🔒 Learning to detach from ‘My Octopus Teacher’ – With insights from The Wall Street Journal

It’s not spoiling “My Octopus Teacher” to discuss some of the broader reasons why this oddball documentary has struck a chord. First of all, octopuses are wondrous tangles of neurons—“probably the smartest of invertebrates, and extremely weird,” as Alison Gopnik wrote in the Journal last month. It’s also fair to say that the timing of the doc, which was co-directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed, is especially fortuitous. At a moment when so much of the news on dry land is dire, a dive into the shallows of a kelp forest with mollusks feels like a brisk, affirming cleanse.

But I think the biggest reason why “My Octopus Teacher” has become a phenomenon is how it speaks to a very urgent modern desire: to disconnect. When we first meet its human protagonist, filmmaker Craig Foster, he’s in the throes of a midlife career burnout: He’s overextended, overworked, fearful of becoming a dour burden to his family, especially his young son. “Your great purpose in life is now just…in pieces,” he says early in the film. “I had to have a radical change.”

Look: Not everyone is going to commit to a hundred days plus of swimming with an octopus in frigid water, like steely, sensitive Craig did. Usually, our attempts to detach are more modest. We try to set boundaries with work. We exercise. We socialize. We pledge to read more books. We attempt to limit our use of devices. Sometimes we leave the house—heavens—without a phone.

But modern technology is designed to be addictive. There’s pressure to always make oneself available. Backsliding is common, and then the whole, maddening cycle repeats itself.

It helps to have your own octopus teacher, or at least a helpful stand-in. Mine is my 8-year-old son, who from an early age has been spectacularly tuned into the natural world. He is a child who can tell the difference, at some distance, between a hawk and a peregrine falcon; who notices broken blue robins’ eggs in the underbrush on a walk to school; who delights in finding a worm, or a snail or the slightest springtime changes to a tree. I am not taking credit for any of this—his mother is the one who encouraged and burnished his love for the outside. The only thing I have given him is a bunch of useless statistics about the New York Mets.

But he’s helped me, greatly. Make no mistake, my son is into Pokémon, and long ago memorized the iPad password, and he just discovered an old game called Pac-Man, but he’s still able to be surprised by his environment, which is how you notice hawks, or a slug or, the other day, a cluster of hermit crabs down at the shore.

The kid is disconnecting me from the noise, and reconnecting me to the moment, which is precisely what Craig got from those many dives into the kelp forest with an octopus. I’m really not much for swimming in cold water. Thankfully, teachers are everywhere.

Write to Jason Gay at [email protected]