be bothered. But now I wonder if every time I choose to wander instead of web-surf, perhaps serendipity can be recaptured.