I believe smartphones have completely destroyed most people’s ability to be bored. Whenever anyone has an opportunity for boredom, they pick up their phone.
Oftentimes it has even moved up the priority above the bottom — boredom — and even taken precedence over other leisure activities like reading, TV, or just sitting and talking. For many, it’s even close to the top, trumping work and other responsibilities. So boredom certainly stands no chance.
If people actually try and sit with just their thoughts, staring out into nature or the walls of their home, they become anxious, like an addict that can’t get their fix.
I appreciate many of the modern conveniences that come with smartphones, but I often miss the days before them.
I think it’s basically a crime against children and humanity for parents to put an iPad (flashing meaningless drivel) in front of their children while pushing them through a supermarket, or a park, or in a restaurant. It baffles me how frequently I see this done nowadays, like children need a constant flashing distraction to keep them from asking questions or being bored. I want to smash every iPad I see used like this. Let children be bored and have their own thoughts. It’s not painful for a child to have to sit in a trolley or a stroller while they’ve nothing to do. In a restaurant they might even learn language and ideas from the adult conversation no matter their age. In my eyes, if you’re a parent who does this, it’s a parenting fail particularly given you managed to get through your own childhood without the same.
My opinion on this topic, while perhaps not as strong as yours, is similar.
I think we inadvertantly created a similar dependence in our daughter, albeit with books rather than electronics.
She is 10 now and, aside from some exposure at school, she has never been allowed personal use of computers and the various computer-like devices we have today.
We did reading curriculum at home between 4 and 5. By 6 she was reading on her own for pleasure.
Today the child walks from room to room in the house with a book. Car rides without a book are accompanied with groans and anger. Any situation where boredom could set in is much worse if she doesn't have a book. She has to be specifically prodded not to read in order to get ready for school, etc, in a timely fashion.
I don't wish we'd done anything differently, but when she does eventually have access to electronics I fear she is going to transfer her extreme book "dependency" to electronics easily.
Because rising a child is genuine hard. And it's only getting harder everyday. The cities are crowded. People are less tolerant to noisy children. If your parenting is not what people expect they will judge you on social media (instead of a very small social circle like before). Many once common parenting practices are literal crime now. And housing and school are only getting more expensive.
The most tolerable alternative is simply not to have children, and it will just be more and more common.
> In a restaurant they might even learn language and ideas from the adult conversation
Their parents will have their phone in hand while pushing the discussions.
On the general point: I remember a time smaller kids couldn't get into most restaurants at all because they would disturb the atmosphere (and I'm sure there's still many shops that won't allow kids).
Also people are way more susceptible to kids being noisy. It might be because exposure to kids has been so low for the majority of adults, but parents will get an utter amount of flack for letting their kid cry or shout and not immediately cater to them.
It's hard to have it both ways, our modern society will need to be more open to kid noise and disturbance if we want parents to just let the kids be kids.
Sometimes the days are long, kid is driving you up a wall and the iPad just…works
My kid isn’t that old yet but partner and I have agreed no screens for first 15 mo at least. So anytime she’s watching TV we turn him away because he’s definitely interested!
Completely agree. The other thing I've noticed is that this "lack of boredom" has really killed my creativity. Phone use (especially scrolling, scrolling, scrolling) gets my brain stuck in repeated patterns that is the antithesis of creativity.
I really wonder what the endgame of all this is. The "attention addiction" enabled by smartphones, and all the apps that are designed by some of the smartest people on the planet whose sole incentive is to keep you addicted, is IMO one of the most detrimental impacts by tech on human happiness in the past 100 years.
My middle ground for this is walking. It gives me enough input to suppress my habit of entertaining myself using a smartphone, and it also makes staring at a screen quite impractical. But it gives me enough room to just process my thoughts.
I think it’s not just addiction but anxiety of being alone with one’s thoughts.
I love doing long solo bicycle rides. Just heading out and spending whole day riding by myself. Over the years, I bumped into many people who find such trips scary. Scared of thoughts that could pop up. Some said they could do that with headphones and music, but silence was no go.
