The Winter of Our Disconnect Read online

  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 iPh
one, 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.

  Don’t get me wrong. I still think the App Store is among the greatest secular miracles of our age—and when I read somewhere in the second trimester of The Experiment about its billionth-download milestone, I paused for a moment of silence and longing. But I am reluctantly mindful of Thoreau’s warning that “our inventions are wont to be pretty toys which distract our attention from serious things.” Not that I ever really confused my virtual Zippo lighter for the torch of learning or anything, but the human capacity to be seduced and sedated by bright, shiny objects should never be underestimated. The Canarsie Indians who sold Manhattan for $24 worth of trinkets are still our spiritual brothers.

  When my own trinkets were taken away, I whiled away many an abruptly empty hour considering how the flight from boredom, so-called, has been systematically impoverishing all our imaginations. I’d certainly taken the “boredom defense” at face value, accepting uncritically that my children “needed” stimulation; that without it they’d be deprived—and, by implication, potentially destructive or intrusive. Like so many other modern parents, I’d taken it as a given that even tiny babies experience boredom. I never stopped to ask myself exactly what that meant. Like, when a three-month-old watches her fist as if it were the latest episode of Scrubs, what on earth can boredom mean?

  I recalled in high-resolution, cringe-making detail how unhesitatingly I’d diagnosed a case of premature boredom when Anni was that age and had trouble settling for naps. The interior of her crib must be too dull for her twelve-week-old sensibilities, I decided—its raucous profusion of music boxes, mobiles, activity toys, and stuffed animals ranging from teddy bears to stingrays (seriously, the kid had a stuffed stingray) notwithstanding. I was encouraged in this delusion by Penelope Leach, whose book Your Baby and Child was pretty much The Dummy’s Guide to Motherhood of its day.

  Leach’s view was that “fussy” babies, as she called them, were simply understimulated babies trying to communicate a need for better programming options. She was big on DIY boredom-busters, such as mobiles of dangling tea bags and Christmas balls and teaspoons, or “whatever is to hand.”

  I made one out of child-safe fishing tackle that would have put Alexander Calder to shame ... in so many ways. I staged mini-puppet shows, and worked for hours creating entertaining balloon faces. My masterwork—a yellow skull-shaped number grimacing as if from sleep deprivation—was something of a self-portrait.

  Baby Anni’s resolute failure to be amused by any of it suggested (to me and to Penelope, anyhow) that I simply wasn’t trying hard enough. Leach hinted openly that difficult babies were probably super-intelligent. It took me some months to wake up to the fact that, regardless, she was also super-exhausted. She didn’t need more entertainment. She needed less. Like mother, like daughter: She needed to sleep.

  Boredom is a bit like spastic colitis. It is massively overdiagnosed. Also like spastic colitis, we forget that it is essentially an effect, not a cause. Patricia Meyer Spacks refers to the word boredom’s “capacity to blur distinctions.” When we say something is “boring,” it is “an all-purpose term of disapproval.”4 It’s not dissimilar to describing a baby’s crying as “colic”—or for that matter an adult’s failure to thrive as a case of “low self-esteem.” Spacks, who happens to be a mother as well as a scholar, notes how often boredom is invoked as a screen for more difficult emotions within family life. She refers to “the hidden aggression—every mother knows it—in proclamations of boredom.” 5 Boredom implies victimhood, and even a quasi-self-righteous anger directed at the perceived source of the deprivation (i.e., you!).

  An inability or unwillingness to engage may be a side effect of physical fatigue, as we’ve just observed. Children who are sleep-deprived find everything boring (just as their mothers and fathers do). Less obviously, boredom may also mask fear: the fear of failing at some new undertaking, for example, or within a new social setting. Boredom can be erected almost as a shield, a force field protecting us from potential psychic harm. As the expression “numb with boredom” suggests, it can also function as a kind of psychic anesthetic. The real source of discomfort is blunted, or supplanted altogether—which is why, over the long term, addressing boredom by treating it with escalating doses of “entertainment” is a dodgy excuse for a cure. Interestingly, psychoanalysts have observed that boredom and clinical depression are closely related. “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!” moaned Hamlet. Translation: “Muuum ... I’m bored!”

