i don’t get bored
INFO
I wrote this post to be published in August last year on a previous blog, but thought I’d revive it for this month‘s Bearblog Carnival.
As a child I used to sit and daydream all the time. And by that I mean that it would happen pretty regularly as I was bored or just wasn’t doing anything. I would stare into nothing and make up imaginary situations, stories, or just imagine what telling someone, usually a friend, about an event would be like. This was therapeutic in a way. It was calming and like an ephemeral journal.
We didn’t have smartphones or computers at home, and we sure as hell didn’t have internet. The only mobile phone in the house was my mom’s Nokia phone that had a touch screen, but I don’t remember it being able to connect to WiFi. It was a 2010 model that she got in 2011. So it was outdated technology by the time it was produced and sold, and very outdated by the time she bought it. It had a few preinstalled games (you couldn’t install more) that I didn’t get to play that often, though, if I were, the special sparkle around playing them would’ve died down faster.
My grandparents on my mother’s side had computers and WiFi, but I didn’t use them because I had no use for them. They didn’t have games on them and the internet was for the adults (I didn’t care to explore it either way). My aunt on my father’s side had a PC at her place and she would buy video games for me and my cousin to play, usually Barbie games because I was obsessed with Barbies as a child. Although the games were explicitly for me, the PC had a purpose which was a tool for her college degree. So my playing on it was a special occasion when she didn’t need it and was at home to supervise me. Mind you she also didn’t have internet except for dial-up for which she had to pay depending on her usage. This is to say that I didn’t get to use the internet there either. Then again, I had no use for it.
When I was at home, I would do lots of crafts out of paper and cardboard. I would draw, paint, color, build miniature farms, listen to music, and read in my room. Occasionally, when there were no power outages (which started around 2012) I would watch TV when my parents weren’t watching it already. So as you can see my options for passive entertainment were very limited. I had to seek it out and create an environment for leisure. This created space for silence and unintentional reflection that I don’t allow for now.
I almost never just sit there. Whenever I have time alone, my eyes and mind are performing an action; whether that is watching something, reading a book or an article, listening to music or a podcast, or writing like I’m doing right now. There is no space for my thoughts to roam free for the sake of it, with no record or without an end goal. They have to have a purpose, it seems, and I detest that. I want to go back to living slow, getting bored, and becoming creative because it was spontaneous.
Boredom is ugly, but it’s a necessary part of the human experience. Years of social media and easy access to entertainment has wrecked my brain that now, even when I’m not on it, I still want that instant gratification. Everything has to feel good in the short term. There is no patience for annoyance in the moment unless there is definite confirmation that joy will come of it. There is no living in uncertainty in the moment without any expectations for what to do. It will take some time and lots of practice plus reflection to unlearn that craving for something done immediately.
And just to be clear: I don’t blame the internet for it. It’s an amalgamation of a factors between self-optimization culture, my own craving to tune out my thoughts when they were very self-destructive, as well as the attention economy. The internet is great if you’re not constantly exposed to other people’s fleeting thoughts like I was for a very long time. As I’m writing this, I’m reminded of a piece I read a few months back titled “Nostalgia is good, actually” that explains two types of nostalgia: reflective and restorative. What I’m doing here, I believe, is reflecting on the past while feeling nostalgic for recreating the good parts about it. So, in my case, that would mean allowing for quiet moments of doing nothing, not always grabbing for the next best thing when the feeling of boredom starts to make itself felt. It’s only that that I’m after.
Or maybe it’s this misguided belief that I can somehow have the good without the bad. Who knows? I won’t, until I try.
PS: I have moved on from a lot of my complaints in this post, fortunately.