Some new research from the University of Bath suggests that people who turn to social media to escape from superficial boredom are unwittingly preventing themselves from progressing to a state of profound boredom, which may open the door to more creative and meaningful activities.
I can’t help but think that, ultimately, people entertained themselves that – while not inherently more productive than browsing social media – were often social activities that helped to form bonds with friends, family, and community. Singing, for example, or telling each other stories, or inventing card or dice games.
If we waved a magic wand and removed casual social media usage, I don’t know if it would cause people to get together again. It might, but we’ve grown quite accustomed to being alone in our own little spheres often.
In the before times, we used to just go to each other’s houses. Ride your bike over and dump it on the front lawn. Often you didn’t even knock. Just walk in and be like “Hi Steve” and we’d just lay about. Sit there and read the same comic book or game magazine.
Silence wasn’t a sin. It was often the base state of things. You accepted boredom/being inert. Occasionally, one of us would have a thought and share it. Maybe put a mixtape on or something. Maybe another friend would gather or we’d pick up and go to someone else or somewhere else. Play around in the woods or just ride our bikes as far as we could go. There wasn’t a goal, it was more explorative. You’d run into people doing the same thing and your groups would merge or keep on rolling like tumbleweeds.
Everything was passive. Time was longer. Things happened, or they didn’t and you were ok with that. Information was rare. Media was rare. You had to seek physical things to see the rumored amazing movies or C-90 cassettes. It was a thing for one of your friends to find a new album from the group you loved in a bin in a record store and you’d all gather around and freak out over the album.
Culture had time to exist. Each generation decorated their existence with the filigree of music and art and clothes and so on that they used to identify themselves, lasting for decades instead of a single 24hour media cycle (or less). That filigree was difficult to find and so we cherished it far more. T-shirts, hippy shops, that old pair of jeans from your uncle that got passed down, band posters from that one show you went to and never stopped talking about. It was all these onetime event things that held memories or importance somehow.
It was not a golden era, it just was. There were downsides to all of this, like any other time. But I’d love to have some of that profound boredom reclaimed by society. In the grand scheme of history, technology is new to us still and we haven’t defined the culture boundaries around it yet. But we do need them, very very badly.
I think it’s worth clarifying that this isn’t a fawning recount of the times gone by. It’s simply drawing a contrast between the culture of impulse and immediacy that we have now vs. then. Before the internet, there was still a culture that was built on the backs of other cultures and technologies- but the development of mobile, is our moon landing event. It shifted society, norms, and human behavior profoundly.
Some said that TV was just as addicting/brain melting, which is absolutely true. The difference here is that the TV was a fixed object with fixed programming and schedules. Now, the TV is mobile—in your pocket at all times. It’s there when you wake up, it’s there when you go to sleep. It’s an ever present object in every single life and it’s highly contoured to your particular psychology. And of course, TV didn’t go away. Quite the opposite.
I think there’s more to it than just boredom. As kids, we were allowed and encouraged to explore. It was normal for parents to not know exactly where their kids were and just expect them home by a certain time. They could and would often tell me to just go outside because there wasn’t an expectation that they needed to watch everything I did.
That feeling of independence was exciting. By 7, I could go anywhere on my block. At 10, I could roam the neighborhood. By the time I was 12, they gave me pretty much free rein to go where I pleased, which meant I didn’t need to wait until I could get a ride from an adult to see my friends. These days, the only independent exploring many kids get to do is virtual. You almost never see kids unsupervised and if they are the first question people ask, is where are the parents?
Video games and social media are more engrossing than what we had as kids, but I think the bigger issue is that kids are so much more isolated and restricted. We blame screens rather than the fact that we, as adults, have made it so much harder for them to socialise in person. As a kid, I knew all the kids in my neighborhood because through that exploration we naturally sought each other out and socialised. They weren’t my best friends or anything. We’d barely even interact at school, but that didn’t stop us from knocking on each other’s doors and asking if they could come outside to play.
I never heard the word ‘playdate’ until I was an adult. Seeing friends wasn’t a special ‘event’. We were just ‘going over to so-and-so’s house. It was usually spontaneous, and it didn’t involve any planned activities. Often it involved tagging along to whatever errands their family did that day. It wasn’t unusual to be expected to help with whatever chores my friends were given. I rarely had an entire weekend where I didn’t see a friend. Today, if kids can’t get together under optimal circumstances, it just doesn’t happen. We’ve shifted from making getting together the priority and what we’re doing being secondary to making what we’re doing be important and getting together is taking a back seat.
I would love to drop today’s teenager, with all their Facebook, BlockChain, and Instant Messaging knowledge back into different time periods to see how they would cope. We would see them pressing the numbers on a rotary dial phone; struggle to tune a SW radio to the World Service, or MW for Radio Caroline; 2 or 3 channels of TV would not entertain them; and the closest Internet experience they could have would be as 2400Baud dial-up connection to a BBS.
Maybe in this world, they would just go outside and play!