When I was ten, my parents divorced. Among the myriad of effects this had on me and my life, one of them was that I sat in the backseat of the car by myself a lot. If we were going anywhere, it was one of my parents driving and my older brother sat in the front seat. Usually, there was music playing. Combined with road noise and the fact that they were facing away from me and didn’t go out of their way to include me in conversations, and I wound up staring out the window, lost in my own thoughts.
I’ve been thinking about those back seats a lot recently because that boredom was the crucible of telling myself stories to entertain myself. These days, you don’t need to ever be bored, if you don’t want to be. It’s so easy that, for the longest time, I didn’t even recognize what I was doing: when I would walk from one end of the building to the other, I’d pull out my phone and start scrolling. Of course, I see people driving with their phones in their hands all the time.
I think that we’ve lost something, some crucial thing that has atrophied almost overnight. It seems like we can’t stand to be bored anymore, even for one moment, because we’ve lost or are quickly losing the creative spark paired with our shortening attention span that allows us to cope with boredom.
I’m trying to get back to that feeling, of looking out the window and letting the stories in my head play out. Reading more is helping. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve moved my nonfiction reading to the living room so I can read instead of scrolling. I’m also trying to be more cognizant of when I’m just scrolling and not really looking for anything. It’s an ongoing process, but I feel like I’m making some good progress. I even just look out the window sometimes while I drink my coffee in the morning. It’s nice.
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How long can you go without looking at your phone?
The Chimerical Dark 