Technology has supplanted boredom.
I’d love to pry that phone out the Kid’s hands some day, lock it in a box, and tell her that she’s got it mixed up. She razzed me the other day because I was vibe coding. She literally shouted in my face that I shouldn’t be using AI. “Dad! That stuff is evil.”
I shook my head and kept my cool and told her that security checking my web code through Claude for hacking vulnerabilities was not the same as generating slop in a chatbot. Both AI, sure, but different realms.
And besides, I thought later as I was out for a walk alone (exercising the dog and daydreaming up my next article) you have your face plugged into a phone screen ninety-five percent of the day. Creativity is not going to bubble magically through that device and make you a better human, is it?
Grumpy old man could shake his fist in the air and shout “oh, the kids these days…” but it’s not just the kids, is it?
When was the last time you left your phone in a different room—and the outside the bathroom door is not good enough of an answer, though that’s getting rarer and rarer too if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by.
Boredom is the heart of my personal creativity.
Boredom—when I turn off the screen, leave out the headphones, walk without conversation, run without headphones, sit without a television, lay in the grass without a book or a game—that’s when the good stuff flows.
We’re all increasingly distracted by entertainment and technology is a garden of distraction.
What hope does boredom have in the face of unlimited options to consume our minds. What hope does human creativity have at the loss of true boredom.
This is a cross post from Of Poets & Processors.