I just drove five and a half hours from D.C. to Oak Hill, West Virginia, by myself, and partway through the trip I realized I can’t remember the last day (not week, day) that I didn’t look at a screen.
Phone when I wake up. Laptop all day. AirPods in whenever I ride my bike. Then at night I’m on the couch staring at the big screen while scrolling the small screen, which is a pretty ridiculous thing to admit... but you and I know its the truth. The TV is already the distraction. I need a distraction from that too.
Waiting used to just be part of life. Elevators, lines, airports. Walking somewhere. Sitting in the doctor’s office. Waiting for someone to show up. The minutes before a meeting. You didn’t do anything with that time. You just thought.
Our smartphones took these moments away and AI is probably going to finish the job.
Phone give you something to look at. AI stuff gives you a constant set of hands to get things done. You can knock out an email in the elevator, talk a draft into existence on the walk to your car or best yet build software over night that gets deployed by the time you wake up. Every little empty space can be productive now, or entertaining, or educational, or social, or optimized somehow.
There’s almost no situation left where you’re forced to just sit with nothing happening. A long drive alone might be one of the last.
Boredom is a weird state when you think about it. Once the world stops feeding your brain, your brain starts making its own stuff. It wanders. It replays some conversation you screwed up. It notices the hills. It connects the dots between things that, on the surface, have nothing to do with one another.
That’s more or less what happened in the car. It took a while, longer than I’d like to admit, but eventually my head started doing what the feed normally does for me. Nothing profound. It was just weird how unfamiliar it felt and motivated this meditation.
Marcus Aurelius has a passage about people always wanting to escape somewhere, a cabin, the coast, whatever, and he basically says it’s pointless because you can retreat into your own head anytime you want. Sure. He never had the luxury of trying that with a phone in his pocket.
I’d like to think tech gives us something to do while we wait. But I’m increasingly convinced that it has wholesale just obliterated the state of waiting as a thing most people experience at all.
Maybe this is just me. Maybe I’ve got a worse habit than most people and I’m projecting.
But I don’t think so. Look around next time you’re in a public space. Actually, you probably won’t, because you’ll be on your phone. So will I.
I think this is everyone. We gave up something none of us would have said was worth anything and so its become difficult to notice that its gone.
I’m not going to tell you to put your phone down. I’m not putting mine down either.
I don’t think I miss being bored.
I wonder what my mind used to do when it had no choice.