Let Us Be Bored and Uncomfortable Again

We’ve given our agency, attention, and desires up to a shiny pocket-sized device—now what?

What happened to the spaces between?

A month ago, I wrote about how social media is possibly making us worse people—or at least, that technology brings out the worst in us. There are plenty of well-cited details about how social media and technology use can lead to terrible outcomes in mental health, especially for young people. I won’t get into the data right now, but you can read Jonathan Haidt’s book or Erin Loechner’s book for more on the specifics of how mental health is impacted by spending a lot of time online. This is a topic I am greatly interested in, for both curiosity and career-related reasons, and therefore one I’ll continue to follow and discuss.

In that post, I mentioned the loss of the spaces between. These gaps of time present between activities, when we are not necessarily otherwise occupied, and we bridge these gaps with our phones. It happens when we’re in line at the register, or waiting for a movie to start, or for the dentist to arrive. At the first sign of a dull moment, or any moment not specifically designated to be spent doing something else—we automatically reach for the phone. We mentally justify that we’re doing work, or catching up with a friend, or just checking up on what that one influencer is doing… Whatever the reason we give to excuse our compulsive phone use, the underlying reason is because we have become habituated to constant virtual contact and entertainment. Our daily tasks and the space between them are riddled with phone use. Are we unsure what to do with ourselves without the crutch of our devices?

We can certainly acknowledge that yes, sometimes phone use is important and useful and positive. However, this argument—the benefits of social media and technology—is typically used to distract us from addressing how our constant phone use is actually problematic: that, in no such scientific terms, it’s kinda freaky how hooked we are to our devices, and it’s kinda freaky that we don’t—or can’t—go anywhere without them.

Do you relate? Or are you one of those people who have a very healthy, non-addicted relationship to your personal device and live an abundantly fulfilling life without any kind of social media?

I’d like to think I’m on my way to that. In fact, there is a growing number of people in my generation who are lamenting the personal devices, logging off of social media for good, and seeking freedom from Big Tech (is that what they call it?). In a 2022 study at Stanford, almost every Gen-Z interviewed chose ‘in person’ as their favorite form of communication—we still want to hang out with people, and social media will never be the preferred method of doing so.¹

In an effort not to generalize entirely, I’ll say that many people, at some point in their lives, desire to spend less time on their phones, or the internet, or whatever digital dependency they’ve developed. I guess some people never feel gross or guilty for spending hours scrolling, but I haven’t met them. As

Freya India

said in this article I responded to a month ago, “Maybe that funny feeling we get from social media isn’t always anxiety. Maybe sometimes that feeling is shame.”

If you get that icky feeling after having spent too much time on your phone, or when you find yourself compulsively checking your email or on the lives of online influencers—you’re not alone, and you are a part of this discussion.

Let us reclaim those spaces between.

How long are you able to without picking up the phone and checking on something in the virtual world? (It doesn’t count if you’re intentionally leaving it behind.) Do you feel good about that amount of time? Could you go an extended period of time without using your phone for non-communication purposes? (As in, could you use your phone as only a phone, a device that calls and texts, for longer than a weekend?)

Are you frustrated by how you’ve let so many of the juicy cracks of your life be filled with mind- and emotion-numbing content, fractionated clips of the lives of strangers?

(I am too!)

The phone exists as a sort of quick fix for our social and emotional problems: we can, pretty easily, avoid situations and uncomfortable feelings by going on our phones. The phone can immediately transport us away from our own life and problems, and into someone else’s life and problems; alternatively, the phone can be a buffer against awkward interactions, or prevent us from engaging with other people. Case in point: as a teenager, I used to pretend to be typing on my phone when I encountered other kids my age, to “show people” that just because I was alone right then, I wasn’t a loner or a loser. I had to let them silently know that I had friends to text. The phone was a strategy to avoid the discomfort of adolescence—and for many people, it still is a strategy to avoid the discomfort of life.

The phone is emotionally numbing, often enjoyable or entertaining, and sometimes genuinely helpful and important for our lives. And—we lose more than just time when we spend it online. I am interested in how people are reckoning with the apparent losses of what the media and internet bring us. No doubt, there are advantages of personal technology—but what are we losing when we hold a smartphone for 90% of our waking hours?

To name a few losses we might be facing: our time, our attention spans, our connection to Real People and the Real World. We may be losing neural pathways —our brains are being shaped by twelve-second videos, after all—and we may even be losing even our very desire to do something else.

That last one is where I want to dwell for a bit—that our phones are affecting our desires to do something else. Because the phone is designed to be addictive and keep us scrolling, it’s easy to condition ourselves to be sated by the endless stream of entertainment we have beneath our fingertips. If that’s the case, we risk our ability to build a satisfying and richly fulfilling life outside the phone—a life that requires us to work a little harder for the same dopamine release.

Consider that your phone use is actually replacing, or at least heavily influencing, your intuitive desires. If we are filling all the gaps in between with our phones…how do we access those desires? If our thoughts are constantly being influenced by whatever screen in front of us, when do we daydream about what we really want, what we could do with our lives?

Try boredom, see what happens.

What would happen if we let ourselves be a little bit bored and uncomfortable instead of reaching for the phone? What would happen if we allowed those interim moments to be filled with contemplation or conversation, instead of content?

As we tell the kids in our lives (or used to, anyways), it’s a good thing to be bored. Boredom can lead to creative innovation, new ideas, and when you respond to boredom, it can generate a sense of introspection and agency. Boredom asks of you: what do you want to do, and how could you do it? And then, generously, boredom gives you the time to figure out that answer.

If you, too, struggle with screen time for you and/or the children in your life, consider boredom as a way to address the problem. Consider letting yourself be uncomfortable with the little bits of time that aren’t dedicated to accomplishing something. Try just waiting in the waiting room, for once.

There are endless ideas for how to decrease your phone use, but that alone doesn’t solve the issue. As Erin Loechner, the author of the recently published book The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can’t, makes the smart observation that you can digitally detox all you want, but unless you are working to create a life you genuinely love outside of your phone, you’re going to keep wanting the phone and the quick feel-good hits it supplies to your brain.

So yes, keep detoxing or placing app time limits to mitigate the negative effects of social media. And, equally or more importantly, tend to your life outside the phone. Water it. Feed it. Add compost. Explore your inner and outer worlds; connect with people in your local area, invest into something you have to leave your home for. Nourish that naturally communal and creative brain of yours, and seek contact outside of the phone.

Try boredom and discomfort, see what happens.

Maggie

1. Cited from Loechner’s The Opt-Out Family. De Witte, 2022. Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.