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The near extinction of boredom.
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I had to rip myself away from my phone to write today’s journal. I was lying on my bed, scrolling through an endless queue of YouTube Shorts, few of which I genuinely enjoyed. Still, the format of short, sometimes pointless videos has a kind of hypnotic grip on me. I often tell myself that I’ll only watch three more videos and then move on to something else. Even if the next thing on my agenda isn’t work—if I’m excited to watch a movie or read a graphic novel my cousin lent me (thanks for that, started reading it today)—I always break my promise. Three videos turn into thirty, I realise how much time has passed and again I tell myself, only three more. In times of desperation I set an alarm for the next convenient interval (like 18:15 or 21:40), at which point I force myself to put my phone down and walk away. This strategy usually works; it’s what I turned to this evening when the ‘three more’ trick failed a few times. I sometimes set an alarm before I even open the app, reminding myself that I am in charge of how I spend my time and attention rather than being under the algorithm’s thumb. I forget that hundreds of employees work at each of the major social media companies, designing platforms like YouTube Shorts to be as addictive as possible. My personal R&D department isn’t as well funded, but my alarm shenanigans and a couple other tricks help me maintain my sanity for the moment. Thank goodness.
I struggle to negotiate the influence of short, addictive videos as a fully grown adult. Recently, I spent the afternoon babysitting a ten year old; she lay on the living room couch watching YouTube Shorts for four hours (out loud on the TV, yay me). We clearly interact with the platform very differently, she had no apparent desire to stop watching. I occasionally interjected to ask if she was actually enjoying what she watched, the answer to which was usually an unconvincing, half hearted yes. Her expression grew more fatigued and less interested as the videos, in their dozens, continued to demand her attention. Towards the end of the marathon she had sunk so deep into the couch that she had practically become part of the upholstery, her eyes heavy and glossed over. This is familiar behaviour to me: I have binged seasons of TV without pause, I have played hours upon hours of video games. I, too, have left an imprint in my couch from excessive lazing. Something was different in her behaviour, though; the videos seemed to be in control. I am convinced that she stopped having fun after the first hour. It was like she was trapped in chemical limbo, not enjoying or engaging with the media in front of her but reluctant to turn away from the ongoing dopamine hit. I get it, who’d choose to be bored? We choose to be miserable, instead.
I think back to when I was ten, that was fourth grade for me. In class my friends and I would draw faces on our erasers and throw them around or puppet them and make loud, spit-filled sound effects, competing in various duels or events. We named the series of challenges The Rubber Olympics! (we called erasers rubbers). Come to think of it, we may have used the portmanteau, Rubberlympics. I would often sketch in the back of my workbooks, usually in styles stolen from comics and games, proudly showing my handiwork to classmates. When I visited a friend’s house or when they visited mine, video games were always a part of our afternoon—especially if I was having trouble passing a particular level. We also played with real toys. We’d play with LEGO or foam swords, sticks were often the most interesting to my friends and I because of the exciting new risk of possibly injuring one another. I vividly remember one friend’s Jungle Jim (a big wooden playset with ladders, bridges and slides) that became the stage for many a high stakes burglary or fight to the death. Those wooden planks were our castles, our spaceships. I think of all the games, races, stories, worlds that I was apart of because I had no alternative. Yes—we had TV, we had games; somehow those couldn’t keep our attention for too long. We would get bored of PlayStation, too, and figure out what game we could engineer that included throwing pebbles at each other. Imagining is work, playing is work. Rewarding work, but work all the same. I had to sit in class, bored out of my mind, before I figured out that I could draw on my white eraser with blue ballpoint pen. It’s difficult to choose the effort of imagination over the relative ease of social media. It feels to me that social media, these short videos in particular, offer to take your boredom away forever, to relieve you of its burden. But I wonder if I was lucky to be bored
Why do I seperate social media from ‘real’ toys? Is this a generational misunderstanding? Just as my grandparents were careful to limit television and my parents were partially suspect of video games, do think that TikTok rots my brain because I didn’t have access to it growing up? The same phenomenon must have taken place when paperbacks became cheaply available for the public. I imagine it was shocking for those who had lived without access to cheap books to be surrounded by a generation who buried their noses in them. Side note: my uncle lived in London in the early 2000s and remembers a week or two when absolutely everyone on the tube was reading The Da Vinci Code. Now everyone’s on their phone. Is it such a big change? Today, though, no one warns of the effects reading may have on your children. To my knowledge, many of the allegations stating that video games breed violence have also died down. Is my reluctance to engage merely an overreaction to new technology? Perhaps.
It’s easy to argue that companies are fighting for your attention now more than ever before. Just look at the billions of dollars that go into social media marketing and research. But then I remember the hundreds of millions of books, comics, toys, video games and tv series that were fighting for our attention years before the iPhone was in anyone’s hands. Perhaps TikTok isn’t the villain I make it out to be, I’ve found loads of new music through TikTok that I never would have discovered otherwise. But, I do believe that boredom is more difficult to come by for the ten year old girl I babysat than it was for me in 2010. In 2010, no shows were on demand, my phone could only phone, games and toys and books only held so much of my attention. They also weren’t designed the way social media is. Once I bought a book, the publishers received their money; it made no financial difference to them whether I read it once or a thousand times (or not at all, I suppose). Social media runs on ad revenue, and I only see ads as long as I have the app open; the more videos I watch, the more profitable I am. Books want to be on my shelves. TikTok wants my full attention for as long as possible. I suppose the question I’m left with is this: as my boredom disappears, does anything else disappear with it?
*I first saw John Green do this sort of thing, covering a page in little circles; it’s featured on the endpages of The Anthropocene Reviewed. The idea wouldn’t leave me, so I gave it a shot. I got bored about ten minutes in, frustrated at the amount of white space I still had left to cover. In my boredom I didn’t create imagined worlds or play with erasers like I did when I was ten, but I began to decompress a bit. For a while I could think through my day at my own pace, or about nothing in particular. No stress, no plans, just circles.
It’s really hard to be bored—it’s so boring! In an attempt to recapture my youth, I’ll try to make space for boredom this week and see where it leads me. If you enjoyed reading this journal, please share it with a friend.