Many teenagers report that they’ve never been so bored
thedailybeast.com
thedailybeast.com
Just as people my age saw TV go from 13 channels to 150+ channels and wondered how you could ever run out of things to entertain yourself, today's teens run into the same limited ability of "consumption" to keep their minds stimulated.
Eventually there's nothing on that you feel like watching, your mobile media feed runs out of new posts, and you get tired of playing the same video games. That period of boredom can be just what you need for ideas to start percolating in your head and occasionally lead you to make something or do something different.
Boredom is what got me screwing around with simple programming on my old Commodore computer or figuring out how to use a mix of cables, adapters, and stereo inputs on my boombox to experiment with rudimentary multi-track recording.
To this day I love having a good supply of parts, bits, pieces, craft supplies, and yes--boredom available on occasion because that's when I try out new ideas. When the alternative is just sitting around doing the same old things, the barriers to trying new ones tend to drop.
If boredom can be reasonably structured, then I think it's a good thing, but unfettered boredom is a bit risky in my opinion.
Reading, drawing, hiking, writing, building something, any other creative pursuit.
Realistically though I understand many of those better things to do might fall under the umbrella of things kids have been taught or conditioned to avoid for various reasons, both unintentionally and intentionally.
But this is what happens when "intellectual" is used as a slur.
What explains the (sometimes heavy) alcohol consumption when fishing, hunting, working on cars, snowmobiling(!!!), off-road driving(!!!), etc.?
Sometimes when I'm starting to feel too overstimulated, I'll purposely allow some boredom in. I'll turn off my phone and internet, stop drinking coffee and just see what happens for a couple weeks. I don't push myself with an agenda like I'm going to "go to the gym", I just stop doing the usual things and see what happens. I'll generally run into a boredom wall after a few days (once I'm done catching up on sleep, etc). This is the point where I encounter a lot of temptation to get back on my phone or do the usual things. But if I just let myself experience the boredom for what it is, eventually I'll find that I'll get inspired to do something different - go for a walk or run, try programming something etc. But in these cases, it doesn't feel like a striving effort - it's more the effortless effort of doing something because I want to. These are what I generally consider to be the "healthier" moments in my life, and what I like about them is they don't feel forced - I just have to get through the feeling of not giving into my more shallow cravings and temptations, rather than forcing something over top of them, and the creativity comes naturally.
Then again, I suppose that might just be a chronic lack of an attention span, which I've had years before I had internet access, so my experience is more than likely less common than average. There's simply too much to do and not enough hours in a day.
EDIT: I will say, though, that the internet's been incredibly beneficial to most, if not all, of those who've grown up with it - the world's never had a better comprehension of the English language.
Part of the problem is I'm starting a company, and am on low finances until it launches. So, I'm car-less, in a city not really meant to be walked, and it's a small town, so not much happens anyway.
Part of me wants to take a cheap job washing dishes, so at least I see people regularly, but I know it would be a waste of my talent, and I would hate it and quit after a day ( seeing how futile it was ), but seriously.. yea, I get what they mean.
Sorry I'm not being extremely articulate, I'm trying to wrap my head around the utility and role of the internet in my life moving forward.
But if it would make you happier, how can it be a waste?
Part of me would be happier, but more of me would still be miserable.
I think if/when I launch and can get some employees, an office, a cool culture, and some momentum, I'll be happier. Right now I'm just going through a tough time.
It also might make you miserable, I’ve seen both and I’ve been both in the same situation within the same day or week.
We spend a lot of our lives holding out for a future that may or may not happen, and may or may not play out as we intend.
It’s important to strike a balance between the (very important) future planning and the living in the present as best we can.
If you’re truly unhappy you should change something, it doesn’t have to be a drastic lifestyle change, just something that pushes you in the direction of feeling better about yourself and being a whole person.
In reality there’s no time other than the present, the world is too chaotic for any of our beliefs about the future to come true in detail.
This isn’t to quash your dreams, but being a dreamer is presumably part of the bigger picture of you as a contented person.
