Adulting Part Thirteen: Bored Compared to What?

We desire to know, to be known and to have a sense of purpose.

Mandala from an adult coloring book. Did you know that drawing mandalas has been shown to reduce anxiety?

I like to read “Notes” on Substack.

For those who don’t look at Notes, or know what they are, it’s the Social-Chat thingy everyone thought would replace Twitter (then), now Elon Musk’s “X”. Except there doesn’t seem to be a character limit on Notes.

I never used Twitter. In case you don’t know my thoughts about Twitter, they can be found here. If you’re not going to look at the linked content, in a nutshell, the rant has to do with Neanderthals, an extinct human species widely dispersed in ice age Europe about 100 million years ago who used abbreviated grunts, groans and pictures to tell stories and communicate.

People compare Notes and Twitter, though I understand Notes is more academic, friendlier.

I scroll through Notes to find new things to read.

Recently, I have seen many essay titles, entire Substacks and comments here containing the word “bored” or “boring”.

I searched looking for entire Substacks focused on being bored, using the search word “bored”:

Now granted some of the results don’t follow the idea of bored as feeling unhappy because something is not interesting or because you have nothing to do.

But several of them do focus on being bored, written by young people. And there are a lot of posts that talk about being bored or instruct how not to be bored or if you do this, you’ll be bored.

This comment sums up a lot of what I read in these posts:

I have been struggling with boredom lately because I deleted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (never calling it anything else), and TikTok as a New Year’s resolution last year. I also reduced the number of YouTube channels that I subscribe to (just a few educational, news, and tech-related ones), as well as the time I spend chatting on Discord. I also uninstalled all of those apps off my smartphone. There’s nothing on it besides utilities (not even emails apps).

Seriously?

Young people, in the prime of their lives bored?

I raised a Millennial.

He was in the private school system until second grade.

I was called in because he was being disruptive in class.

He was bored.

Turned out he really was bored with what was being taught.

While the teacher was instructing his classmates on basic geometric shapes, circle, square, triangle, he already knew basic flat shapes and had moved on to building complex, three dimensional geometric shapes at home and he had advanced to being able to calculate the volume of a sphere.

“Mom, this is baby stuff, circles aren’t always flat. They can be filled with water and the less water there is, the further it goes, but the splat isn’t as good.”.

This was second grade, eight years old. This was a complex answer.

The second grade teacher had no clue when I repeated what he had said to me.

When I asked him how he knew how he knew this (to determine the volume of a sphere), he said “throwing water balloons off the deck mom”. And you can believe I tested him on this. He could tell me how much water (by showing me the line on a measuring cup) was contained in a randomly filled ballon.

Was it visual or genius?

He is what psychologists then called highly gifted.

Gifted kids often get bored because they aren’t being challenged enough.

I pulled him out of school during second grade and homeschooled him to the day he went off to a well known university that specializes in Engineering.

When we got to geometry in our homeschool and I showed him the formula for calculating the volume of a sphere, he said “I know mom”.

So, I get what being bored is.

My favorite thing to do when he would say he was bored was ask “bored compared to what?”.

He never had a good answer to that.

I encouraged reading, many hobbies, cooking and all he carried forward into adult life.

I discouraged social media mainly because if he was going forward in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) career he would eventually need a security clearance.

He’s 32. He’s an Aerospace Engineer. Six figure salary. Debt free (I paid cash, in full, college tuition. Yes the current college debt forgiveness programs pisses me off.), except his mortgage. Many hobbies, some very expensive. He doesn’t have time to be bored.

But this fascination with boredom in young people is interesting to me.

How did this happen?

I’m not a psychologist, though I learned an awful lot raising a highly gifted kid, it seems to me many young people my son’s age are void of the ability to self entertain and lack the imagination to change.

A comment I read in one of pieces I read that focused on being bored:

You can learn a lot about someone by watching how restless they become in the absence of external stimulation. Some are simply too dependent on it to be anything without it.

Boredom demands that you spend time with yourself; it demands that you be effective company to yourself as it was before learning about these other things.

Whoever cannot handle boredom cannot handle himself/herself, and thus is at the mercy of what external stimulation feeds them. They are easily captured; they are readily ensnared and like an addict, they become what is fed to them.

When I read a really good comment, especially from another writer, I ask myself “who is this guy?”.

From his Substack About page:

I am

Patrick Muindi

, a writer from Nairobi, Kenya. I mostly write about realism in everyday living, guiding my readers to a happy and fulfilling yet pragmatic and practical life.

My kind of person.

He writes

Everyday Living

.

I literally read all of his writing that day - well the free stuff.

Interesting individual in my opinion.

