The Winter of Our Disconnect (10 page)

Now, obviously no one would advocate leaving your kids on the doorstep of an institution. (Fantasize about, yes. Advocate, no.) And, Lord knows, Bussau’s perception is an unusual one. Many children would be, and have been, crushed by similar circumstances. But the truth is, many haven’t—and some have thrived.

Frankly, even acknowledging this as a possibility seems a subversive thought. The whole notion of allowing children to tough things out for themselves has disappeared from our parenting without a backward glance. And that very much includes finding a personal solution to the personal problem of boredom. “A man must assume the moral burden of his own boredom,” admonished Samuel Johnson. Yet as parents, and perhaps particularly as mothers, we tend to assume the moral burden of
everyone’s
boredom.

I’d been listening to my kids bleat on about being bored practically from the moment of conception. If their ultrasound photos had a caption, I have no doubt it would have been: “Muuuuum, there’s nothing to dooooooooooooooo in here!”

I often think about our first big trip to the States, when they were seven, five, and three. Just for the record, getting from Perth, Western Australia, to my sister’s place on eastern Long Island takes twenty-eight solid hours of travel, twenty-four of them airborne. When traveling with children, the kid-chill factor makes it feel much, much longer. On this particular trip, we left for the airport by taxi in the wee hours of the morning, wending our way through the neighborhood until we reached the main highway—a distance of perhaps five blocks. At the red light, the baby tugged on my sleeve. “Are we in New York yet?” she lisped. “’Cause I’m bored!”

The assumption that it was my job to remedy life’s boring bits (or, preferably, to prevent them) had never seriously been questioned—by any of us. I don’t think that makes our family particularly unusual.

Boredom is a big issue for parents today. Not just listening to kids complain about boredom—but responding to those complaints. Taking responsibility for those complaints. And, perhaps above all, throwing technology at those complaints. Somewhere along the line, providing “stimulation” became a key aspect of our job description. The belief that a stimulated child is an advantaged child is so widely shared we rarely bother to articulate it. So too, of course, is its corollary: that a bored child is an at-risk child. In fact, the moral imperative to keep our kids occupied or suffer the consequences is one of those unexamined articles of faith that has helped to make modern parenting such a minefield of misplaced guilt and misdirected resources. (Baby Einstein, anybody?)

Even before The Experiment, I’d started to wonder whether we’d been confusing “plugging in” with “switching on”; whether boredom—far from being the enemy of all that is educational—might turn out to be our friend.

When we contemplated taking the leap of faith into screen-free living, there were many things we feared. Gaining weight. Losing friends. “Missing out” (in some vague but disquieting way). But our greatest fear of all was the one that Bill had articulated right from the git-go: that without our media, we’d be bored.

How ridiculous. Of
course
we were bored. Paradoxically, though, we found reconnecting with our inner blank slate wasn’t nearly as gruesome as we’d feared, once we got the hang of it and rediscovered the lost art of staring into space. And allowing ourselves to be “in the moment” with boredom did motivate us—each in different ways—to discover ways to plug up the gaping, screen-sized holes in our imaginations.

For my part, I amused myself by turning to the study of boredom. I read most of Patricia Meyer Spacks’s compulsively interesting
Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind
on the train (the looks I got from my fellow passengers were pretty entertaining too). Along the way, I learned that boredom is first and foremost an idea—a set of beliefs and values. Boredom is not a universal experience—like hunger, or the urge for straight bangs—but a product of culture. And a fairly recent product of culture at that. In fact, the word “boredom” did not even exist until the eighteenth century. And some historians argue that the concept of boredom, and by extension the experience of it, didn’t either.

For that matter, “interesting” (in its current sense) was also an eighteenth-century innovation, making its first appearance in Laurence Sterne’s
A Sentimental Journey
in 1768. “If life was never boring in pre-modern times,” notes Spacks, “neither was it thrilling, interesting or exciting, in the modern sense of these words.”
¹
That’s different from saying that people did not, by Bill’s standards or yours or mine, experience these states of mind. One thinks of the sheer tedium (to us) of agricultural tasks such as hoeing or planting or harvesting—or of old-fashioned rote-learning of poetry, or Bible verses or times tables. Such activities may not have been precisely relished, but to have experienced them as “boring” implies the existence of an alternative. A better offer forgone. In the absence of such an alternative, you might feel blank or unmotivated or, as we say, “on autopilot.” But when there really and truly is nothing better to do, you are unlikely to feel bored.

