I can’t remember the last time I was properly bored. I don’t mean bored by something — a film I’m not enjoying or a conversation that’s gone on too long — but that old-fashioned kind of boredom when there was simply nothing to do. Waiting for a bus, sitting on a train, arriving at a pub before everyone else. There used to be quite a lot of it.
There isn’t anymore, obviously, because I have a phone. And I’ve noticed recently how quickly I reach for it. Not because there’s anything I particularly want to look at — most of the time there isn’t — but because there’s a spare minute and apparently I’ve decided that needs filling. I’ll check the news, look at football, open social media, close it and, embarrassingly often, open it again a minute later.
I’m hardly going to complain about smartphones. I’ve spent years writing about technology and I still think they’re extraordinary things. I can listen to almost any record ever made, find my way around a city I’ve never visited, take a decent photograph, read a newspaper or look up the name of that bloke who was in that thing without moving from my chair. I wouldn’t willingly give any of that up.
But I do wonder what happened to all the gaps.
I remember long train journeys with a newspaper, a book and, years ago, a Walkman. At some point you’d finish the paper or stop reading. The tape would reach the end. There wasn’t anything else, so you looked out of the window for a while. I don’t remember finding this particularly difficult. Sometimes you thought about things. Sometimes you watched the world go past. Sometimes, presumably, you were just bored.
Those moments have almost disappeared. If I’m waiting for somebody, I look at my phone. If I’m on a train, I look at my phone. Even watching television, I’ve occasionally caught myself looking at my phone while supposedly watching something on another screen. The ridiculous thing is that I’ll sometimes have to rewind because I’ve missed something — then find myself reaching for the phone again.
I suspect boredom was probably quite useful. Your mind wandered because there was nowhere else for it to go, and occasionally it wandered somewhere interesting. Ideas appeared. You noticed things around you. Or nothing happened at all — which I increasingly think might have been the point.
None of this means I’m about to have a digital detox or swap my smartphone for something that can only make calls and send texts. I like my phone far too much. But I am trying to notice when I take it out simply because nothing has happened for 30 seconds.
Perhaps the answer isn’t getting rid of the phone. It’s just remembering that not every empty moment needs filling — and that occasionally having absolutely nothing to do might actually be quite nice.