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Ted Gioia

of The Honest Broker wrote a post that went viral:

The State of the Culture, 2024

The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies—because they will be the dealers.

Addiction is the goal.

In it he described how he sees tech companies devouring our culture.

I was one of the many who read it and couldn’t agree more with his views. It’s well worth your time.

But if you’re addicted, do you get bored?

You do if what you’re addicted to isn’t available, in my opinion.

The Convivial Society is a newsletter about technology and culture written by L.M. Sacasas and in his piece Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet he countered what Gioia described as the Dopamine Culture and extended that idea further by arguing that it’s not addiction rather compulsion (an irresistible impulse to act, regardless of the rationality of the motivation) and a quest for something bigger:

There is, of course, more to be said in response to the question, “What am I looking for when I am scrolling?” We are looking for social connection, yes, but we are also looking for intellectual connection, which is just another way of saying that we long to know. We desire an understanding of things and take pleasure in learning. Just as with our desire for community, the desire for knowledge is itself both deeply rooted in us and deeply good. Both can orient us toward the path of human flourishing. Indeed, I’m tempted to say that the whole of the human condition could be summed up this way: we desire to know and to be known.

With all of our digital devices and social media outlets, we have the ability to retreat from our “in real life” relationships and obligations.

It’s easier to participate in a virtual world and easy is what many look for.

What this culture creates are young people who are increasingly used to spending more and more time alone in their virtual pursuits, that infinite cycle of social media drama, outrage, many young people are spending less time focused on real life tasks.

This has created a generation that is detached from time and place. A generation whose only cultural references relate to their devices, pop culture, and social media, one that knows less and less about their own place in American history and culture, their place in their community.

And if this is true, we can extend the argument by stating that if these younger Americans are left to their own digital worlds, they actually won't find self-satisfaction and contentment because they are not participating in any form of traditional culture.

This makes them “bored”.

Gifted kids often get bored because they aren’t being challenged enough.

People get bored because they aren’t being challenged enough.(?)

I would add to Sacasas‘s human condition summation:

we desire to know and to be known and to have a sense of purpose.

In getting back to

Patrick Muindi

’s comment:

Whoever cannot handle boredom cannot handle himself/herself, and thus is at the mercy of what external stimulation feeds them. They are easily captured; they are readily ensnared and like an addict, they become what is fed to them.

One wonders where does boredom lead?

In the essay On The Degrading Effects of Life Online by Jon Haidt and Freya India, Professor Haidt writes about the phone based childhood:

Social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube use a very different model: Anyone can post anything, from an anonymous unverified account, and then AI (supplemented by thousands of workers in developing nations) tries to take down some percentage of the most awful stuff. The heads of these companies assure us that they take down billions of pieces of harmful content each year, but that just indicates the mind-boggling size of the problem. Even if they could magically catch 99% of the stuff, our kids would still be getting sent beheading videos in choir practice. Oh, and in the U.S., thanks to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, we parents can’t do anything about it. The companies have been granted immunity from lawsuits for what they show to our children, even underage users (under 13) because the companies have also been granted freedom from any duty to check or verify ages. 

The second enormous difference is that when I was a child, the violence was almost all fictional. There was cartoon violence, of course, which was not at all disturbing, although later on, graphic video game violence (such as in Grand Theft Auto) was far bloodier. There were scenes of murder in police dramas and in mafia movies that sometimes were disturbing (such as Moe Greene’s death in The Godfather).

But our kids today are witnessing the suffering and death of real people and animals. This is shocking, haunting, and degrading in a way that no fictional violence can be. While in London, I learned about the “cat in a blender” video that circulated widely online last year. Months later, video experts concluded that the video had been digitally edited and the kitten was probably unharmed, but millions of children saw a graphic video of one of the most depraved and disturbing things a human being can do. The fact that someone was motivated to fake such a thing to create an internet sensation only makes it worse. 

I have no words for the “cat in a blender” video. Oh, wait, yes I do. Sick.

Freya India

writes about the morally degrading effects of living your life for social media:

Most of the time when we talk about social media being bad for us we mean for our mental health. These platforms make us anxious, depressed, and insecure, and for many reasons: the constant social comparison; the superficiality and inauthenticity of it all; being ranked and rated by strangers. All this seems to make us miserable.

But I don’t just think it makes us miserable. I’ve written before about how it makes us bitchy. And self-absorbed. And over time I’m becoming convinced that our most pressing concern isn’t that social media makes us feel worse about ourselves. It’s that social media makes us worse people.

And apparently, bored.

Twenty years ago, on an early date with my husband we were discussing socialization as an element of schooling (he was fascinated that I was homeschooling), I threw out the idea that brick and mortar schools were in the business of dumbing down the population:

“It’s the systematic dumbing down of a population.”