Man, that's grim. I just think these people think the moment they go out alone with their thoughts, the first one is something real morbid: Maybe I should kill myself! Slow down buddy, we were just going on a walk alone.
Same here with the rides. Yesterday I rode 50 miles by myself for the first time in a while, and was impressed with the amount of things going on in my life that I just hadn’t thought about.
All of my best ideas come on the bike or in the shower.
One of my favorite times to practice not looking at my phone is when I'm waiting for something outside of my home. Waiting for a coffee at the cafe? Stare off into space, not at my phone.
I find the only time this is difficult is if I'm in a crowded area, and I'm anxiously concerned that I don't appear to be staring at a person like some creep. Then I feel one of my only options is to stare at a phone. But I also don't have a lot of entertaining apps on my phone so maybe I'll check the weather eight or nine times.
I wonder if this "stay in the way of it and let it hit you like a track..." piece is his wording.
Three years ago I was really grieving lost relationship, floating (not drowning) in sadness... and I found this piece of electronic music by San and Tac [0] with these words placed in the background. I would listen to this song and one day I realized, walking in a park, that I could really let it in. And I did... at it was beautiful...
I find any form of exercise extremely boring. I go on these multi-hour bike rides which are borderline untolerably boring to me, especially at night. They do seem to have the side effects of stimulating the thoughts, reducing stress and better sleep, but to me it's just as bad as staring at the wall for a few hours, so a pretty big artificial effort.
As an avid long distance cyclist, I talked to multiple people from, let’s say, conventional meditation community. All of them agreed that solo cycling is damn close to meditation if not the same. Especially road cycling, mountain biking is a different beast. On calm backroads, of course.
Personally wall-style meditation is damn hard. But cycling makes it doable. My routine is to focus on cycling for the first hour or so. Which is also needed to get away from the city and suburb traffic. By the time I’m far away there’s enough endorphins and whatnot in the system to help and then sliding into my own deep thoughts is pretty easy. For some time till physical exhaustion kicks in.
What I find crucial is pre-planned route and having already ridden it. No need for checking the map, no fear of missing a turn without navigation and no new sights to stare at.
And pace is important. Slow & steady. Not too slow. Zone 3 is perfect IMO.
I agree to an extent. When I was younger I wanted to read anything over being bored. Sitting on the toilet would lead me to read the toilet perfume spray ingredients many times over.
My psychology professor used to say that boredom is very important state for kids. They should experience it on a regular basis, because it is the state when people become themselves. It is not external events drive their existence, nor habits or conditional reflexes, but they need to think of something to deal with boredom. With this line of thought boredom becomes a driver for a development of a personality.
> I do get movitated [sic] by listening to other people now but I don't really NEED to do that. I could just lock myself away for days and get inspired by myself. That's my favorite way to do it. It's more like a pure form of motivation when it's all on your own. But you have to wait until you're really bored and you've got nothing to do. That's when it comes out. That's when I reckon it gets good.
I don’t mean to be too negative here, but the author sat one time for twenty minutes in boredom and now is making a prescription that we should all spend more time in boredom.
In my opinion, I don’t even think they’re wrong in their prescription. But seriously think about that. One “walling”. Universal prescription. Hmm.
That’s more or less what most people did a century and change ago every day. Being bored is somewhat of a lost art nowadays. Good or bad I’m not sure but I definitely feel the tug of the smartphone when faced with boredom.
I once spent a week doing this, deliberate boredom. I only permitted myself stimuli in the form of work, and any chores I might get the urge to do (I do not usually have the slightest urge to do chores). Besides that, I sat around waiting for food or sleep.
I remember making the decision, and going through with it, but somewhat unsettlingly I do not remember hardly anything from the week itself. Maybe that is because there are no memorable moments on which to look back on.
What I found with my boring time is that I’d either spend it daydreaming or in a contemplative state. The greatest benefits is that it feels like taking a quick rest. Maybe my brain are not reacting to any stimulus? But yeah, not everything needs to be memorable and fewer things need to be captured.
