Blackout! Lessons Learned From a Night Without Electricity

Blackout! Lessons Learned From a Night Without Electricity

January 26th, 2025 – 8:12pm: CRACK-BOOM! It was like lightning had just struck our house. All the lights go out as we’re dropped into darkness. My wife, step-mother, and daughter scream as both the baby and dog come running terrified. I go to the window to check how many of our neighbors are affected by the blackout. Total darkness. It’s everyone in the valley.

It had been raining torrential rain for the past 2 days, a thunderstorm passing over the island that knocked over trees, powerlines, and left many a home or business flooded. We had a feeling a blackout would be coming, as they often do when these kinds of storms pass over Hawaii. This particular one left us without power, but also knocked out the cell towers in the area meaning our phones were useless as well.

After finding my emergency flashlight, I set it up on our living room table pointed up at the ceiling to give us something like an overhead light. The room was still pretty dim and had the lighting of a nightlight, or maybe a dwindling campfire. After everyone had calmed down from the deafening lightning strike, my family all gathered around the light and with no cell service, no Instagram, TikTok, Netflix, YouTube or any internet at all to check, we all just talked.

With the internet forcing every member in the house to get off their phones, the smartphones lay aside, untouched.

And we just…talked.

…And it was really nice.

It’s sad how rare it is to be able to just sit down with a room full of people you love and just have undistracted conversation and connection. Talking with undistracted everyone felt really nice, and based on the reactions I saw from everyone else, they felt the same. The atmosphere was calm, relaxed, with no one itching to get back on their phones. This experience made me feel like this should be something we plan to do regularly – scheduled time to really connect.

It also made me think hard about how much we take the electricity we have for granted. We so often just turn on all the lights when it starts to get dark out of habit, like the darkness is something we have to combat so that we can continue to do things we want until sleep time.

That frame of mind also made me think about something else: by “fighting” nature like the setting of the sun, we end up using more (polluting) electricity and end up forcing our bodies to stay up later than they might naturally. It reminded me that it’s too often the case that we use technology to force some kind of unnatural “solution” that we want but don’t necessarily need, like highly polluting 1-hour flights, plastic packaging to keep our foods “clean” (while the plastic adds chemicals to the food), or “smart” devices like an AI-enabled, Bluetooth coffee makers that save you the trouble of pushing a button at the cost of energy intensive servers and extra circuit boards.

I think that I would argue that for our “powerless” night, we ended up having more fun, joy, and connection that we wouldn’t have had if we had electricity. We used almost no electricity at all (save a couple hours of two D-sized batteries), which polluted less than we would have regularly. For this night, for us, the reduction of electricity and technology led to more connection.

I think this is a good takeaway from this experience and one that I will have to remember – sometimes, the best thing you can do for your own peace, calm, and connection, is to just step away from technology and find love and satisfaction from being with those you love. We should have power outages more often.