An Ode to Being Bored

Readers of my blog will remember that I did a digital detox in January 2023. Readers of my blog will also remember that I had some criticisms of digital detoxes. I felt that doing something for a short period and then reverting back to business as usual was not the solution to reducing screen time in the long run.

In my blog post, My Thoughts On A Digital Detox, I stated that I felt in control of my digital usage. I devoted a whole section to it and wrote the following:

While I use Facebook, Google, and YouTube almost daily, I find Twitter and Instagram quite dull and only use them sparingly. I do not have a Television or Netflix and watch a small amount of YouTube or iPlayer while eating dinner in the evening, which doesn’t amount to more than an hour max. I only check emails, WhatsApp and Signal messages once daily unless something exciting happens in the groups.

Reading is a big hobby. I read a lot of books, probably well above average. I do cold water swimming three times a week, walk daily and hold down a job. This is on top of seeing friends, eating and completing chores.

But then, was I kidding myself? Was I any better than the average person? I play a computer game on my phone, only the one, and I binge-watch YouTube videos on decluttering and productivity.

Those of you with an iPhone can check your daily phone usage by going into your settings and looking at screen time. I was shocked by what I saw; that was only my phone. Someone entirely in the Apple ecosystem can check across devices, but those of us with a Windows PC can’t.

I tried a screen lock that would block apps after a specific time of day or a certain length of use. That seemed childish and inconvenient, as I had to use the phone outside my set time boundaries for work. I turned off the settings and carried on as usual.

According to the Selectivv website, the average person spends about 3 hours and 43 minutes on their phone daily. Let this sink in for a minute, nearly 4 hours on your phone! I am not that bad with my phone, but I also have a tablet and a laptop and using those is screen time, too.

For my Easter holiday in Devon, I decided to drastically reduce my screen time and travel without my iPad or laptop for the first time in years. After all, I had a Kindle full of books and hiking trails to be explored.

My experiment did not go well. I was on my phone before leaving the house to go to the station. I had to look up my exact train time and best route, which served as an excuse to play a few levels in Two Dots. I told myself that my detox would start in Devon; I wasn’t quite on holiday yet, yeah, right!

Once in Devon, the weather was shit, and my hiking turned into long stints in tearooms and pubs. You can’t read 24/7; you need to do something else occasionally. You need your phone. (No, you don’t, but…)

I was pretty good; I didn’t miss YouTube, I didn’t read the news, and I didn’t spend all hours scrolling, but I still used my phone more than looking up routes or opening hours of museums. But why?

Why could I not just sit there doing nothing? In 2017, Manoush Zomorodi wrote a brilliant book entitled Bored and Brilliant: How Time Spent Doing Nothing Changes Everything, in which she explains our relationship to devices and our inability to be bored.  

My son and the iPhone were born three weeks apart, in June 2007. I’m more of a 2.0 kind of woman, so I didn’t rush out to buy one, and anyway, I had more pressing things to tend to. My new baby was colicky and miserable. I spent hours pushing him around, trying to soothe him to sleep, which he would do only when his stroller was in motion. We probably wandered the equivalent of ten to fifteen miles a day. Our walks were also very quiet because my newborn required utter silence to snooze longer than fifteen minutes at a time, so I couldn’t talk on my flip phone or get coffee from the local store or even just sit on a bench. The baby weight flew off, but I was the most bored I had ever been in my entire life. At first, I was angry, frustrated, and sad. It was the classic story of my generation: A woman goes from urban professional to cloistered mom in one shocking instant.

…

I had long ago traded in my old flip phone for a smartphone, and now it seemed I spent every spare minute on it. Whether waiting for the subway, in line for coffee, or at my son’s preschool for pickup, I was engaged in some kind of information call-and-response. I checked the weather, updated Twitter, responded to emails. When I flopped into bed at the end of an exhausting day, instead of turning out the lights, I chose to fire up Two Dots—a game that I couldn’t stop playing despite myself. I wasn’t using my smartphone to connect. I was using it to escape. Scrolling through Twitter made my long commute disappear. Updating my calendar obsessively gave me the feeling of productivity. As my life ramped up, so had the pace and quantity of my technology consumption. My brain was always occupied, but my mind wasn’t doing anything with all the information coming in.

In trying to figure out when, in the past, my best ideas had come to me, I was reminded of my time with Kai. During those long, solitary, tech-free walks, where I was cataloguing the details of everything, I saw around me.

Manoush Zomorodi concluded that being bored allowed her to think and develop ideas. Like me, she feels that mobile phones have a place in our lives, but that time away from screens and doing nothing is good for us, and we need to allow ourselves to experience boredom. As Andy Warhol said: ‘I like boring things.’

In her book, Manoush goes into much more detail on the benefits of boredom. She also goes on to explain her reservations about digital detoxes:

I don’t like it when people call Bored and Brilliant a “digital detox.” I’m not against the idea of powering down completely for a specific period of time. Those kinds of breaks are great, when and if you can manage them. But locking your phone away in a drawer doesn’t help you develop better habits once that phone is back in your hands.

For her, as for me, rather than completing regular detoxes, we need to find new, more innovative ways of relating to our digital devices. Technology is here to stay and helps us with everyday life in many brilliant ways. We can look up the weather, traffic and exact times for buses.

What I’m advocating is balancing the way we use technology and making sure, as best we can, that our gadgets align with what we hold dear and true. Yes, we are up against billion-dollar companies and leagues of highly educated and intelligent people paid a lot of money to keep us in a digital feedback loop. But there are actions we can take—and some of them aren’t any harder than giving a folder a funny name—to contain the information and stimulation threatening to overwhelm us at every turn.

So, rather than ditching my phone, I will try to use it more mindfully and learn coping strategies for dealing with boredom. Standing at the bus stop doing nothing should be easy. We did it in the pre-digital age, so why do we need to get out our phones when we have nothing else to do? Why can’t our phones stay inside our bag, and our eyes wander at what goes on around us? We need to get back to being alone with our thoughts, with being uninspired and bored.

Put your phone away, be bored, go on, try it!

trabantbettina

Bettina Anna Trabant, Founder of Life Organised, your professional organising and decluttering service in East London. Eco-conscious minimalist and avid tea drinker,