> I believe smartphones have completely destroyed most people’s ability to be bored
I used to teach and consult on various forms of emergency preparedness and wilderness survival. It would amaze me at how people getting disconnected from their phones, would put extra stressors on them when I was training them.
When in the outdoors, the very first thing I would do, was to take each student's cell phone from them and tell them "you have no cell service in this situation, else rescue could be here in a few hours". That in itself would bring on extra stress into their training for the whole weekend.
When I would consult with families on preparedness in the home, the first thing I would do is cut off their internet connection and take their cell phones. It amazed me on how they could not find anything to do with their new found boredom.
Snippet from one of my documents - "... many people practice shelters, fire making, water procurement and are really good at these skills. But one should practice boredom,
putting themselves in uncomfortable controlled situations, and/or practicing "embracing the suck". Practicing a physical skill for an hour and then walking back
into your comfortable home is nice, but what did you really learn? "
Not even that. A deck of cards, checkers or chess, or even a battery powered AM/FM radio (which one should have to receive news and information in the event of a worse case scenario).
long time ago, when i was living in.. oz.. for few years, the boredom thing came up to me a few times. And there are few phases.. a bit like those about accepting death in "All that jazz" movie.. So here my take and speculation.. The vast empty wilderness spaces are best for total boredom. Though be careful, survival there is not boredom. But not that difficult for few days. Keep some civilization comforts (pillow? water? repellents? ..) and Just stay there, doing nothing. Don't turn on phones or radio or whatever civilization-strings-attaching-you-back.
The state that your mind will get after such thing, is like.. you go beyond boredom. Stop caring about anything unimportant to-real-you. Newz? whuts-dat? Anxiety? none.
So.. if you go for a easy but near-unescapable longer boredom - e.g. rent a floating house, on the lazy river, going with 5km/h (and no way to propel it faster), for a week upstream.. and another week back.. mmmm.
i did not make it. did not find time, courage, you-name-it, and now oz isn't a country that i would go again. But Maybe one day, maybe another place..
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Oftentimes it has even moved up the priority above the bottom — boredom — and even taken precedence over other leisure activities like reading, TV, or just sitting and talking. For many, it’s even close to the top, trumping work and other responsibilities. So boredom certainly stands no chance.
If people actually try and sit with just their thoughts, staring out into nature or the walls of their home, they become anxious, like an addict that can’t get their fix.
I appreciate many of the modern conveniences that come with smartphones, but I often miss the days before them.
I think we inadvertantly created a similar dependence in our daughter, albeit with books rather than electronics.
She is 10 now and, aside from some exposure at school, she has never been allowed personal use of computers and the various computer-like devices we have today.
We did reading curriculum at home between 4 and 5. By 6 she was reading on her own for pleasure.
Today the child walks from room to room in the house with a book. Car rides without a book are accompanied with groans and anger. Any situation where boredom could set in is much worse if she doesn't have a book. She has to be specifically prodded not to read in order to get ready for school, etc, in a timely fashion.
I don't wish we'd done anything differently, but when she does eventually have access to electronics I fear she is going to transfer her extreme book "dependency" to electronics easily.
The most tolerable alternative is simply not to have children, and it will just be more and more common.
Their parents will have their phone in hand while pushing the discussions.
On the general point: I remember a time smaller kids couldn't get into most restaurants at all because they would disturb the atmosphere (and I'm sure there's still many shops that won't allow kids).
Also people are way more susceptible to kids being noisy. It might be because exposure to kids has been so low for the majority of adults, but parents will get an utter amount of flack for letting their kid cry or shout and not immediately cater to them.
It's hard to have it both ways, our modern society will need to be more open to kid noise and disturbance if we want parents to just let the kids be kids.
Sometimes the days are long, kid is driving you up a wall and the iPad just…works
My kid isn’t that old yet but partner and I have agreed no screens for first 15 mo at least. So anytime she’s watching TV we turn him away because he’s definitely interested!
