One might be forgiven for mistaking me for a crotchety old man—more likely than not wearing tweed, elbow patches worn thin, with a smoothed pipe dangling from his mouth—if they eavesdropped on me expressing my firm disdain of Modern Technology. The capitals here are quite intentional, to distinguish the commonplace technology that surrounds us everyday and which we no doubt do not even recognize, from Technology, something I deem more nefarious and damaging. Technology, in this sense, includes the tools, information, and entertainment that have largely not aided our lives but subsumed them. I hardly need describe the omnipresence of the cellphone: carried inseparably on one’s person like a tumour, consulted during dinners, used to pass the time in line-ups, greeting first thing in the morning, tucked away last thing at night, always close at hand, just in case. There are many informed and better researched thinkers than myself who have made strong cases against the internet and social media use that typically comes hand-in-hand with cellphones, and which has not made us superhuman, but subhuman, something quasi-mechanical, feeding into the matrix with our attention and our lives.
“Youngsters these days,” I can almost here myself declaring—though, to be precise, this isn’t a phenomenon reserved to the young, is it? The encroachment of Modern Technology is ubiquitous, boasting a firm victory over young and old alike. And here I must add a confession of my own: despite my hatred and criticism of these things, I am not myself unaffected. Despite attempts to untether myself from my flashy iPhone SE (glamorous, I know), it often stays within arm’s reach of me throughout my day, as though I’m expecting a call or text from… whom, exactly? That question is never answered, though the implicit assumption seems to be: boredom. I rail all too easily against boredom. It makes me bristle and squirm, like I’m in a dental chair waiting for a root canal. “Any fate but that,” my brain whispers. “Give us mindless scrolling, hollow entertainment, an endless stream of photos and videos you don’t care for and will never remember. Anything but boredom.” Habit stalls any intellectual defence. No armistice is considered. A swift kick of dopamine declares victory final. And with my will-power, I sacrifice the best hours of my life as tribute.
Call me melodramatic, but I firmly argue that part of our problem is that we are hardly dramatic enough. Part of this is because we cannot muster the emotional capacity necessary to be dramatic, the best of our emotions poured as a libation at the feet of Modern Technology. The other part is because complacency has settled in so deep that there no longer seems to be a second path. “Why the drama?” we may yawn. “It’s only a few minutes while I’m in line at the grocery store.” To this I may ask two things. First, is it? Is it only a few minutes of time each day? Will your time log testify to that truth? My own phone is used primarily for texting, has no social media, and is still often used for over an hour and a half every day. Where does that time go? It has been swallowed, leaving no mark upon my world to testify to its existence. To place this seemingly small number in context, 1.5 hours a day is equivalent to 547.5 hours a year—or, in academic terms, nearly the same amount of time required to complete all the coursework for a one year Master’s degree. The reality of seemingly insignificant amounts of time compounded over a year can be either delightful or devastating. What was only a few minutes while standing in line, while waiting to pick up the kids, while brewing coffee, was only “a few minutes” until it was your whole life.
The second thing I may ask is this: Even if the only time you spent on your phone was while waiting in line, might that not also be a loss? I do not mean this in terms of lost time, though, as I’ve just suggested, that too may be an important consideration. Rather, I mean this in terms of lost humanness—the absence of that interaction with the child in front of you (wailing or not), the failure to enjoy how grocery clerk tosses canned beans up into the air like a New York bartender before scanning them through, the missed delight of seeing the rugged construction worker purchase a delicate bouquet of flowers for his wife on their eleventh anniversary. You see, a line is never just a line. Lines are microcosms of beautiful, dramatic, momentarily sustained human expression and interaction. In a line is a snapshot of all that it is to be human: the delightful and the wearisome, the mundane and the inspiring. There is exquisite wonder in such small moments that comprise our lives.
Of this melodrama I refuse to repent. To sensationalize boredom is to experience life in the margins. We are transient, tiny creatures, living and breathing and living our little lives only for a moment. How much smaller do we become when we fill the vacuums of our lives with distraction rather than delight? How can we endure staring at our phones when the constant pleasures of boredom are offered us? It would seem that our desires are not to great but too small. We satisfy ourselves with the amusements of virtual reality when the infinite fascinations of true reality are ever before us. To echo C.S. Lewis, we are far too easily pleased.
The best solution is perhaps not, though I’ve often contemplated it, to throw one’s devices into the nearest lake and forget that Modern Technology has already robbed us of so much. I rarely advocate responding to violence with violence. Extrication is necessary, but asceticism is a touch extreme. The solution I propose is gentler but far harder: to embrace boredom like it’s a long lost friend (which it is), to endure the discomfort you must suffer through as you become reacquainted, and to allow it to cultivate wonder and delight in your life. This is an active, not a passive exercise. Boredom must be practiced like a skill. At first, you may find yourself amusingly clumsy at it, as one might be when they take on a new sport or hobby. But over time you will develop as a second nature a keen familiarity with boredom. You will recognize its contours, its treasures, its poetry. Boredom will strike you not as a hollow, squirming void, but as a chalice expectantly waiting to be filled with the riches of mundane human experience. And perhaps, in the process, you will find yourself becoming more exquisitely human as well.
1 thought on “Becoming Human: A Case for Poetic Boredom”
Our culture needs more of these reminders… we have lost our way!
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