“That will never happen, humans aren’t that stupid.”

And yet here you have it in today’s culture.

As someone who was part of the early computing world, I often feel guilty about where that work has landed future generations. The potential of what the beginnings of the digital world could have been and where it actually went.

When I see the words “anxious” and especially “bored” coming from young people, all I can think is they lack confidence in themselves.

Exposure to much of today’s badly applied technology, especially social media has done this.

Like radiation sickness, too much exposure causes sickness.

Confidence is an attitude:

• A belief or conviction that an outcome will be favorable.

• Belief in the certainty of something.

• Belief in the effectiveness of one's own abilities or in one's favorable acceptance by others; self-confidence.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition

When I was in my 30’s-40’s in business, we had a saying:

Lead, follow or get out of my way

In our personal lives it was:

I may be right, I may be wrong, but I am never in doubt

Today, I bet no one under age 45 utters either of these sentences.

I submit, if you are confident, you are more than likely accomplished.

Accomplished means being very skillful or showing the skill set of an expert (but not necessarily is an expert).

Someone who is successful in setting and reaching goals set will eventually be accomplished in some way.

Constantly setting new goals for yourself and reaching them is how you develop purpose and how you become confident.

You can be accomplished at any age.

My Millennial is an example and he does utter my business and personal life phrases (above).

If you are accomplished, you most likely are not going to be bored because the dopamine that comes from being accomplished is similar to the rush your social media sites provide.

But bored isn’t just at Substack.

It’s everywhere.

A few of the many from my search online simply using the word “bored” in the search box. Try it:

80 Productive (And Fun) Things to Do When You’re Bored

Color a mandala -Did you know that drawing mandalas has been shown to reduce anxiety?

Five ways boredom could be changing your behaviour, for better or worse

Perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of boredom is related to finding meaning in life. People who feel bored report that their current situation is devoid of any purpose.

Why We Get Bored and How to Overcome It

Other research has considered attention as a key aspect of boredom as people often report they struggle to pay attention when bored or start daydreaming or mind-wandering.

Courtesy of your US government:

The Unengaged Mind: Defining Boredom in Terms of Attention

Through the synthesis of psychodynamic, existential, arousal, and cognitive theories of boredom, we argue that boredom is universally conceptualized as "the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity."

And funny, not much of what I found got back to the bored gifted kid.

Is “bored” a “thing” right now, like transgenderism?

Or is the human race doomed because of technology?

Did COVID lockdowns damage society this much?

These questions reminded me of a post from

Ruth Gaskovski

about a year ago Rehabilitating Ferals of the Digital Age:

Rehabilitating Ferals of the Digital Age

(I love Calvin and Hobbes).

There is hope

In this post, you will hear from seven of our aligned Gen Z leaders (six from the U.S. and one from the UK) who are organizing, writing, and protesting against the harms caused by the phone-based childhood. All of them have personally experienced the harms of an online childhood and are calling on all of us to help improve the online world for the next generation—because the social media companies will not do it themselves. The Youth Rebellion is Growing - by Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt

Some institutions, such as schools, museums and concert venues are beginning to create screen-free areas, banning smartphones, tablets, and laptops. One of the methods of keeping screens secure is a product called Yondr, which physically locks up smartphones.

Yondr is a physical system that keeps people from using their phones in certain areas.

The technique is simple; you place your phone in a small pouch, which locks. You can then enter the screen-free area, and you’ll keep your phone, with no tracking system or on-site storage needed. Once you’re done, you can take your phone to an unlock station and return the pouch.

Since it’s a physical pouch system that keeps people from poking at the screen, Yondr doesn’t need to interfere with a phone’s connectivity.

Text messages, location services, parental apps, and other vital systems will still be functioning on a phone in a Yondr pouch. This makes them particularly popular in schools since it can allow students to keep their phones while locking them up during test-taking, certain classes and/or physical activity periods.

Yondr is being implemented in many schools these days, you’ll see little snippets in local papers about the different schools introducing them.

And you can always somewhat control your own online life if you want to:

But just like we can hit that like button and get fed more, we also have tools that can negate the negative. For example, in Instagram, you can either just hit the “X” button on the upper right which is the anti-like button or you can hit the three little dots … and open a new series of options from “Report” which is useful to flag problematic content, which you should do, to an option to select just ‘Not interested,” which starts to train your algorithm. How to Train your Algorithm- Social Media and Agency by

Michael Woudenberg

.

An additional source of reading: The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can't by Erin Loechner.

Discover a new and hopeful path forward as you consider your family's approach to social media, screen time, and technology.

Bored?

Bored compared to what?

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You got this far?

Congratulations!

Thank you for not being bored with my writing!