Vital Signs: Boredom and Youth

Boredom

Entertainment can be the medicine for the sickness of boredom. What is boredom? Most succinctly, it is a sort of privation. It is the absence of an object of consciousness that retains one's interest. It is a vacancy in the house of the mind. It is a void which causes the structure of consciousness to collapse into itself in dejection and disappointment. If boredom gives rise to a desire for entertainment, what gives rise to boredom? Literally, nothing is boring. Boredom occurs when something is missing.

To be bored is a mode of consciousness. It is the feeling of emptiness. As the whole body aches during dehydration, so the whole mind aches during boredom. The emotion felt along with boredom, ennui, contains the revulsion of pain, but more generalized than localized. It is a manifestation of languishing. It is the nearest one comes to an awareness of the inner process of decay. Protracted boredom atrophies the will. One wants something more, but has been so long without something, one is unwilling to pursue more. The capacity for thought decreases. One sees nothing to draw upon. The emotions dull from the luster of ennui to the matte of apathy to the stain of depression.

For instance, a person feels bored while waiting twenty minutes for a doctor to enter the little white room where she has been deposited. There is no noise. There are no colors. Even the smell is notable for its absence. Her senses are not stimulated. She cannot abide in deprivation. Early in the process, perhaps she seeks something out. She searches the drawers for a magazine or for useful items to pilfer. She thinks about her shortage of bandages, or her need to go to the pharmacy, or her route to the nearest one, and so on. She has managed to fill her consciousness, thus avoiding boredom. Has the outer world offered anything new or additional? No. The room is as sparse as it was before. She has created material to occupy herself. As children, the acts of creation come from the playful imagination. As adults, the imagination is conscripted into practical concerns and is accustomed to thinking of plans and tasks. Either way, one may stave off boredom by taking mental leave of lackluster environments.

Youth

Boredom first and most simply afflicts the youth. Understanding their discontent is an appropriate starting point.
The explanation for boredom in youth is developmental. The mind and body grow in tandem. Consciousness complexifies as one becomes aware of the world, then aware of being aware, and then aware of the self. The mind's foundational faculties—perception and imagination—bloom most quickly.

To grow, one needs nourishment. It is fitting for the process of growth to begin by feeding upon low-hanging fruits. The body relies upon a mother’s milk for its first food. The mind relies upon sensory phenomena, which are the most abundant interior occupants. They are available nearly everywhere you turn. The process of perceiving takes little more than the process of digesting. Perception needs no enticement; it happens on its own.

The move from mother’s milk to solid food for the body is repeated in the mind by the inauguration of the imagination. It is the next step in the process of liberation. One is freed to perceive more than one’s immediate surroundings. Although digestion occurs naturally and thoughtlessly within the healthy body, the biting, tearing, chewing, and swallowing that provides the stomach with sustenance requires effort. The imagination, the grist mill of the young mind, requires more effort than digesting. Mercifully, exercise of the imagination is rewarding. The consumption and digestion of the sensorial is generally pleasant. The imagination’s first creations use material from the sensed world. It needs only to recall sensory phenomena, mix them up, or spin them around, and thereby a new outcome is made. Naturally, one seeks out aesthetic satiation and avoids its unpleasant counterpart, boredom.

Although blooming is good and necessary, it is taxing. Growth depletes resources, both those contained in one's surroundings and in one's self. One has to consume from without and then process within. One needs to take and then turn the taken into something. These requirements are pressing as long as one feels the need to be occupied.

The specter of boredom ever-encroaches upon us because every object of perceptual interest will soon be uninteresting. Not only do such objects keep one's interest only as long as they are being perceived, the repeated perception of them decreases their interest value. As soon as the sun falls below the horizon, one departs from the overlook. The most moving experience upon first witnessing is blasé upon the fiftieth. Few objects are impervious to human forgetfulness and fickleness. We see this constantly in the youth and their limited attention spans.

How does this discussion of something as old as humankind relate to our previous observations of contemporary culture? Our nature—our tendency to depreciate the same object over time and repetition—is nothing new. If our sickness—this love of entertainment—is as advanced as it seems to be, something must have multiplied its symptoms. What was the catalyst? Technological developments funded by economic developments together with enough political security in life's necessities to pursue and profit off life's frivolities.

Entrepreneurs seek to entertain our youth, prone to boredom as they are, and we—their guardians—pay for it. Now, the children are at liberty to develop more quickly and move on to higher pursuits faster. Children are relieved of the burden of having to imagine for themselves—so the guardians think. Creativity is a puerile stage that can be accelerated with flashing lights and loud noises—so the guardians think. The children can put away the childish things sooner and learn the skills necessary to make wealth—math and science. At the very least, they will stop struggling to find something worth occupying themselves and cease pestering us for our attention. Give a child an electronic game, sit her in front of a television, or hand him a controller, and imagination is made easy. There is no need for playful manipulation and demanding struggle. The environment is saturated with perceptual interest. A child needs only to stay awake to experience as much, if not more, pleasure from witnessing someone else's imagination than using her own. Once exposed, she will be quiet and contented. She will be entertained.

Do these provisions tend to retard growth or hasten it? If a person is systematically supplied a necessity, will he be more or less equipped to acquire it for himself? When a person is put on dialysis, do we expect her kidneys to mend? Is dialysis refreshing—rejuvenating? No. It is a recognition that the kidneys are beyond repair. It would be odd indeed to unhook a patient from the dialysis machine after a year and say, "There. You have seen how it is done. You do it for yourself now." "No! Stop!" the patient would protest. "I know nothing about how it is done. I see the blood whir around, but I cannot make it do so in my body. I cannot do it on my own! Nothing has changed inside of me." The same protest, translated into the language of youth, is the declaration of "I'm bored." It is a plea for help and an admission of inability. What entertainment damages most in children is creativity, the catalyst of the imagination. Without the willingness to self-start, a child searches for other ways to get to the finish.

Boredom is not a disease like kidney disease. A child can regain functionality, if only she is encouraged to reclaim it. When you take the training wheels off of a child's bike, recognize that she may fall. Prepare to soothe her. If you put the training wheels back on after she falls, you cannot expect her to have better balance the next time you take them off. The same holds true for the imagination. If a child cannot occupy herself and you give her something that imagines for her, you cannot expect her to better occupy herself in the future. Out of love, you must be firm in your reply: "You can do it."

The wound will not mend on its own. A child may be frustrated and confused by stern support. Overstimulation has diluted children's abilities. Their situation is like that of a man who has along the way indulged in spicy foods at every opportunity. In the nursing home, he heaps salt and pepper onto his meals by the spoonful, complaining all the while that he cannot taste anything. He has ruined his taste buds. The youth have ruined their receptivity through incessant, pre-processed perception. It is no wonder they tug on our clothes, throw tantrums, and beg for entertainment. For them, the world without entertainment is a desert—a hostile and foreign place. What they perceive in it is less enticing than what they remember and what they can do about it is less than they could the day before. There is no time to waste. Bored children often mature into bored adults.