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<\/a><\/p>\nAs I think I\u2019ve said here, when our children were growing up, I did not allow them to say the \u201cB-word.\u201d\u00a0 That is, \u201cbored.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not that I censored the word, but whenever I heard one of them complain, \u201cI\u2019m bored,\u201d I\u2019d make them pay.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I\u2019d give them a theological lecture, citing G. K. Chesterton on how nothing in creation is boring in itself, but we just need to approach it in the right way.\u00a0 I\u2019d make them listen to me reading from Heretics<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly required than a defense of bores. When Byron divided humanity into the bores and bored, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he counted himself. The bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness, may, in some sense, have proved himself poetical. The bored has certainly proved himself prosaic.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cLife seems longer,\u201d Dunbar concluded,\u00a0 \u201cif it\u2019s filled with periods of boredom and discomfort.\u201d\u00a0 Thus,\u00a0\u201cDunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly. He had figured out that a single hour on the skeet-shooting range with people like Havermeyer and Appleby could be worth as much as eleven-times-seventeen years.\u201d<\/p>\n Sometimes I\u2019d come back with an annoying remark:\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m bored.\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019d reply, \u201cJust think!\u201d\u00a0 \u201cThink about what?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cI don\u2019t care, just think!\u201d<\/p>\n Once again, my curmudgeonly rants are confirmed by modern science.<\/p>\n Christine Rosen\u00a0 has written a piece for the After Babel<\/a> substack entitled On The Death of Daydreaming<\/a> with the deck, \u201cWhat we lose when phones take away boredom and interstitial time.\u201d<\/p>\n Drawing from her book The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World<\/a>, Rosen notes that people today have trouble handling \u201cinterstitial time\u201d\u2013the moments between<\/em> the times when we are doing something specific.\u00a0 For example, the time we spend driving from one place to another, waiting for an appointment, riding an elevator, being between tasks.\u00a0 Today, we feel like we need to \u201cfill\u201d those times. We do so\u00a0 by means of our phones\u2013playing a game, checking email,\u00a0 scrolling through the news, catching up with social media.\u00a0 Rosen has noticed that many drivers at stoplights cannot even wait until the light changes without getting on their phones.<\/p>\n We are losing the ability to wait, the virtue of patience, and the pleasures of anticipation. And we have stopped doing what people used to do:\u00a0 daydreaming, letting the mind wander, engaging in aimless reverie.\u00a0 \u201cJust thinking.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0But at least we aren\u2019t bored.<\/p>\n Rosen begins her essay,<\/p>\n Can you remember the last time you daydreamed? Or coped with boredom without reaching for your phone? Before the era of mobile technology, most of us had no choice but to wait without stimulation, and often, that meant being bored.<\/p>\n But today we need never be bored. We have an indefatigable boredom-killing machine: the smartphone. No matter how brief our wait, the smartphone promises an alleviation for our suffering.<\/p>\n Yet the smartphone\u2019s triumph over boredom might prove a Pyrrhic victory. As Jonathan Haidt showed in\u00a0The Anxious Generation<\/em>, the rapid adoption of smartphones and social media, particularly by the young, led to many negative unintended consequences such as increased rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and self-harm. So, too, our efforts to vanquish boredom have had deleterious impacts such as on our ability to let our minds wander, to cultivate patience, and to experience anticipation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It turns out, as she shows, we need<\/em> to daydream and to let our minds wander.\u00a0 We even need to be bored sometimes.\u00a0 She quotes Freud: \u201cFor a living organism, protection against stimuli is an almost more important function than the reception of stimuli.\u201d\u00a0 And yet, we try to keep ourselves stimulated all the time.<\/em><\/p>\n She also cites contemporary research about the importance of letting our minds wander, whether in daydreaming or just letting our thoughts go where they will:<\/p>\n Researchers have found numerous positive effects of a wandering mind. Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman summarized<\/a>\u00a0them:<\/p>\n \u201cself-awareness, creative incubation, improvisation and evaluation, memory consolidation, autobiographical planning, goal driven thought, future planning, retrieval of deeply personal memories, reflective consideration of the meaning of events and experiences, simulating the perspective of another person, evaluating the implications of self and others\u2019 emotional reactions, moral reasoning, and reflective compassion.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Daydreaming exercises an important power of our minds\u2013namely, the imagination, the ability to think not just in abstractions but to conjure up images in our minds, whether memories, possibilities in the future, or sheer fantasies.\u00a0 (That\u2019s my contribution, not Rosen\u2019s.\u00a0 See my book with Matt Ristuccia, Imagination Redeemed<\/a> for more on this.)<\/p>\n Rosen does say these faculties are important in the development of children. \u201cParents have a crucial role to play in teaching children how to deal with boredom, and it can be as easy and as old-school as simply telling them: \u2018Go outside and play.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 (How about reading Chesterton or Catch-22<\/em> to them or telling them to \u201cjust think\u201d?\u00a0 Such harassment always made my children want<\/em> to go out and play!)<\/p>\n Children are extraordinarily creative when given the space and time to indulge their wandering minds, but this often requires first overcoming the immediate challenge of handling their frustration and boredom. Placing the burden of alleviating one\u2019s boredom back on a child isn\u2019t a punishment; it\u2019s an opportunity for them to find creative solutions to their discomfort.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Rosen also urges parents to teach by example.\u00a0 When children see their parents checking their phones during a red light, they will learn to do the same. We adults have much to unlearn.\u00a0 She makes a suggestion:<\/p>\n Try this experiment: For one day, do not pick up your smartphone during small breaks in your routine, such as waiting for the train, or sitting in your car at a stoplight. If you find yourself in a doctor\u2019s waiting room, or waiting for a friend at a restaurant, don\u2019t pick up your phone to fill those few minutes. Pay attention to what is around you, or let your mind wander.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n She concludes, \u201ca bit of boredom is good for us, so the next time you have a minute to spare, instead of reaching for your phone, be rebellious: Daydream.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n