Shhh / Peaceful — Miles Davis
#365Songs: March 27th
Warning: this is going to be one of those “when I was a kid” posts. But listen, this one is important. I promise.
I grew up on a quiet street in a blue collar suburb in one of the country’s most broken towns. I was as restless as a kid as I am as an adult, and boredom loomed in every direction. And like all bored kids, I resisted everything and annoyed my parents to take me somewhere, buy me something, play with me. Sometimes I’d find a friend, and we’d ride bikes to a park to play basketball or baseball; sometimes I’d play Barbies with my neighbor, or build a Lego village loudly in our living room. I read a lot, created puppets out of sandwich bags and put on theatrical shows. One time a friend tried to turn my Big Wheel into a motorcycle — and as a result it became a thing that never moved again.
Some of my friends started fights, stole cigarettes and bad beer, set shit on fire; some of us made out behind trees. One time a few of us called hundreds of “Children’s line” numbers listed in the phonebook, which led twice to making out behind a tree with stolen cigarettes and bad beer.
Boredom is dangerous, exhilarating, filled with endless possibilities. I’m certain now there are few things in life more vital than boredom.
I was a bad student because I was bored of the other kids, the teachers, the school, the city, the state. I buried myself in books because that’s where life lived, where things happened, where interesting people met interesting people, experienced dramas and romance and overcame danger. I fidgeted, hid a paperback in my lap and read while teachers taught. I wasn’t taken seriously because I didn’t take any of it seriously.
I was bound for nowhere but the dusty stacks of a library, escaping that town one page at a time.
And then early in my Junior year, I decided to take an AP English class. The moment I walked in, a few weeks after school started, my scholarly friends and the rest of the class looked up and laughed, one kid even said, “Smith, you’re in the wrong class. Shop is down the hall.” They laughed; I laughed back.
Over the course of a few weeks, something happened. I started talking in class, and my critical thinking skills was celebrated rather than ostracized. The other kids listened, nodded at my observations.
But the one thing I remember most is the teacher, that one most of us have at some point in our lives who we point to as our turning point. He told us that he’s never bored. Of course us kids didn’t understand. Life is fucking boring, not a damn chance. But he said it over and over, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. What he meant, I realize now, is that he was never bored for long because he let himself move beyond the boredom, where the good stuff lives.
If asked today, I’d say the same. I’m never bored, at least not for long. When I let just enough time pass, when the boredom is verging on insanity, something fires up in my brain, ideas flow, questions come to mind. That’s when art happens, when inventions are schemed up, when time stops and the impossible becomes possible.
But it’s different now. Boredom never comes because there’s always a phone, a laptop, an endless doom scroll of cat videos, Google searches, Instagram photos, conspiracy theories, clickbait rabbit holes, text messages, and emails. An endless excuse to never be bored again.
In this week’s Atlantic, writer Jonathan Haidt wrote a story about phone-based childhoods. He said, “Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States — fairly stable in the 2000s — rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.”
Though he rightfully blames the phone — as does every other mental health study in recent years — he never directly identifies the real problem: boredom is dead. Kids aren’t bored enough to discover new passions, try new things and fail before trying new things once more; they’re not bored enough to build a rocket with Legos, scrape together scraps and design a multi-room fort, write scripts that become little films, make music with pots, pans, and a wooden spoon.
Kids aren’t bored long enough to discover what they truly love.
I’ve seen this with my own kid. Admittedly as a busy parent, I’ve often failed to push him to stay bored long enough because I, too, need him occupied to create enough peace necessary to get my own shit down. So it’s easy to say sure, play Fortnite, sure watch Youtube soccer videos—and then the algorithm does what the algorithm does and sends him to places he doesn’t belong). But in those moments when boredom does strike, and he sits in it long enough, suddenly I’ll hear scampering, chaos, the noises of a kid doing something, and then hours later he’ll have hacked all my electronics, solved the homeless crisis with pop-up cardboard homes, made a comedy reel of pratfalls, learned all the lyrics to his favorite song.
Boredom is innate, essential. It’s the last ingredient our brains need to make things. Sure, sometimes it makes trouble, sometimes it makes messes, but so often it leads to the most beautiful creations in our lives.
Let’s try to be bored again. Next time you’re in a quiet moment, don’t grab for the phone. Let the restlessness kick in, let your distracted urges pass, and wait. Just wait, and wait, and wait until the magic happens.
