we stopped being bored
I caught myself reaching for my phone while waiting for the microwave the other day.
There were maybe forty seconds left.
Apparently, this was too long.
I didn't even have anything to check. No message I was waiting for, nothing I particularly wanted to look up. I just unlocked my phone and opened something because there was a small, unoccupied space in my day and I had developed the reflex to fill it.
I started noticing how often I do this.
Waiting for food. Standing in line. Sitting in the car while someone runs inside somewhere. Waiting for a game to load. Even watching a movie sometimes, which feels particularly ridiculous because I am already doing the thing that is supposed to entertain me.
I don't remember always needing this much stimulation.
I remember being bored.
Really bored.
The kind where you would lie upside down on the couch for no discernible reason. Read the ingredients on whatever bottle was within reach. Look through the same drawer you had looked through a hundred times. Stare out the car window and make up rules about which passing objects meant you were winning a game nobody else knew you were playing.
I used to draw houses on paper and decide who lived in every room. I made things on the computer that served absolutely no purpose. I rearranged my bedroom because the afternoon was long and apparently the bed needed to be on the other wall.
Sometimes I did nothing at all.
And I don't remember thinking there was anything unusual about that.
Now doing nothing feels almost deliberate.
You have to choose not to reach for something.
That's strange to me.
We have filled almost every awkward little pause that used to exist in a day. There is always a video to watch, a conversation to check, something to read, something to listen to, something happening somewhere.
Which is wonderful, really.
I don't particularly want to return to sitting in a waiting room reading a six-month-old magazine because it is the only object available to me.
But I wonder if boredom wasn't entirely useless.
Not because it secretly made us more productive. I don't want to turn boredom into another thing we have to optimize.
Maybe it was valuable precisely because nothing was expected from it.
Your mind could go somewhere stupid.
You could notice something irrelevant.
You could have a thought that wasn't prompted by anything you had just watched, read, or been shown.
You could waste twenty minutes and have absolutely nothing to show for it.
I think that's the part I miss.
Not boredom itself.
Just having little pieces of the day that belonged to nothing.
And maybe we didn't need to fill all of them.