The Importance of Boredom
Algorithms hate idleness—but civilisation depends on it.
“How did we do?!” gushes the delivery firm’s hypodermic email. No sooner had a book slapped the doormat than the behavioural inquisition arrived.
What this automated parasite demands is almost unspeakable. ‘Rate our driver from 1 to 10!’ If I were so inclined, that driver, who delivered the parcel and therefore met every expectation I hold of a delivery driver, could be on the dole faster than one can say, ‘corporate downsizing.’
By tapping the link, marking ‘1’ beside each question—Did he appear cheerful?—his working life would rest beneath my thumb. I could leave a comment on his performance: “Your driver shambled up to my door with a crack pipe dangling from his teeth. He booted my wife up the arse and ranted without proper academic citation about ‘Jewish control of the media and banks.’ That said, prompt delivery. Adequate packaging. A lovely item. Would recommend!”
Without recourse or tribunal, our innocent driver would find himself deleted from his livelihood quicker than an ill-considered dick pic. My false complaint would filter through an algorithm that scrubbed for keywords and flagged for the limited attention of an underpaid keyboard sherpa eating a sad supermarket sandwich at his oak-effect plywood desk. The false positives—swift delivery, adequate packaging—wouldn’t trouble the jury.
The delivery firm, its wings pinioned by the brutal arithmetic of minuscule profit margins, would deem it more efficient to sack the driver into instant poverty via email. They wouldn’t waste three minutes calling to ascertain whether I’d forgotten my Risperidone or am simply a malicious nutter whose eternal vendetta against delivery drivers expresses itself in phony complaints.
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This is hardly trivial. In digital society, quantitative values (efficiency, rationalisation, measurability, and processibility) dominate ever greater swathes of our human, qualitative lives.
Don’t have a girlfriend? Download a docile Japanese blonde—French-speaking, raffish and literary—here at Replika. Need a friend? Our AI companions will listen dutifully as you reveal exactly why you don’t have real friends.
For the profoundly anti-social tech titans, the human condition, for which they are so gravely ill-equipped, is to them little more than a faulty operating system awaiting an update. The cure to all of man’s problems rests buried in the galaxies of data they have sucked from our brains whilst we thumb through hours and hours of dopamine-laced Content™.
Picture the Mark Zuckerberg future: not one free of idleness, ignorance, and want, but one in which every human foible has an app store remedy. We have redesigned society to suit the aspergic whims of boys, who, absent a lucky break with Facebook, might have announced themselves to the world via a CNN breaking alert: High school oddball slaughters classmates in fleeting moment of recognition.
These are permanent adolescents who wasted their teens watching Star Wars rather than unclasping Sally Henderson’s cumbersome bra. For them, the future is not merely an advance on the present but a Utopia in which they—in all their oddness and lack of bra-dropping aplomb—rule the earth. Once the geeks—now the gods.
But that frictionless future of driverless cars, sex robots with adjustable breasts, and convenient meal-replacement pills exists only in their fevered minds. The reality is rather grim.
In his work, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley depicted a dystopia in which doped-up subjects cherish their servitude. The drug of choice, soma, vaccinates against boredom, feeling, emotion—those murky glitches of our human software. For Huxley, “The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy. Its second-worst enemy is total efficiency.”
Our efficiency fetish ushers us, scroll by scroll, into idiocracy. The Financial Times details the collapse in reasoning, critical thinking, and concentration.
There’s more. A study from the University of Southern California showed a stark drop in conscientiousness—the quality of being dependable and disciplined—amongst young Americans. Since 2017, neuroticism has spiked whilst agreeableness and extroversion have sunk. More Americans say they are easily distracted, and fewer think they are helpful or outgoing. Since the smartphone, we’ve slowly eroded the faculties which make civilisation possible.
Here’s the first page of Zuckerberg’s Utopia. Imagine Lord of the Flies mixed with American Psycho. Sorry—too opaque? Imagine your AI companion selling your own breath back to you for just £13.99 a month—forever.
“Correlation doesn’t imply causation.” I hear that a lot these days. Perhaps, in Zuckerberg’s future, that saying will be as decipherable as the Latin Mass. An obscure ditty from the Paper Times.
The evidence grows. Recently, Ballard High School in Kentucky banned phones from bell to bell. What happened? Did Jack form a rebel tribe and drop a boulder on poor Piggy’s rational head? No. Freed from their all-pinging all-dancing smartphones, the students felt, for the first time, that essential emotion: boredom. Library loans surged by 67 percent. They read books!
One work they may wish to read is Solitude by Anthony Storr. In that remarkable effort, Storr recruits the great English essayist, Samuel Johnson:
“What Johnson calls that ‘hunger of imagination,’” Storr writes, “is also a necessary feature of human adaptation. Man’s extraordinary success as a species springs from his discontent, which compels him to employ his imagination.”
But we have abolished boredom. Boredom is inefficient. Suffering of any sort is no longer a crucial feature of the human condition, but a software glitch in need of update. Never mind that some of the greatest truths we know are born of suffering, discontent, and boredom. There’s an app for that.
My niece is fifteen and just discovering teenaged angst and stylised melancholy. She wears Nirvana T-shirts night and day.
When I jokingly said: “Get your own bands, dork! Nirvana was my band like twenty years ago,” she replied, “I would. But we don’t make music anymore.”
If only her school banned the smartphone. If only we gave boredom a second chance.
Boredom is actually pure gold for any creative pursuit. Your mind will start kicking into gear with no noise in the background.
What a beautiful piece. And absolutely on the nail. Thank you summarising the western mailaise so succinctly.