This Summer, Refuse to be Bored
My kids know exactly what I will say to them if they tell me theyʼre bored. I have a canned response I started using years ago: “Only boring people are bored. Youʼre not boring. Figure out something to do.”
In the history of the English language, words for boredom are relatively new. The word does not appear in our language until the 1850s. In different times and different generations, people simply didnʼt have a category for boredom. Words like bore and boredom emerged in the world of high class elites who had servants to do their every bidding and no need to work for survival.
Our Entertainment Makes Us More Bored
The irony is that while our society tries desperately to remove boredom, we grow more bored. We have learned how to fill the smallest gaps of our lives with entertainment, but it seems only to enhance the problem. By continually looking to entertainment to get rid of boredom, we are repeatedly blinding ourselves to the beauty and goodness of the real world, while simultaneously feeding ourselves ultra-amusing stimulation. We have endless things to look at, videos to watch, posts to engage with. By comparison, birds, mountain vistas, ant hills, and sunrises start to feel boring. The world of the screen - bright colors, fast movement, personalized algorithms - have become far more appealing than palm trees, snowy mountains, and, well, real people. The screens we use to cure our boredom are actually making us more bored with the real world. This is not good, since the real world is where we are called to live.
Boredomʼs father is blindness and its mother is discontent. Boredom is just one expression of spiritual blindness to the goodness of God. Rather than seeing creation as good and beautiful, given by God to be enjoyed by his creatures, the bore sees it as bland and uninteresting. Rather than seeing life circumstances as being guided by the good hand of Godʼs providence, the bore is unhappy with Godʼs placement of him in life. The bore opens every gift on Christmas morning, but afterwards complains that the giver didnʼt actually get him anything he wanted. The problem, of course, is not with God. The problem is that the bore wanted all the wrong things. Why did he want the wrong things? Because he is blind to God.
Boredom says, “Whatever is here, right in front of me, is not enough for me. I am discontent with it.” Boredom is a rejection of Godʼs world and the responsibilities heʼs laid upon us. It is a refusal to value his gifts and it questions his generosity. Boredom is a heart issue. Parents should be highly attentive to the presence of boredom in their childrenʼs lives.
When a child looks at all the world given to him, and finds none of it is interesting, be alarmed. In youth, we call this boredom. In age, despair.
When a child is restless, bored, and requiring attention, the easiest thing for a parent to do is to squelch the disturbance by giving the child a bright, glowing rectangle to look at. A show, a game, an amusement will almost immediately tranquilize the child and give the parents peace. Weʼve all done this, and there is a time and place for everything. But we must know that this is only a short-term solution, and if we continue to apply this method it will only make the child increasingly unhappy with the world he inhabits, and make him long for the virtual world his technology can give him. In reaching for the rectangle, we may be quietly teaching our children that the Creatorʼs world is not worth their attention.
We Are Not Victims
We are not victims of boredom, we are guilty of it. When we feel bored, we are tempted to immediately think the problem is outside of us. It is the situation weʼre in, the people weʼre with, the life weʼre living. But this is misinterpreting the situation. Godʼs world, objectively, is not boring. And our current circumstances, whatever they may be, are hand-crafted by divine providence. Boredom is blindness, and it is the fault of the one experiencing it.