I live in a sleepy town in the SF Bay Area, and am exactly the same - there are days where I just don't talk to anybody. I don't feel anxious, but I feel kinda empty or lonely. I don't always want to go into the city because it's a hike, and I'm not sure what'd I'd do when I get there anyway. I found a volunteer organization that I go to two days per week, and have made friends and now occasionally hang out with them outside of the volunteer setting. The impersonal nature of HN and reddit made it a suboptimal replacement for actual face-to-face contact. Not to mention I find it more pleasant to spend some of my time not surrounded by startup and the tech world.
And no doubt. Especially with people (myself included at times) peering and swiping through lists of content as we try to coax ourselves to sleep at night— traditionally an optimal time for reflection.
I think it can't be emphasized enough how necessary it can be to just reflect a while without that everlasting pull to some other flighty distraction
When I'm never bored I feel like I'm too busy. Then when I get some small bit of downtime, I don't want to do anything because I never know when I'll get the next small bit.
This comes at the perfect time for me as I've been reflecting on my hobbies and how to make the most of them for my life.
I'm using it to do machine learning training. The Google crash course is excellent.
Well said.
> Perhaps we will see a renaissance of long form consumption...
The problem can perhaps be considered one of opportunity cost. In the time it takes to read that long form article, I could read a whole lot of "tiny bits of content". And in many ways, I have spent the last N years tuning myself for those tiny bits. So the long form article has to pay me back for the time I spend reading it, not just at the end of the article, but at least at the rate that the tiny bits of content do. Otherwise, I'll feel like the article is wasting my time, and I'll quit part way through, looking for something more stimulating.
Of course, the flip side is that all those tiny bits of content have their opportunity cost, too. The problem is that, for each one, it's just a tiny opportunity cost. But add them all together through a day (or worse, a year), and I lose a huge amount of time and mental energy on tiny little searches for stimulation.
That's very sad, and a direct result in my opinion of the gamification of digital attention. If it's not on ${social_network} and doesn't earn you Likes then it might as well not exist.
Even just pressing Random Article in Wikipedia would be a step up out of that abyss.
But first teenagers have to relearn the ability to self-discover, like previous generations did in libraries, instead of sitting staring at a feed waiting for something to be pushed to them.
And the second lesson might be that not everything has an immediate feeback. I still reach back to things that I learned about by chance on the Web and Usenet back in the 90s.
I don't think your assumption that these teens just don't know how to discover content is correct. The problem is that content isn't interesting. There's only so many times you can hit random on Wiki and stare at "List of famous dogs from Bollywood movies" before you want something more engaging.
Your comment, to my ears, sounds like "these kids need to put down their Nintendos and go play a nice game of kick-the-can!"
I think the problem is deeper than that. The problem is that even many of the interesting articles are only interesting in a certain way. I'm looking for something, and what I'm looking for isn't really here. And after a few years on HN (or Facebook, or Reddit, or Twitter, or whatever), I start to realize that the next article isn't going to really supply what I'm looking for, just like the last thousand didn't. So I'm bored even while I'm looking at the next HN article, hoping it will do the trick, and at the same time knowing that it really won't.
In my opinion it's teenagers thinking they know everything or think they are much smarter than they are with a new 2010's era spin.
It's like someone with a lifetime supply of Hostess snacks saying they're hungry. "But you have all the food you can eat!" Sure... for certain definitions of food. When you've been used to getting that cheap and quick hit of dopamine but then suddenly you're not getting the same positive feedback from your brain, it's jarring. And eventually you have to find some complex carbohydrates that take time to digest. It's not as immediately satisfying as sugar, but it balances out the highs and lows.
The Web to me these days is a maintenance dose. Just enough to keep me distracted for the amount of time I want to be distracted for. But nothing more.
Side question: Where do people find the freaks on the internets nowadays?
The other day I started thinking about how amazing toilets are – how much time they save every day. Bare with me. I went on thinking about the history of toilets, musing back to an ancient one I visited in Ephesus, Turkey. There were no toilet stalls. Between 6-10 holes in a bench, with flowing water underneath. According to our guide, this is one of the first toilets of its kind (citation needed). It must've been so amazing when they got this toilet. They probably talked about it all the time, and wanted to go there to hang out. It was a place of communion. Today toilets are utilities. They aren't exciting at all. You barely stop to wonder about the marvel you sit on. How much time it has saved you, or how the mechanics actually work.