  My own experience with boredom also suggests a connection to loss of control. Sitting trapped in a classroom, or at the laundromat, or on a station platform, or in a long-term relationship, or even a perfectly nice foreign country, may be labeled “boring”—but it’s really frustration borne of powerlessness. The resentment we feel at such times may get massaged into something more passive, more socially acceptable. Instead of getting mad, we zone out. In situations where, on the contrary, we perceive we do have what psychologists call “locus of control”—regardless of the level of stimulation we receive—we are less likely to invoke boredom. Even the illusion of choice helps us to reduce boredom’s dead weight.

  Paradoxically, too much choice can also induce boredom, or at any rate indifference—almost as if an overload switch has been tripped. An oft-cited study that found shoppers bought more jam the fewer varieties they had to choose from is a sweet illustration of the numbing effect that “options overload” can produce. Thirty years ago, when cable television was an innovation, the joke that you now had access to one hundred channels and there was still nothing on seemed the height of irony. Today it’s more in the nature of a truism. The dilemma has been noted by many observers, among them Orrin Klapp in Overload and Boredom, who points to the “major paradox that growing leisure and affluence and mounting information and stimulation ... lead to boredom—a deficit in the quality of life.”6

  The more interesting life becomes, in other words, the more boredom we are doomed to experience. Kinda fascinating, really.

  January 19, 2009

  Electricity still awesome.

  Bill and Anni to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button today ... together. (The Curious Case of Socializing Siblings?!)

  B. lobbied for reimbursement—“Thanks to you and YOUR experiment, we have nothing else to do!” Frankly too stunned to object. Last time they saw a film together was literally last century.

  Had hoped to save money, but can see error of expectation now. Between movies—FOUR this week for me alone—books, music lessons, and CDs (we’re allowed those, thank God), am cleaned out for the month already. “And don’t forget you promised to reactivate our gym memberships,” A. scolded. “It’s the least you can do.”

  Okay, okay. So in the early weeks, we hadn’t quite gotten the hang of “assuming the moral burden of our own boredom.” I was still pretty much carrying the can for all of us—and offering cash compensations, no less, when I let the side down.

  That same week, I went to a barbecue and found myself surrounded by a knot of admiring parents, avid to know how we were surviving. Honestly, I hadn’t been called “brave” by so many people since the last time I took the kids to midnight mass. One man, the deputy principal of a prestigious private boys’ school, told me he’d recently been ordered to smart wire the residence hall to allow the boarders “equal access” under the Digital Bill of Rights. “Parents nowadays consider Internet access an ‘essential service,’” he explained bitterly. “I think it’s nuts, but ...” He shrugged. “I guess no one wants their children to feel deprived.”

  I smiled just a little stiffly at that.

  Back at Test Pattern Central, the deprived ones were starting to find their sea legs. Within a day or two of the blacko
ut, Bill had fished his saxophone out of the toy closet, where it had long lain abandoned like some brass Velveteen Rabbit. Listening to “Summertime,” played on the deck after dinner in the waning light of a still-sultry midsummer evening, was my first moment of pure joy during The Experiment. “If it never gets better than this,” I mused in my journal, “I don’t care. It’s already been worth it.”

  It had been a ridiculously long time since I’d heard Bill play anything that didn’t involve a joystick or a mouse. Yet fewer than two years before, he was taking weekly lessons with a teacher he loved, and had even started talking about the possibility of a musical career. Then ... nothing. By the end of Year 9, he’d discovered water polo, World of Warcraft, and Windows Live Messenger. MySpace, SideReel, and a terrifying procession of first-person shooter games followed in swift succession. Music disappeared from the horizon, as if it too had been picked off by a sniper’s bullet. From time to time Bill would talk vaguely, almost nostalgically, about picking up his instrument again one day. As if music were a childish thing he’d put away along with his Meccano set and his beloved vacuum cleaner (the one he’d found on a rubbish heap and used to perform party tricks with marbles).

  He’d also acquired an iPod and seemed more focused on amassing music rather than making it—or even, necessarily, listening to much of it. I’d noticed the tendency in other teenage boys. (“Do you only have eight gigs? Aw, too bad, man. Me? I’ve got one-sixty.” Spit, swivel, and swagger, stage left.) They’d compare hard-drive capacity the way earlier generations boasted about horsepower or rifle caliber. At the same time as the iPod encouraged Bill to get excited about acquiring the ultimate playlist—mostly, it has to be admitted, by file-sharing stealth (polite terminology for breaching copyright)—it helped push music from the center to the periphery of his consciousness.