Get Bored

I hear this as advice now.

Step away from devices. Set aside your screens. Embrace boredom like the good old days.

What was boredom like before all the tech? Play a little word association with yourself.

Remember how antsy everyone was?

Hanging out with friends and someone saying, "What do you wanna do?

Then another person in the friend group saying, "I dunno. What do you feel like doing?"

Eventually, someone would offer an idea. Maybe, "Why don't we go to Blockbuster and find something to watch?"

Inevitably, there was that one friend who, regardless of the activity suggestion pitched would say, "Ugh, [insert activity] really?" But then of course they would not offer a suggestion for something to do. And so everyone continues awkwardly loafing around waiting for some "solution" to lift the burden of boredom.

Ok, so, what did we learn? For one thing, most of us were super bad at being bored. This was adolescence, mind you.

I don't think it would be much better as an adult without the intention of leaning in to the boredom on purpose.

Mind wandering is mixed bag. Research indicates that excessive mind wandering is correlated with negative mental health outcomes. On the other hand, it's useful as a writer. It's useful for coming up with ideas and drawing connections between unlikely source materials.

But mind wandering can happen any time. You don't have to try.

Purposeful time set aside for getting bored, which can be a tech time out to focus on our surroundings, is an act of resistance. Trust me on this one. All evidence points to Big Tech wanting us locked in to social media, immersive VR or AR or mixed reality or some avatar wildness in the metaverse where we ignore our small lives and physical bodies.

Why? Because they don't want regular people (who they couldn't care less about) to be anything more than NPCs. Wealthy tech bros, and the 1% don't want to concern themselves with most other people unless they are in service (read: servitude) to them.

It's no accident hustle and grind culture are happily encouraged. Most of these jobs are low paying service industry jobs.

Boredom is a safe haven where we may be able to stumble upon unexpected thoughts, ideas, hobbies, plan making— all off the grid and not monetizable by Big Tech. This is a true form of resistance as anything done off the grid isn't sharing our most valuable resources— our personal data about our attention. Further, it’s an act of resistance to create private information (read: memories/experiences) that these powerful forces will not have full knowledge of and they don't like that. They want a full picture of who you are in order to curate targeted ads, lifestyle and everything else that shapes a person's “identity”. Here, identity is the self as brand. We are more than this.

There was a time when you’d hear someone half-joke, “Pics or it didn’t happen.” I’m glad that people are growing tired of this. Platforms are trying other methods (audio and video content) to find other ways to maintain and grow engagement. They’re not about to give up. They’ll happily break you first (by accident, of course… wink/nod).

So be bold and do something off the grid as an act of subversion.

Enjoy time and don't post about it on social media

Keep some of yourself to yourself.

I suspect many of us will feel better if we claw back a little privacy and realize that oversharing online is emptying some of the authentic meaning and value from our personal experiences that were never meant to be curated just to appease a theoretical audience… Big Tech has convinced us it's our job to keep everyone posted about all of our goings on. There was a time, not all that long ago, just before “The Facebook” became mainstream, that it was not unusual to privately share updates, notable life moments, trip photos, with just a few friends. There was nothing wrong with that. In many ways, you may recall feeling more connected back then.