The Internet will sort of become like that one day too. Just a utility.
This is the danger of using the internet for purely consumption/entertainment purposes and for short-term dopamine hits. Used to deepen your knowledge and further yourself in a subject, the internet is the greatest tool ever invented.
Incredibly sad that this is what the internet has been reduced to. It's not the internet that's boring; it's your vapid social circle!
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7xn6yv/what_yout...
Sometimes I've jokingly asked my family members if they've finished reading it (the Internet) yet. It's so sad that these limits are imposed - sometimes by ourselves but also often by the invisible walls of the corporate, private gardens. I guarantee there are enough educational (history/technology) and maker videos on youtube alone that I'd never get bored.
But if you're specifically looking for more to do where your friends are, you're going to be limited in the same way you would be in real life. When I started traveling extensively for business in the mid '90s, I made a point of being friendly to people in airports, restaurants, stores, etc. (Well ... those that wanted a conversation anyway). Expanding the pool of people that you talk to will inevitably lead to information pools that you weren't aware of.
As an analogy, it always amazes me to watch someone else using software - take git or even bash for example. I'll say "I didn't know you could do that" and when they ask how I accomplish a task, they generally learn something new too. I have (by far) more sites bookmarked that I've learned about here on HN than from any other source. I guess it's because we don't just repeat lip-gloss and fingernail polish styles here?
In 2018 you have to go out of your way to remember how novel and diverse both the internet and personal computing can be.
There is so much, SO MUCH, to do, to see outside our black mirrors, that we don't even realise. But it's much harder now than ever. Because our phones have made everything seem so easy, it cheapened many experiences (e.g. social interactions). Now that we have to go back we have to realise that the pace is much slower in real life.
reminds me of: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
A 15 year old kid who has "seen everything there is to see on the internet"? I mean, really.
This is the exact same 'restlessly disengaged' phenomenon humans have been experiencing since the dawn of the species. It's part of having a complex brain. Other animals probably even have it.
There is no end of stuff to do and see! Sometimes you just don't feel like doing anything. And that's okay. It might be better in my mind to consciously redirect, or to take a nap instead of zoning out on a screen, but to each their own.
This isn't necessarily a literal statement. There's just so much noise and nonsense to wade through as to be demoralizing. Or the excess stimulus is enough to just turn you off everything, in part why I try to minimize aimless surfing. It may take a conscious effort to stumble upon something of interest.
It reminds me of a book I read last year: Bored and Brilliant[1].
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Bored-Brilliant-Spacing-Productive-Cr...
I get your remark that the massive passive consumption leads to boredom, but I do not think that the format is the real culprit here.
I was terribly bored as a teenager. I didn't have the luxury of blaming the internet at the time. I was boring.
I'm a Millennial and had several friends complain regularly in high school and college that they were bored. They couldn't stand to be alone because they didn't know what to do with themselves. I never understood this. I was fine in groups and could be social and I was perfectly fine being alone for extended periods of time. I genuinely can't think of a time when I was bored when I was left alone. Sure, I've been bored in my life - but it has been when I was forced to do something or be somewhere I didn't want to be. Alone and in charge of my own time, though, there was always something I wanted to do, learn, etc. I think people like some of my friends and apparently Gen Z never learned to be alone or how to get lost in their own mind, whether that be through creativity or curiosity.
I've also noticed another troubling trend with Gen Z. Many of them have no passion, drive, or ambition. They don't really care about much of anything and simply want to be entertained all the time. I think that's the other side of this. I have younger siblings as part of this generation and nieces and nephews and they all seem to be aimless in life. Granted, they are still young and may not know for sure what they want to do, but for all but one of them they seem to have no interests or hobbies!
