There were times when I was that age that my young friends and I would look at each other with the same bored look. We'd ask each other endlessly, "What do you want to do?" Then the exchange which followed would innumerate the reasons why it was too hot or too cold to play that way, or that we always did that, and it was now BORING.
It would have been tempting to trade this boredom and the work it took to relieve the feeling for all the choices which exist today. The online options are endless and habit-forming. The vast amount of offerings with streaming TV and music are overwhelming. The online gaming competions are completely captivating of one's entire imagination. None of these options are boring. Quite the opposite, the feeling of boredom has largely been eliminated and ironically produces a different type of feeling I'll call tedium. It's become tedious to choose between all the alternatives we have before us. Not to mention, these choices don't necessitate leaving the house or the security of our Internet communcations devices: phone, tablet, laptop, or gaming box. To tell the truth there is little difference between these gadgets, only size and the speed of the CPU which runs it.
My point being the main difference between now and back then is when we felt bored it was usually in a group of two or more. If you were bored by yourself, only you had to decide which book to read, or hobby to pursue or which of the 7 channels delivered by antenna on the pre-cable era TV to view. These were enough if whatever age-related chores had been completed. We raked leaves or shoveled snow long before we were allowed to use power tools to cut the grass and clip the hedges and bushes.
Another huge change that has occured is with these same said chores. There are certainly fewer children doing chores, or at least ones any previous generation would recognize. For example, all paper routes were lost along with the decline of the newspaper industry. All yard work has been outsourced to teams of workers with power tools we could only have dreamed about for pushing leaves into piles, cutting grass, and blowing snow from sidewalks. Errands to pick up and deliver samll articles are completed by package delivery and messenger services.
These alterations to once was the normal routine of growing up leave us with more tedium and less boredom. Does that sound like splitting hairs? Maybe. I'll leave that to posterity, and what was once the realm of letter writers to decide. Sounds like an idea for a future post.
Posts
