FREEDOM OF BOREDOM

“I’m trying to find myself” he said.

“Where did you last have yourself?” she asked.

There’s a peculiar silence that only exists at 4:37 – the kind that feels borrowed from a horror film’s pause before the scream. I had dreamt I was a traffic cone in a blizzard, silently observing humanity skid to their doom. Now I sat on the edge of my bed, lost somewhere between a sigh and a sneeze, illuminated by the blue glow of my phone screen, doom-scrolling through other peoples dreams. – This is how I imagine God spends his time, lost between disappointment and despair, with a hint of envy that tastes like battery acid.

Do you remember the good old days?

Where machines hummed and clicked and did not whisper back. 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.

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. I have become a tenant in my own life – surveyed, studied, sold.

So, I’ve begun to rebel.

I’ve turned to buttons – buttons with click and consequence, knobs that turn with stubborn friction, screens glowing green and don’t scream back. These are things with insides, guts I can unscrew, circuits I can trace, errors I can curse and fix – not replace.

There is joy in resistance, there is intimacy in the analogue.

They call it nostalgia, as if comfort were a disorder.

Indeed 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. A study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that nostalgia helps individuals cope with existential threats. But it’s different this time, for the existential threat is modern technology.

The internet used to feel like a place. A messy, glittering, neon-lit alley of ideas. We built homepages with blinking fonts. No brands, no followers, just expression – raw, awkward, awful, and beautiful.

Now the web is a shopping mall, and every corridor leads to a checkout.

Music once existed in my room, not in the cloud. 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. Not just black rectangles, but a Bop It you could personalise.

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. We drown 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.