This wording might make me sound old and cranky but...when I was their age I was not like that. This isn't some romanticized hindsight bias from my childhood. I remember clearly. I had several interests that I was really, really into - science/math, computers/programming, tennis, and science fiction. I was fortunate enough to have parents who could afford to send me to places like tennis camp in the summer as well as computer camp (yes, that actually existed back in the 90's, believe it or not) so that I could further these areas of interest. My pure entertainment was through movies, music, and yes, gaming. But gaming wasn't done out of boredom. It was done for one of two reasons. First was the social aspect of multiplayer games like Counter-Strike and Goldeneye (which at the time had to have everyone in the same place). The second was for the fantasy aspect of gaming so that I could allow myself to get wrapped up into a well-told first person story with games like Myst, Half-Life, and System Shock.
Lastly, what truly astounds me is Gen Z's lack of curiosity. When Google and Wikipedia came around, I entered a whole new level of learning online. I could find and learn anything I wanted to, without having to hike to the library and try to figure out where to find the information I wanted (which I never did, because I hated going to the library). The internet became a massive educational resource to me. But Gen Z doesn't even use it for this purpose, as far as I can tell.
I don't think, as the article suggests, that the cause is that we have adapted. Instead, I think society has changed in a few other ways where instead of trying to curate children's curiosity and imagination, we have instead decided to follow stricter structures and schedules in a one-size-fits-all attempt at schooling, while decreasing funding for the arts and entirely getting rid of things like shop class. Combined with these structural changes, children have tablets from shortly after birth and they learn that entertainment (a.k.a. the eradication of boredom) is just a click away...until it suddenly isn't. And then when that hits, they don't know what to do, because they have never been in that situation ever before. Their mind literally can't function in the same way because it was never taught how to handle that scenario. So they click around through apps like zombies, accomplishing nothing, learning nothing, and remaining unfulfilled.
I think this is a symptom of a much bigger problem in society. I think there was a similar phenomenon during the collapse of the Roman Empire: people simply lost interest in maintaining the society and doing what was necessary to keep it going (such as specialization of labor), and it fell apart. People abandoned the cities to instead work for feudal lords, and the cities were sacked by invaders.
And of this, I have to admit, I am not guiltless. I don't feel connected to society in the same way I used to and I admit to having fallen into this mindset. I have actively tried a few times to offer something back (other than money) and no one seems to want it, despite their claims to the contrary. Case in point - I went on several forums offering completely free advice and support in helping people to lose weight as I have studied this topic extensively and made significant changes to my body through changing my eating habits. Only one single person even responded and then they didn't even follow through with a single communication. None of this was unsolicited, either. People directly asked for help and then wouldn't take it (despite being free). Others chastised me on the boards for what they thought was a scam ("it's not free, he'll hock products at you", despite my promise to not do so). I even put up fliers at my local grocery store and bus stops advertising the same. Not a single response. I tried to put up a flyer at my community center but they put up so many roadblocks just to let me put up a piece of paper advertising a free service, I couldn't get approval. So even when I try to pay it forward, so to speak, I can't even do that, so I just gave up and stopped trying entirely.
So now I'm more, "Fuck 'em, every man for himself. They're someone else's responsibility and they probably have a family anyway who should be helping. Not wasting my time." And that's really messed up and unfortunate.
Programming and architecture were basically my first two hobbies, and both were engaged through classes in high school. And I only had those opportunities due to a magnet high school that specialized in engineering and technology. (For instance, we still had a shop class, though it was a high-tech version with CNC mills and metal lathes... My friend liked to make aluminum lightsaber handles.) So I think you're absolutely correct in identifying schooling as an issue.
I think everything else you discussed before that last paragraph is just a product of a support structure you had, that not everyone else was fortunate enough to have. For instance, my mother was extremely focused on schooling and me being college bound, to the point where my C in history in middle school was completely unacceptable. Because middle school feeds high school and high school feeds college. Hobbies and other enjoyments were seen as distractions from schooling, not vital parts of my developing personality.
Hopefully this boredom will lead to the end of the society of the spectacle and commodity fetishism (bringing with them consumerism i hope).
Maybe this will result in a new approach towards entertainment, how to socialize between peers, art; it would be amazing if boredom would lead to a renaissance driven by science and helping others - let's see
Whilst I also like a bit of C&H, it's a cultural artifact from another generation. "(T)hese kids" don't need our C&H, they have their own, or will make it themselves.