Boredom
Post last updated 3 months, 2 weeks ago
This is my take on Winther's Bear Blog Carnival February 2026, the topic being, as you might have guessed, boredom.
It's a topic I've thought about from time to time, especially since the pandemic, because I can't really remember the last time I felt truly bored. If I were to guess, somewhere before the lockdown-probably at a university lecture by a bland professor. It was also a time I wasn't using my phone as much as I do now; heck, until late 2020, occasionally my friends and I had no trouble not checking our phones once when we were going out.
Earlier, growing up in a small village, I had my agenda pretty full, either with school, helping my parents around the house, going out, or just playing on the PC. I didn't really have time to get properly bored, but I wasn't feeling bad about it either.
I am a lot busier than before, of course, having a full-time job and keeping an active social life and whatnot, though I do get bored: at work when I have nothing else to do for the day, waiting in a queue at the dentist, or just sitting at the laptop. But now, every little in-between time I have, I'm filling with scrolling on my phone or laptop, mindlessly switching tabs or apps.
Get rage-baited by a Reddit post, watch half an hour of brain-rot memes on Instagram and lose ten IQ points, read a moron's take on the current geopolitical situation on Facebook-this sort of thing. As far as I know, I still have a decent1 screen time-around three and a half hours-but it's mostly garbage time.
I've noticed that the lack of boredom is fucking, besides my attention span, my ability to have my own thoughts. I read, listen to, and watch the opinions, arguments, and ideas of countless people in a day-most of them unadvised in what they say-but I don't have time to form my own ideas and arguments. I cannot properly listen to what the person next to me is saying because it might be slightly boring, and I just have to do something-anything-but fiddle with my fingers and my thoughts.
I see this with people of any age: my mom, who doesn't even know how to properly use a phone and is watchmaxxing TikTok; the 2-year-old who just gets handed a phone or tablet so the parents don't have to deal with them; and me, who thought I had control, but at some point it slipped.
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It's a lot worse than I wish, but a lot better than some of my friends.↩