Tag: Technology

Eradicating Boredom, Losing Creativity: The Double-Edged Sword of Digital Distraction

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“I’ll never be bored again!” I said the day I purchased my first smartphone. I said that in reference to one of the very few games we play that has no winners: the waiting game. With a smartphone in hand, I thought I could finally resolve one of my biggest complaints about life: waiting.

“We’re not going to live forever,” we complain when someone is involved in the life and death struggles of a grocery store price check. Most of us don’t take out our life expectancy calculator to figure out how long we’re going to live, or to calculate how much of our lives we’ve wasted waiting in line, but we all love sharing that snarky joke about the guy complaining to the clerk that the price tag said asparagus cost $3.47 as opposed to the register’s reading of $3.97.

We’re all waiting for something, all the time, but what makes us angrier, waiting for something to happen, or doing nothing for long stretches of time? We’ve all experienced our frustrations inch their way over into anger, then boil over into rage, and we’ve all experienced that sense of helplessness when it happens to us. With a smartphone in hand, I correctly predicted that I could avoid falling into that trap of claustrophobic silence and inactivity by filling it with something, something to do with my hands, and something is always better than nothing in the waiting game.

Promptness is About Respect

The waiting game is not selective or discriminatory. Everyone from the most anonymous person on the planet to the most powerful has to wait for something, but there’s waiting and then there’s waiting. The waiting game is all about power and the lack thereof. When we’re stuck in line, at a restaurant, waiting for a seat, we experience a sense of powerlessness. We’re so accustomed to having power over our own life, as adults, that when we find out the wait time for that restaurant is forty-five minutes, we exert that power by walking away. When we find out every decent restaurant in town has a thirty-to-forty-five minute waiting time that sense of frustration sets in, and we eat at home. When someone we love leaves us sitting in that restaurant for a half an hour to forty-five minutes a sense of helplessness creeps in when we realize that we’ve accidentally put ourselves in a position of dependence yet again.

I don’t know if everyone feels this way, but I replay a Madonna quote in my head. “If you have to count on others for a good time, you’re not doing it right.” When I’m sitting in a restaurant with patrons passing me, looking at the vacant side of my table, I realize I’m counting on the wrong people in life, the narcissistic, irresponsible, and disrespectful people I count on for an enjoyable lunch. If they leave us there long enough, by ourselves, we’ll start to dream up all sorts of motives and agendas for their tardiness. That frustration can lead to anger and a level of teeth gritting and grinding that damages the expensive and painful dental work the impatient we’ve had done. 

I know that the search for what could tip me over into some form of mental illness is over when I am on the other end of the waiting game, and I eventually hear, “What is the big deal, I was only a couple minutes late, and I had to …” They usually fill that void with utter nonsense that we cannot disprove, so we just let it go. 

Life happens when we least expect it sometimes, and sometimes we’re going to be late. If we respect the other person, we call, text, or email us to inform them we’re going to be late, but that would be respectful on our part. That’s really what we’re talking about here, the respect or lack thereof, on their part. If we respect our employer, we show up on time. If we enjoy the company of someone we’re dating, we show up on time, or early. It’s about respect, the lack thereof, and narcissism. And when they show us this lack of respect, quality friendships can be tainted and temporarily damaged, and dissociations with associates end what could’ve become a friendship. We overreact to such slights, and we know it, but it all boils down to the fact promptness is all about respect.

The Eradication of Boredom

When we’re immersed in the maddening waiting game, the mosquito paradox comes to mind. Anyone who has ever had a beautiful day at the park ruined by a scourge of mosquitoes has asked why scientists don’t find some way to bioengineer an eradication of that relatively useless species? Biologists, with a specialty in mosquitoes, provide arguments for why we shouldn’t, but when we’re swatting, slapping, and running from the scourge, we develop seven counter arguments to every one of theirs. The only vague but true answer we’ll accept is “Anytime we mess with nature, there will be consequences.” We’ve all heard that in relation to the mosquito, but what about waiting and the resultant boredom? Boredom is a naturally occurring event. What could possibly be the consequences of eradicating boredom? We’re not talking about that simple, “I don’t know what to do to pass the time” boredom. We’re talking about levels of boredom that takes us to the edge of an abyss that stares back at us, until it roars to the surface and frightens everyone around us.

Some of us loathe the boredom inherent in the waiting game so much that it whispers some scary things about us to us, but when it’s all over, it dawns on us that something happens to us when we spend too much time in claustrophobic silence with nothing to do but think.

How many useless, pointless thoughts have we had in such moments? We flush most of those thoughts out of our mind after it’s over, as we will with that which our body cannot use, but some thoughts collect, mate, and mutate into ideas that we can use. How many of our more meaningful, somewhat productive thoughts had hundreds of useless, pointless parents conjugating during the waiting game? 

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The child and I often talk a lot about how relatively boring things were when I was a kid. This involves me recalling for him what we did for fun, and how we thought those things were so much fun at the time. “We had to do these things,” I say when I see his face crinkle up, “because we were all so bored.” These complaints could be generational, as I often hear the previous generation describe their youth as “Such an incredible time to be a kid,” and they were raised on farms! I’ve been on farms, trapped there for huge chunks of my youth, and the only thing I found incredible about it was how incredibly boring it was. It takes a creative mind, more creative than mine, to believe that being raised on a farm is an “incredible” time.

