May My Daughter Know Boredom

Since I was a kid, opportunities to be bored have gone from “smaller than ever before” to “none at all, ever.”

I remember once, in a 5th grade history class module on medieval Europe, the boys in my class were accused of a conspiracy of cheating because we all got a specific quiz question right that most of the girls got wrong, and the teacher thought it was because we all sat on one side of the room and shared answers. In fact, the boys sat together because we were still young enough to be scared of befriending girls, and we knew the answer because the question was about trebuchets. We 11-year-old boys knew everything about trebuchets because any boy born around 1992 played hours and hours of a computer game called Age of Kings.

I was thinking about this recently because, as the father of a seven-month-old, I worry a lot about the differences between the technology that I grew up with and the technology my daughter will grow up with. Already, the discourse on the cultural differences between generations seems somehow realer, because the material differences between the technology that was available during childhoods as close in years as that of mine and Kara’s (we’re six years apart) is pretty stark. I bought my first music on CD at a Tower Records, and I remember Facebook coming out, where my wife is a “digital native.” It’s easy to sound like some stodgy old man going on about how that Elvis shouldn’t be swinging his hips around or how the kids these days [something something] when you talk about this sort of thing. But when you have a kid, these concerns become real to you. And the worry I keep having, the one that made me in some roundabout thought process think about the trebuchet thing, is that the way technology worked when I was a kid forced me, in little ways, to be bored, whereas today the idea of tolerating being bored as a normal and healthy part of life is just foreign.

I have never been good at being bored, and I have never liked it. I have never, in other words, been good at the practice of choosing to be bored. But because life forced me and everyone else to be bored back then in those ancient days of the 90s and 00s, I at least had to build the being bored habit, and exercise the being bored muscle.

That is, a little. Those of us born twenty years after the initial release of Pong were, by any objective metric, some of the most entertained people in history. I am of age and nationality and class circumstances that just mean that I have enjoyed relatively lots of technological tools for filling time, compared to earlier people who must have had some Zen monk-like ability to stare into the fire, or roll a wooden hoop, or… I don’t know what they did all day.

Let me give you a very disorganized sketch of my childhood and adolescence as I remember it in terms of boredom and entertainment, and ask you to trust I am going somewhere with this:

Growing up I always had whatever the latest video game console was, and I also watched a lot of TV. As a really little kid, I remember waking up early to sneak in an episode of something on the Disney Channel or Cartoon Network in the 7:00-7:30 slot before breakfast. You know, just a half hour screen fix, like a smoker who has one before work. I also had permissive parents, screenwise, not those ones like the kid in the class we all felt bad for had, the ones who thought watching TV more than half an hour a day was some kind of brain poison and who would never have left their kid alone with something so evil as an N64 with a copy of Super Smash Bros, or, God forbid, Goldeneye.

The year the first Xbox came out, I got one for Christmas, and my friends and I would sit on the floor around a TV playing Halo for several hours after school at the apartment of whoever lived nearest by. When it was time to split up, I would probably get home and play it some more instead of doing my homework. I also read books – I am really not some drooling screen addict – but that’s more entertainment, right at my fingertips. On any random day when I was 8 or 15 I might have swapped back and forth between two shows, two video game consoles, and two books. This is all perfectly normal for an American boy born the year I was. We rotted in front of screens, and had lots to do even outside of school and socializing and physical activity. Sometimes a parent would come in and say “that’s enough screen time, go outside.” But they wouldn’t do much about it.

When I went on a family vacation, I’d take a clear purple plastic Nintendo Gameboy with me, usually with a copy of Pokemon Blue Version. That was enough to fill an entire flight, and maybe an entire trip, battling Charmanders or whatever, in the era before airplane seats had touchscreens in the back of the headrests with a whole selection of recently released and classic movies you can get paralyzed just trying to pick between. Sometimes you could watch a movie on a flight back then, though: There would be a single screen in the middle of everyone, above the aisle, hanging and always jiggling like it might fall. It would play a scheduled movie once the seatbelt sign came off. If you’d already seen it, or it wasn’t your kind of flick, or perhaps wasn’t even in a language you even understood, you would still probably watch it. I mean, what an amazing time-wasting frontier in entertainment technology, to be watching a movie on the go, in the air.

