FREEDOM OF BOREDOM

Do you remember the good old days when boredom wasn’t so… ‘active’?

Where machines hummed and clicked without taking notes, a time before our lives became subscriptions stitched together by swipes, before we stared into glass rectangles like moths drawn to panels of artificial light, projecting artificial aspirations, – even intelligence is following the trend.

Today’s tech is a masquerade – polished, indifferent, and leased. My music, once held in my hands, now behind a subscription. My books flicker on a plastic page, not behind a subscription, but instead could vanish with a policy update or a sudden end of service. I do not own, – I temporarily access, I do not collect, – I rent, for I have become a tenant in my own life – surveyed, studied, sold.

So, I’ve begun to rebel. I’ve turned to push buttons and clicky knobs, screens subtly glowing green instead of screaming like a SAD lamp. The things with insides, guts I can unscrew, circuits I can trace, errors I can fix – not replace.

There is joy in resistance, there is intimacy in the analogue, but they call it nostalgia, like comfort is a disorder.

Apparently, interestingly, to me at least, research indicates that nostalgia often intensifies during times of uncertainty or stress. This emotional response can provide comfort, reduce anxiety, and foster a sense of identity and meaning. The study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that nostalgia helps individuals cope with existential threats.

But I feel it’s different this time, for the existential threat is the actual modern technology, that is not only disappearing from my hands, but is also chaining them.

Music once existed in my room, you could see it spool, hear it warp, as the hiss of a tape told the story of your acquisition. Phones had personality, in every colour, every shape, that could flip, turn, slide, like a Bop It you could personalise. And I just miss physical stuff, useless boring old stuff that you had handed down through generations, no subscription, and no worth except the worth that you and you alone held to it. The photographs and books that you could date chronologically based on smell alone. The feeling of indentations on typed paper, – the markings of the aching fingertips it cost to pound each letter amongst the mechanical clicks and clacks of the typewriter.

And what we’ve lost most of all – what no one mourns loudly enough – is boredom.

Boredom was the birthplace of thought, it was where wonder lived and danced, but now we scroll, forever, drowning thought before it forms, trading our inner monologue for someone else’s feed.

I don’t want tech that babysits my brain or studies my sleep like I’m a lab rat with a subscription plan. I want tools that serve me – not markets that feed on me. I want slowness, tangibility, with the romance of unreliability that I can fix with a pencil. I want colour, the crackle, and time.

I want the freedom of boredom.