I miss being bored.
It sounds ridiculous, I know. Of all the things to miss, boredom must rank somewhere below delayed flights and lost luggage. Nobody ever wished for it. As children, we complained about it constantly, and adults had an infuriating habit of replying: “Then go and find something to do.” Somehow, we always did.
These days, finding something to do has never been easier. Finding a moment when you're not is the hard part.
I was thinking about this at a departure gate recently. The place was full but oddly silent. Not because nobody was talking, but because nobody was talking to anyone in the room.
A man in a suit was watching what looked like a football match with no sound at all. A teenager was laughing at something the rest of us couldn't hear. A young couple sat shoulder to shoulder, scrolling through two entirely separate versions of the world. It struck me that we had all left long before the aircraft had.
Flying used to be one of the last places you could not be reached. Once the doors closed, the world had to wait. Now the Wi-Fi is creeping aboard. Even when it hasn't, most of us have packed enough downloaded films and podcasts to circle the planet twice. The headphones go on before the safety demonstration is over. The one thing we can't seem to download is an idle moment.
It isn't only flying. Watch anyone waiting for a lift. Nobody simply waits. They check. Messages, news, scores, weather, a stranger recommending a restaurant they will never visit. Even a pan of milk set to boil has become a chance to check whether civilisation has survived the last three minutes, though milk takes a dim view of being ignored and tends to announce as much all over the stove.
We are, admittedly, a strange species. We carry in our pockets more books than most old libraries held, more music than a radio station could play in a year, and enough films to last us until retirement. And still you will hear someone sigh that there's nothing to watch. That takes a peculiar sort of talent.
Reed Hastings, who co-founded Netflix, once said the company's real competitor wasn't another studio. It was sleep. As a piece of business strategy, it's brilliant. As a description of how we actually live, it's a little frightening. Sleep. Not a rival service, not the cinema. The basic human need to lie down and switch off.
And notice who didn't even make the list. Boredom. Sleep at least put up a fight, the one stretch of the day a screen still can't quite reach. Boredom wasn't knocked out in the final. It never qualified. We don't lie awake bored anymore. We lie awake watching one more episode. Which is arguably worse.
Because boredom, when we actually had it, was never the empty thing we made it out to be. Long journeys used to come with their own pace. You looked out of the window because there was nothing else to look at.
I still remember train rides where the landscape did all the entertaining. A cluster of houses. A farmer walking behind his cattle. Children playing cricket in a dusty field. A man cycling furiously, perhaps late for an appointment only he knew about. I knew nothing about any of them, and that never once stopped me wondering who they were and where they were going.
The strange part is that I remember those journeys far more clearly than I remember the last film I watched at 30,000 feet. Perhaps because my mind had something it rarely gets now. A bit of room.
It would be easy to blame the technology, but that lets us off too lightly. Technology isn't the villain. It is simply very good at solving problems, and somewhere along the way we decided boredom was one of them. I'm no longer sure it was.
Looking back, I don't think I was ever truly bored on those trains. I was just temporarily unoccupied, which turns out to be a different thing altogether. It was where the mind wandered off and came back carrying something. Where you noticed what you would otherwise have missed. Where ideas turned up unannounced, usually when you weren't looking for them.
We've become so good at killing time that we've forgotten how to spend it. Every gap now demands to be filled, and every pause feels like a waste. Somewhere between the smartphone and the streaming queue, we lost the knack of sitting with our own thoughts without inviting something louder in.
The next time I fly, I'll probably do exactly what everyone else does. If there's Wi-Fi, I'll connect. If there isn't, I'll watch one of the documentaries I dutifully downloaded and then ignored in favour of browsing for something better, because apparently I now need a back-up plan for my back-up plan.
But I might leave the headphones in the bag for a while. I might look out of the window instead.
And somewhere in all that empty space, I might just find that man again, cycling furiously towards an appointment only he knows about. I never did find out where he was going, and that is rather the point. I don't want to look him up. I just want to wonder.
I miss being bored.
The writer is a UAE-based communications consultant