Now you can hear a groan from nearby tables whenever you take your family to a plane or restaurant
I really wonder what the endgame of all this is. The "attention addiction" enabled by smartphones, and all the apps that are designed by some of the smartest people on the planet whose sole incentive is to keep you addicted, is IMO one of the most detrimental impacts by tech on human happiness in the past 100 years.
When the wife takes over driving duties (we work in two-hour shifts) I jot down the ideas that came to me.
(But in fact, phones are boring to me. It's my laptop that robs me of my boredom when at home.)
I love doing long solo bicycle rides. Just heading out and spending whole day riding by myself. Over the years, I bumped into many people who find such trips scary. Scared of thoughts that could pop up. Some said they could do that with headphones and music, but silence was no go.
All of my best ideas come on the bike or in the shower.
They will come and sit between your eyes and the screen until you pet them. I can now put the phone away and spend time with my cat and my thoughts.
I find the only time this is difficult is if I'm in a crowded area, and I'm anxiously concerned that I don't appear to be staring at a person like some creep. Then I feel one of my only options is to stare at a phone. But I also don't have a lot of entertaining apps on my phone so maybe I'll check the weather eight or nine times.
Three years ago I was really grieving lost relationship, floating (not drowning) in sadness... and I found this piece of electronic music by San and Tac [0] with these words placed in the background. I would listen to this song and one day I realized, walking in a park, that I could really let it in. And I did... at it was beautiful...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6Y2BnKy8Eg
Love & Stillness
Personally wall-style meditation is damn hard. But cycling makes it doable. My routine is to focus on cycling for the first hour or so. Which is also needed to get away from the city and suburb traffic. By the time I’m far away there’s enough endorphins and whatnot in the system to help and then sliding into my own deep thoughts is pretty easy. For some time till physical exhaustion kicks in.
What I find crucial is pre-planned route and having already ridden it. No need for checking the map, no fear of missing a turn without navigation and no new sights to stare at.
And pace is important. Slow & steady. Not too slow. Zone 3 is perfect IMO.
Deleted Comment
> I do get movitated [sic] by listening to other people now but I don't really NEED to do that. I could just lock myself away for days and get inspired by myself. That's my favorite way to do it. It's more like a pure form of motivation when it's all on your own. But you have to wait until you're really bored and you've got nothing to do. That's when it comes out. That's when I reckon it gets good.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080611121559/http://www.furiou...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eRvfxWRi6qQ
In my opinion, I don’t even think they’re wrong in their prescription. But seriously think about that. One “walling”. Universal prescription. Hmm.
I remember making the decision, and going through with it, but somewhat unsettlingly I do not remember hardly anything from the week itself. Maybe that is because there are no memorable moments on which to look back on.
I used to teach and consult on various forms of emergency preparedness and wilderness survival. It would amaze me at how people getting disconnected from their phones, would put extra stressors on them when I was training them.
When in the outdoors, the very first thing I would do, was to take each student's cell phone from them and tell them "you have no cell service in this situation, else rescue could be here in a few hours". That in itself would bring on extra stress into their training for the whole weekend.
When I would consult with families on preparedness in the home, the first thing I would do is cut off their internet connection and take their cell phones. It amazed me on how they could not find anything to do with their new found boredom.
Snippet from one of my documents - "... many people practice shelters, fire making, water procurement and are really good at these skills. But one should practice boredom, putting themselves in uncomfortable controlled situations, and/or practicing "embracing the suck". Practicing a physical skill for an hour and then walking back into your comfortable home is nice, but what did you really learn? "
The state that your mind will get after such thing, is like.. you go beyond boredom. Stop caring about anything unimportant to-real-you. Newz? whuts-dat? Anxiety? none.
So.. if you go for a easy but near-unescapable longer boredom - e.g. rent a floating house, on the lazy river, going with 5km/h (and no way to propel it faster), for a week upstream.. and another week back.. mmmm.
i did not make it. did not find time, courage, you-name-it, and now oz isn't a country that i would go again. But Maybe one day, maybe another place..
Deleted Comment