Things changed to personal technology devices while I was a teen. I remember some time in about 7th grade when my little iPod first got a backlit, color screen with the ability to play video. I downloaded Remember The Titans and Season 1 of South Park. I would never be bored again, I thought. Waiting in the vestibule to enter school in the morning, I could watch an episode of TV. On a bus ride to camp, I could rewatch that movie for the dozenth time. What even was boredom?

And as for TV, where my mother was always telling me she grew up with exactly one channel, which simply stopped broadcasting at a certain time of night, we had literally one thousand. HBO and Showtime had no commercials, and it had boobs. Rome was a great show. And, even better, that was around the time TiVo came out. No longer was I trapped watching shows I did not like. I could watch the shows I did like, which had been scheduled to record while I was away. And no longer would I have to watch boring commercials. I could press that little skip button, jump 15 seconds, and blast right through the ads. Still, I rewatched the same episodes of The Simpsons and That 70s Show over and over, because I didn’t have terribly broad tastes. I might watch the same episode 4 times in a week, learning to damn near speak alongside the script, to kill time. And I was so entertained. I marveled at what technology had delivered to me, when just a year before I had had to suffer through entire summers watching commercial-infested reruns of shows I didn’t even like.

Ok, thanks for sticking with me. To finally get to my point: While someone born around when I was had a crazy amount of entertainment options measured against any historical metric, and even spent a large number of hours a day in front of TV and computer screens, I think something is profoundly different for kids today. With the advent of social media, online gaming, smartphones, and mobile video, the diminishing opportunities to be bored I experienced as a young person went from “smaller than ever before” to “none at all, ever.” Instead of having to watch a rerun, or read a paper magazine in a waiting room, or sit at a light, or even just watch the movie you yourself chose to stream on demand without also toying with your phone at the same time – all things that might force you to exercise that being bored or focus on something you don’t feel like caring about muscle in some tiny way – there is now an infinite scroll.

As any number of technology critics have pointed out, the entertainments themselves might suck, but the reward psychology is that of a slot machine; The next swipe might bring something great. And, personally, this era of technology has eroded my ability to read nearly as much. I can see the ways that, in my 6-years-younger-wife, having it younger viscerally set different expectations about entertainment and boredom and social norms about how comfortable it is to go phoneless for an hour. (Kara keeps her phone on, backlight dimmed, in the movie theater.)

So, here is why I am writing this on a parenting Substack. I have been thinking a lot about my wishes and fears for my daughter. And while of course one of them is for her to never, ever suffer in any way, I know that one is hopeless. Another, more reasonable one of them is for her to have parents who know they cannot control the world around her, only help her become wise and adaptable to a world we will all be disappointed and frustrated and broken up by, to some degree or other. My feelings about technology bring these two into tension. Because god do I hope that, even if she experiences it as some kind of awful suffering as a kid to have to be bored, I still hope she has at least some opportunities to be bored. I hope rewatching some movie she didn’t even want to watch the first time is the best entertainment she has available some of the time. I hope she finds herself somewhere, unable to sleep, with nothing to pass the time but a book, and builds the habit of reading cover to cover. I hope when she thinks about her phone, she knows instinctively that there are tradeoffs.

I hope her whole generation looks down on the technology habits of her parents’ the way ours does at people who smoked in restaurants and on planes. What were they thinking, don’t they know that’s poison? I can’t believe people used to just do that. I hope she has to just sit and listen to the jackals in her mind, and that she learns to laugh it off rather than run to some self-diagnosis of an anxiety disorder. I hope that by the time she is older, our whole culture’s relationship to technology is less fucked up than it has been for the last ten or fifteen years.

I hope if she reads this one day when she’s older, she thinks, Dad, duh.

Nicholas Clairmont is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine. You can follow him here.