It seems almost exotic nowadays. These days, a few seconds of downtime are enough for our hand to automatically reach for the phone. Two minutes before the underground arrives: phone. Someone goes to the loo in a restaurant: phone. An advert starts on the telly: phone. We’re waiting for a file to download: phone. We wake up in the middle of the night: phone.
We have gradually achieved something quite extraordinary: eliminating almost all downtime from our days. And we’ve called it progress.
Of course, the smartphone is a marvellous tool. It allows us to communicate, work, take photographs, get around, read, listen to music, learn almost anything and talk instantly to someone on the other side of the world. The problem isn’t the device itself. The problem begins when the device becomes the automatic response to every second when nothing is happening.
For perhaps boredom once served a purpose. When there was nothing to look at, we were forced to look elsewhere. Sometimes outside, sometimes at others, sometimes within ourselves. We used to imagine, reflect, remember, daydream, make up absurd stories, link two completely unrelated ideas, and wonder what we were going to do with our lives. In short, our brains were working without being constantly fed something to consume.
Nowadays, such moments are becoming rare. Every spare moment can be immediately filled by a video, a message, a news item, a photo, a game, a notification or the face of a stranger explaining something on camera for thirty seconds.
The phenomenon is particularly noticeable amongst the youngest, but it would be very convenient to believe that it only affects them. The debate over the role of smartphones in schools has intensified further in France, and some parents are now looking for devices with more restricted features, specifically to ensure their children can be contacted without giving them immediate access to the entire world of the smartphone.
This debate goes hand in hand with another concern: that of reading and the ability to remain focused on a text for long enough. Social media and screen time are regularly cited in this discussion, even though they obviously cannot, on their own, explain academic difficulties or the decline in certain cultural practices.
But behind the educational issue lies something perhaps even more profound: we are in the process of changing our relationship with time.
We are becoming less and less tolerant of waiting. A video must start immediately. A reply must arrive quickly. A page must load instantly. A film that doesn’t grab our attention within the first few minutes is abandoned. A song with an intro that goes on too long may be skipped. A conversation that drags becomes an opportunity to check our phones.
Even our leisure activities must now constantly prove that they deserve our attention.
The paradox is remarkable: we’ve probably never had so much entertainment at our disposal, and yet we seem to get bored more and more quickly.
In the past, boredom was caused by a lack of stimulation. Today, it might be caused by an excess of it. When our brains get used to receiving a constant stream of new information, a normal situation can start to seem hopelessly slow. A walk without music. A meal without a mobile phone. A train journey without a video. A conversation that takes its time. A three-hundred-page book.
Anything that doesn’t change every fifteen seconds is then likely to seem too slow.
And here, something begins to go far beyond the issue of screens. Because life itself is slow. Learning something is slow. Loving someone is slow. Writing a book is slow. Building a friendship is slow. Understanding a complicated idea is slow. Watching a child grow up is extremely slow. Creating a work of art is often terribly slow.
So we are in the process of creating tools capable of speeding up almost all our activities, whilst the most important things in life stubbornly continue to take time.
Perhaps that is why boredom deserves to be rehabilitated. Not the boredom endured for days on end, that of isolation or unease, but that little, mundane boredom lasting just a few minutes. The sort where absolutely nothing happens.
It possesses a virtue that has become almost revolutionary: it does not seek to capture our attention. It gives it back to us.
Many ideas are born precisely in those strange moments when the brain ceases to be occupied by an immediate task. In the shower. Whilst walking. On a train. Looking out of a window. A few minutes during which we stop receiving information and our mind finally begins to produce its own.
Artists are well acquainted with this space. Creating is not merely a matter of accumulating references, images, sounds and information. There must also be a void between them. A mental space where two things that appeared to have no connection whatsoever can suddenly come together.
Yet this void is becoming rare.
We now carry the whole world in our pockets. It’s extraordinary. But the whole world has one flaw: it never falls silent.
There will always be a new video, a new controversy, a new message, a new disaster, a new photo, a new person to look at. The flow is endless, whilst our time is not.
So perhaps the true luxury of the future will not be having access to more content. We already have it all. Luxury could become exactly the opposite: managing to do without it for a few moments.
To sit somewhere, looking at nothing, listening to nothing, posting nothing, learning nothing, optimising nothing, and simply waiting.
It might even be that, after a few minutes, something quite unexpected appears.
A thought.
