On Being Bored
My children sometimes used to complain, “Daddy, I’m bored.” It drove me nuts. I always have more to do than I can do—important grown-up work, work that has to get done—and here I’m supposed to stop and entertain a bored child? I wasn’t always good about it.
Now, in the absence of an attentive, patient, playful parent, there’s the cell phone. It’s always there, and with even the slightest possibility of impending boredom out it comes. It seems painful somehow to see a young teen hunched over the cell in something like a self-constructed womb of oblivion to everything around her. With this technology we’re all more interconnected in wider networks of instantaneous communication, true; but at the same time we’re less connected to ourselves and to each other in our immediate time and place. It’s a diversion. Seeking diversion from impending boredom is quite different from actively finding something to do.
^ ^ ^ ^
I think about my own childhood. Laugh if you will about the “Senior Citizen” reminiscing about “The Good Old Days,” but I really can’t remember ever being bored as a child.
I was born in Denver, Colorado, November 11, 1939, and lived there until I was 11 years old when we moved to Gainesville, Florida for a year, and then to Norman, Oklahoma where I spent my teenage and early college years. I have two sisters, one a year and a half younger, the other four and a half years younger. Our father was an architect, our mother a housewife—both what you’d have to call intellectual. They valued reading, writing, conversation.
In Denver, when I was old enough I went to school. I did not like it. No one drove us. We walked, which provided opportunities for lingering, loitering, and even playing hooky. We also were allowed to roam freely throughout the neighborhood in our free time, playing in the vacant lots with other children or by ourselves. We lived not far from the Denver City Park, which held a premier museum of natural history. Entrance was free. I loved to roam by myself or with my sisters through the adjacent golf course and park, and then wander through the museum gazing for hours at the exhibits of everything from insects to dinosaurs from around the world. Looking back, I’m not quite sure how I got away with it, but I often “played hooky” to do that. (I wasn’t good in school; maybe the teachers didn’t miss me much.)
We spent a month or more each summer “up in the mountains,” on property outside of Denver that our family owned—basically, a log house on twenty mountainous forested acres. Our grandmother and great aunt lived there year ’round, for as long as they could. We loved spending time with them. Our parents pretty much left us on our own except at meal-times and bed-time, but Grandma Nana especially gave us special kinds of adult attention. The unpaved road fronting the property had scattered houses every quarter-mile or so, some with children about our age, so when we were there in the summer we had other kids to play with during the days and evenings. We played the usual games: “kick-the-can,” “red-rover, red-rover,” “hide-and-seek.” On rainy days we played card games, pick-up-sticks, or just read.
As in Denver, maybe more so, I was often happy to be alone. I remember especially how I used to get up before anyone else and go out on the small flagstone area by the back door of the house. It was sheltered by a lean-to structure, but faced east so the rising sun shown directly in. I watched the wasps and other insects beginning to stir, listened to the birds and the wind in the pines, and just sensed the living mountains around me while the early sun cut through the chilly early morning air and warmed my skin.
Dinners were times for the family to gather together every day. They had a definite beginning and ending, and were times for conversation—often debate and argument, which we learned early-on not to take personally. At bedtime, we gathered around and our father read to us from King Arthur, The Secret Garden, Tarzan, Heidi, books and stories by Kipling, and so on. But otherwise all day we were largely on our own. I didn’t expect our parents to amuse me or drive me places—they had their world and work, and I had mine. There were no cell phones or computers. We didn’t have TV until I was well into my teens, and the notion of watching TV while we ate never even came up. Movies were a special treat. I had feet, and quite early a bicycle, to get me around.
It all sounds ideal, but of course it wasn’t in many respects. I could paint you a whole other picture. Especially, I didn’t adapt well to school, which was a trial for me, my parents (especially my mother), and the teachers. We experienced family quarrels. Our parents loved us, but weren’t good at showing it directly. There was more, but it’s not relevant here.
The point is that, looking back, these aspects I’m relating were good. With no points of comparison, we just took them for granted at the time. Compared to today’s world we had an astonishing amount of freedom and “alone-time.” We used it to play—to engage with our immediate environment and each other in real time—and we weren’t bored, ever.
^ ^ ^ ^
What has changed? You can’t just blame cell phones and the internet, because already my own children experienced boredom in the 1970s and ’80s. Boredom is the effect of a kind of disconnection and paralysis. Someone (whatever their age) who is present in their moment, who experiences autonomy and some degree of freedom, who can act, who has friends to play with will not be bored. No one should suffer boredom, and I feel badly that could not have given my children the resources they needed not to be bored. It’s a waste of time, of life—unless it becomes the ground for discovering what you really want to do and acting on that discovery. Maybe my own feeling of helplessness in the face of others’ boredom is what really irritated me about it.
But while I might have done better, boredom in North American life points to bigger problems than just my own failings. Is the alleged break-down of civic life in North America that Putnam wrote about in Bowling Alone partly to blame? Maybe the way that digital media cuts into face-to-face communication is part of it too?
Perhaps the squeezing of the middle-class requiring both parents to work, and all that that means for quality “family time,” plays a role? We live in a world that seems both much more constrained, and more out of control, than when I was young. In that sense, could boredom among young people be paradoxically related to the spectre of growing violence and mass shooting in America? Is it all of the above?
^ ^ ^ ^
Today there’s a whole other world of expectations and possibilities (or their lack). Maybe a lot of it comes down to fear. Parents have less trust in their children and the world they are in. Is it really a more dangerous world, or is it just that TV collects and projects the dangers daily into our living rooms? Today parents constrain their children, shepherd them here and there, drive them to school and to organized activities. I’ve seen it. No wonder they’re bored. Then to stave off the boredom we give them expensive gadgets: the TV and X-Box, cell phone and tablet—and they’re still bored. I’m sure that’s not the whole story, but it also is part of it.
Like so many things in today’s world, it’s all good for the GNP but not for our human selves, nor for the environment. It’s complicated, and it would be good to understand it better.