When my kids were babies, I found staying at home and being a “housewife”—despite the fact that I was divorced (LOL) and despite the fact that I felt I was doing “the right thing”—to be supremely boring much of the time. My mother never did. At least partly, this is because I could imagine other options.

The problem of boredom is also completely tied up with leisure, and specifically with the separation of work and leisure in our lives. Although technology is today blurring some of these boundaries—allowing us to snuggle up to our in-boxes in bed, for example, or to Twitter our way through tedious meetings—most of us still take the work/leisure divide for granted. Not everybody else in the world does, or has. Premodern people didn’t. Those who today live in subsistence economies don’t either. Nor, for that matter, do very small children (for whom everything is play), or new mothers (for whom everything is work), or genuinely addicted workaholics (who have forgotten how to tell the difference). As the proportion of work to non-work decreases, leisure itself becomes the “problem”—which is something most people rarely think about in relation to work/life balance, until they retire and freak out.

At the opposite end of the life course, we see the problem of leisure in the phenomenon of “the hurried child,” as described by psychologist David Elkind in his classic 1981 book of the same name. Nineteen eighty-one—the very same year IBM introduced the personal computer (which, btw, retailed for $2,800 and boasted a 64K hard drive, which is enough to store about
three one-hundredths
of a single song). We all know kids who are like this: so scheduled they practically need a press secretary to keep track of their obligations and appearances. Sussy’s school seems to specialize in them. “It’s difficult keeping up with eleven-year-old Chloe Hetherington,” enthuses a typical feature in our local paper. “Three times a week, the Cottesloe girl arrives at school by 7:30 a.m. to take part in music lessons; on Wednesday afternoons it’s dance practice, Thursdays she’s at debating, and by Saturday she’s charging around a hockey field.” The usual suspects counsel restraint—in this case, a school psychologist (whose own eight-year-old daughter “takes dancing twice a week as well as guitar lessons and circus sports”) and a “parenting educator,” who offers the insight that “It’s all about balance.” But it isn’t difficult to detect the approbation behind the stock warnings. An all-dancing, all-singing, all-hockey-stick-wielding child practically screams parental success. In Chloe Hetherington’s world, there’s no room for staring into space. Boredom, it is clear, belongs to lesser beings.

As Chloe’s example suggests, boredom is in part a class issue. (Producing a “hurried child” is as unmistakable a case of conspicuous consumption as driving the Audi to Pony Club.) Like parenting itself, boredom is a social construction. Although we commonly speak of boredom as if it were an objective, almost biological state of being, it isn’t. On the contrary, it’s more an explanation—or even an excuse, really—than a condition. It is also, and perhaps especially where our children are involved, a
judgment
.

As parents and educators, we increasingly fear that judgment—and we are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to avoid it. I was amused to read that in the eighteenth century, when the rise of bourgeois society allowed a measure of leisure time to the working classes, country folk desperate for entertainment organized grinning competitions—because that’s exactly what I used to do with my kids on those rare occasions when we braved a non-family restaurant (basically, anywhere that didn’t feature placemats with jokes). “But where are the crayons?” they’d wail, as I tried to explain the difference between a white linen tablecloth and a sketchpad. Sooner or later, I’d be sitting there in my cocktail dress and high heels, cross-eyed and with a pinkie stuck up my nose. Even as teenagers, their restaurant attention spans remain gnatlike. We place our orders, and they still ask me, “How soon will our meals arrive?” as if they believe I have prepared the pad thai myself and smuggled it into a back room while no one was looking.

Freedom from 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 very dawn of the digital age. “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,” he wrote, “but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” Lord knows, in the age of Twitter we’ve stopped worrying about such minor details. Nothing important to communicate, a cynic might observe, is not only no impediment. It seems to be the whole point.

Before The Experiment, I hadn’t given much thought to my own thaasophobic tendencies. Now that I have, I realize I am not necessarily typical. Not all of us feel the need to download a digital copy of
Wuthering Heights
upon hearing the announcement of a ten-minute track delay. I did exactly this the day I got my iPhone, and I’m humiliated to report that it delivered a thrill that was borderline erotic in its intensity. “As God is my witness, I’ll never be bored again!” I exulted. You could practically hear the overture to
Gone With the Wind
over the hissing of the air brakes.