Boredom has emerged as a key corollary to the Digital Bill of Rights—and those who abridge it run the risk of provoking what Hannah Arendt called “the primitive anger of unfulfilled entitlement.” An article I read at the start of The Experiment advised teachers to “give up the struggle” to prevent children from text-messaging one another during class, citing a University of Tasmania study dubiously titled “2 text yrm8 is gr8!” The study found that more than 90 percent of ninth- and tenth-graders—including those in schools with strict (LOL) no-phone policies, regularly engaged in the practice. Author Martin Beattie urged teachers to abandon their fortifications and start incorporating messaging into school routines instead. 2
Nevertheless, as Bill correctly surmised, boredom—far from being an energy-sucking black hole to be avoided as assiduously as a Mormon door-knocker at dinnertime—has actually served to fuel human progress, and many experts have noted as much. Bertrand Russell was one of them. Philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, social reformist, pacifist, Nobel Prize-winning author, and serial monogamist—what, no field hockey?—Russell believed boredom to be “one of the great motive powers throughout the historical epoch.” He clearly knew whereof he spoke. But Russell’s comment also suggests that a world without boredom would be dull indeed—and this was a paradox I found myself revisiting continually. “All endeavor of every kind,” Spacks reminds us, “takes place in the context of boredom impending or boredom repudiated.” 3
Other commentators, I discovered, have seen boredom as a character flaw, a social disease, a form of passive aggression, and even as an excuse for active aggression, arguing that people shoplift, or binge drink, or shoot others not because they’re “bad” but because they’re “bored.” As a result, many of us are not simply averse to boredom, we are frightened by it.
As someone who literally reads the fine print on the conditioner bottle while in the shower, I found I could relate. Later, when I was able to Google it, I discovered there is a name for this disorder: thaasophobia—fear of boredom. Pronounceable or not, I believe it has reached epidemic proportions in our culture. Pre-Experiment, it certainly had done so in our family.
I expected the Digital Natives to grow restless without their media. But my own hyperelevated need to be ... well, not “entertained” exactly, but distracted , was something I’d failed to factor in. After all, I was a grown-up. When I wasn’t putting fingers up my nose. Like most other grown-ups, I often bragged that I was “never bored.” That I—not unlike little Chloe Hetherington—was too busy to be bored. What I hadn’t admitted was that I was almost always siphoning some form of input. Maybe I didn’t fall asleep to Super Mario, or zone out to an endless loop of quasi-inappropriate YouTube videos, but my headspace was, in its own way, as colonized by content as anybody else’s.
For starters, like many another educated adult, I consumed “news” in the same way that I consumed Coke Zero: in great empty gulpfuls throughout the day. It was filling but hard to digest, producing an uncomfortable informational flatulence. Nevertheless, I was used to taking the moral high ground and pretending to a self-evident “need to know.” “Hardly a man takes a half hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?’” Thoreau observed a century and a half ago, with palpable disgust. What on earth would he have made of my NPR “desktop ticker” extruding headlines across my laptop screen every second of every minute of every hour of every day?
The question of what we DO with the news we “follow”—like a loyal fan, or a stalker—is one of the least addressed issues in contemporary journalism. It is something Thoreau started thinking about from the
Nevertheless, as Bill correctly surmised, boredom—far from being an energy-sucking black hole to be avoided as assiduously as a Mormon door-knocker at dinnertime—has actually served to fuel human progress, and many experts have noted as much. Bertrand Russell was one of them. Philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, social reformist, pacifist, Nobel Prize-winning author, and serial monogamist—what, no field hockey?—Russell believed boredom to be “one of the great motive powers throughout the historical epoch.” He clearly knew whereof he spoke. But Russell’s comment also suggests that a world without boredom would be dull indeed—and this was a paradox I found myself revisiting continually. “All endeavor of every kind,” Spacks reminds us, “takes place in the context of boredom impending or boredom repudiated.” 3
Other commentators, I discovered, have seen boredom as a character flaw, a social disease, a form of passive aggression, and even as an excuse for active aggression, arguing that people shoplift, or binge drink, or shoot others not because they’re “bad” but because they’re “bored.” As a result, many of us are not simply averse to boredom, we are frightened by it.
As someone who literally reads the fine print on the conditioner bottle while in the shower, I found I could relate. Later, when I was able to Google it, I discovered there is a name for this disorder: thaasophobia—fear of boredom. Pronounceable or not, I believe it has reached epidemic proportions in our culture. Pre-Experiment, it certainly had done so in our family.
I expected the Digital Natives to grow restless without their media. But my own hyperelevated need to be ... well, not “entertained” exactly, but distracted , was something I’d failed to factor in. After all, I was a grown-up. When I wasn’t putting fingers up my nose. Like most other grown-ups, I often bragged that I was “never bored.” That I—not unlike little Chloe Hetherington—was too busy to be bored. What I hadn’t admitted was that I was almost always siphoning some form of input. Maybe I didn’t fall asleep to Super Mario, or zone out to an endless loop of quasi-inappropriate YouTube videos, but my headspace was, in its own way, as colonized by content as anybody else’s.
For starters, like many another educated adult, I consumed “news” in the same way that I consumed Coke Zero: in great empty gulpfuls throughout the day. It was filling but hard to digest, producing an uncomfortable informational flatulence. Nevertheless, I was used to taking the moral high ground and pretending to a self-evident “need to know.” “Hardly a man takes a half hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?’” Thoreau observed a century and a half ago, with palpable disgust. What on earth would he have made of my NPR “desktop ticker” extruding headlines across my laptop screen every second of every minute of every hour of every day?
The question of what we DO with the news we “follow”—like a loyal fan, or a stalker—is one of the least addressed issues in contemporary journalism. It is something Thoreau started thinking about from the
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