O blessed boredom

A  friend whom I’ll call Lynn just came back from the beach a few weeks ago and wrote in her blog that, far from being refreshed by the weekend of sun and spray, she was driven to a fit of anxiety. The reason? Far away from her computer and TV, she felt cut off from the world and wondered, as she sat on the beach with the water lapping her toes, what was going in the world, what her friends were up to, what was happening on her favorite TV shows. Far away from her main sources of media stimuli, she realized how dependent she had become on being connected. At the end of the weekend vacation, her nerves were more frayed than they were before.

After I read her post, I felt just a little jealous, and the teacher in me went into harangue mode. “How dare you not have fun, young woman? Me, I haven’t been to the beach in a year. I’d kill to be able to go before the summer ends. But you, you ungrateful wretch, you go there, sit your behind on the fine sand, let your feet feel the cool seawater, and you can’t handle it?” (Thankfully, the scold within me doesn’t get out much to flex his muscles. A bathroom break and a drink of water usually does the trick.)

Sure enough, soon after reading Lynn’s blog I came upon this article from the Boston Globe titled “The Joy of Boredom” (March 9, 2008) by Carolyn Y. Johnson. It seems Lynn isn’t alone in her inability to disconnect. Johnson writes, “Perhaps nothing illuminates the speed of social change better than the new fear of disconnection... ‘There is this hyper-anxiety over feeling lonely or disconnected,’ said Kathleen Cumiskey, a professor of psychology and women’s studies at the College of Staten Island who says her stepdaughter sleeps with her cellphone at arm’s length and considers turning the device off unthinkable. ‘Our society is perpetually anxious, and a way to alleviate the anxiety is to delve into something that’s very within our control, pleasurable, and fun... It feels like it has all the makings of addiction.’”

A society perpetually anxious to the point of addiction — doesn’t Lynn’s anxiety sound like a withdrawal symptom? How have things come to this pass? Well, our love for our high-tech devices is at least partly to blame. We are now able to fill every single moment of our lives with something to do. “Increasingly,” Johnson says, “empty moments are being saturated with productivity, communication, and the digital distractions offered by an ever-expanding array of slick mobile devices. A few years ago, cellphone maker Motorola even began using the word ‘microboredom’ to describe the ever-smaller slices of free time from which new mobile technology offers an escape. ‘Mobisodes,’ two-minute long television episodes of everything from Lost to Prison Break made for the cellphone screen, are perfectly tailored for the microbored. Cellphone games are often designed to last just minutes — simple, snack-sized diversions like Snake, solitaire, and Tetris. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook turn every mundane moment between activities into a chance to broadcast feelings and thoughts; even if it is just to triple-tap a keypad with the words ‘I am bored.’”

There you have it. Those vacant moments that we used to have — say, lining up at the supermarket or at the bank, walking from one building or room to the next, waiting for our partner to come back from the restroom — can now be filled with activity. We can text friends, listen to music, or watch videos on our devices. We never have to suffer even a moment of “microboredom.”

Which raises the question: is it a good thing to always have something to do? Is it so great to always have some kind of stimulation, for our eyes, ears, and mind, ready at your fingertips? Probably not. Those empty moments that can seem scary, because they frighten us with their dullness, those times when we disconnect, are also the moments when we can connect to something else: ourselves. “We are most human when we feel dull,” Johnson writes. “Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life’s greatest luxuries... To be bored is to stop reacting to the external world, and to explore the internal one. It is in these times of reflection that people often discover something new...  Granted, many people emerge from boredom feeling that they have accomplished nothing. But is accomplishment really the point of life?”

Lynn’s anxiety was particularly striking to me because it occurred during a vacation, a stretch of time that is designed precisely to be empty. You don’t go on a vacation in hopes of accomplishing something. (Unless you’re the kind of person whose idea of a vacation is touring 15 European cities in 18 days. I’ve never understood those trips. How can you take in so much in so little time? So if you’re one of them, stay away from me.)

My ideal vacation spot, and thankfully my wife’s too, is a quiet beach (not one where peddlers pass by hawking their wares every two minutes) where you can spend the day sitting quietly with a book, with each other, with yourself. And perhaps that’s one thing we have a hard time doing: being with ourselves.

“Technology seems to offer...  a wide array of distractions that offer the boon of connection,” Johnson writes, “but at a cost.” One cost is being, well, distracted. How many times have you wondered (just as I have), as you browsed a web site or watched a video or listened to a new CD, that there’s something else you would rather be doing, some other site you should be going to, someone else’s music you should be playing, somewhere else you should be?

And really, how much are we accomplishing in this flurry of activity? Is all this just busywork meant to distract us from things we would rather not deal with? Perhaps Samuel Beckett got it right. In his most famous work, Waiting for Godot, two tramps, Didi and Gogo, wait in some indistinct wasteland for someone named Godot who never shows up. They feel bored and anxious while waiting. So every once in a while they find something interesting to do and go at it for a while, then say, “Well, that passed the time, didn’t it?”

Maybe we are more like those two pitiful souls trapped in limbo than we care to admit, stuck in some strange place waiting for something that we don’t understand, concerned most of all with filling up the moments so they don’t bore us. Perhaps that’s all we really want to do, stave off boredom. We’re here on earth temporarily, passing the time. Then one day, it’s time to go.

* * *

Comments are welcome at dogberry.exie@gmail.com. Or visit my blog at http://dogberryexie.blogspot.com.