“It’s all about perspective,” they say, and they’re right. If we don’t know any better, skipping stones in a pond and fishing can be a lot of fun. We rode our bikes around the block a gazillion times, and we thought that was an absolute blast, and then we played every game that involved a ball, but they all seem comparatively boring when compared to the things kids can do now. We could argue all day about the comparisons, but they do have better things to fill the empty spaces. Yet, what happened to us as a result of all those empty spaces, and what happens to them as a result of mostly being devoid of any?

How much of our youth did we spend sitting in chairs, looking out windows, waiting for something to happen? Some of us did something, anything, to pass the time until the event we were waiting for could happen, but there were other times when we just had to sit and wait. We’d sit in those chairs and think up useless and pointless crap that ended up being nothing more than useless and pointless crap, but how many bountiful farm fields require tons of useless and pointless crap per acre? 

We have cellphones and smartphones now. That’s our power. That’s how we eradicate boredom. “4.88 billion, or 60.42%, of the world population have cellphones, and the number [was] expected to reach 7.12 billion by the end of 2024. 276.14 million or 81.6% of Americans have cell phones.” We don’t ever have to be bored again. 

We have game consoles. “The Pew Research Center reported in 2008 that 97% of youths ages 12 to 17 played some type of video game, and that two-thirds of them played action and adventure games that tend to contain violent content.” These kids may never have to face the kind of boredom I did as a kid. We didn’t even have an Atari 2600 in our home when just about every kid we knew did, and it wasn’t because our dad wanted to prevent us from becoming gamers. He was just too cheap. So, we were forced to do nothing for long stretches of time.

When you’re as bored as we were, the mind provides the only playground. “Is there something on TV?” There never is, and I don’t care how many channels, streaming services, apps, and websites we have, an overwhelming amount of programming is just plain boring to kids. We could go out and play, but when you’re from a locale of unpredictable climates, you learn that that is not possible for large chunks of the year. The only thing we can do, when we’re that bored, is think about things to do. I invented things to do to pass the time, but they could get a little boring too.

Filling the Empty Spaces 

“You’re weird,” is something I’ve heard my whole life. I’ve also heard, “I’ve met some really weird fellas in my time, but you take the cake,” more than a few times. That’s what I did when I ran out of things to do. I sat around and got weird. Your first thought might be, “Well, I don’t want to be weird, and I don’t want anyone thinking my kid is weird either.” Understandable, but what is weird? Weird is different, it’s having divergent thoughts that no one has considered before, until they grew as bored as we did. Weird is rarely something that happens overnight. It takes decades of boredom, and it takes a rewind button of the mind, replaying the same thoughts over and over, until we’ve looked at the same situation so many different ways, on so many different days that we’ve developed some weird ideas and abnormal thoughts about people, places and things around us. This is what happens when we stare out windows too long, looking at nothing, wondering how the world might look different if it was weird, strange, or just plain different. It’s what happens when someone lives too long in the mind, and their peeps start worrying that they’re not doing it right. 

Some weird, strange, and just plain different thoughts led us to think about the difference between success and failure. Success is a short-term game that will mean nothing tomorrow if you’re not able to back it up, so you better enjoy it while it lasts, because if there’s one thing we know about success, it has a million parents and failure is an orphan. We also realize that, in those dark, quiet moments we spend alone, looking out the car window on the drive home, that failure does define us. Athletes and business people say, “Don’t let failure define you,” but it defines us. Some remember those moments, and some will never forget, but what we do shortly after failing will define us too. The thing that plagues us is, “Was that moment of failure an irreversible blemish?” and when we’re left staring out the window at nothing, it can feel like it is. Some will never forget, and we know who they are, because they always remind us who they are, but most forget. As any trained public speaker will inform us, an overwhelming number of people will forgive, forget, and dismiss errors. Most people aren’t paying near as much attention as we think, and most people aren’t dying to see others commit errors. When we’re left alone for long chunks of time, replaying moments over and over, we can make the mistake of thinking it’s the opposite. 

“Reach for the stars,” they say. “Become the next Albert Einstein, Vincent van Gogh, Isaac Newton, and Leonardo da Vinci, fill your empty spaces, and reshape your world.” It’s great advice, and we think about how we should try to be better today than we were yesterday, and we shouldn’t spend those dark, quiet moments obsessing about trivial notions we consider our limitations. As we sort through those famous names, we ask how bored were they, when they were kids? Those guys had nothing to do either, when they were kids. They didn’t have movies, TV, devices, or consoles to occupy their time. As boring as it could be to be a kid in our generation, we can only imagine those previous generations were just itching with boredom back in their day, and they were so bored that they dreamed up some things that laid the foundation for everything we find interesting now. We can imagine that most dismissed them as dreamers and daydreamers that wouldn’t amount to much, and they ended up conjugating all of those pointless and useless thoughts into something that ended up reshaping our world.    

No matter how much we daydream, or dream up interesting thoughts, most of us will never actually reach those stars. Yet, something happens to us when we’re so bored that we think up weird and interesting thoughts that will never amount to anything. We accidentally, incidentally, or just by the natural course of filling empty spaces become more interesting. Thinking so much that we think too much could lead us to divergent thoughts that some people find so weird, strange and just plain different, but that can lead them to ask us about matters that they consider trivial, relatively unimportant, to important. Our unique perspective often attracts people to us, and it could lead us to have more friends, which could be one of the primary reasons we should consider inserting more boredom into our kids’ lives. Our kids might not know who they are, or who they could be, if they find artificial ways to avoid ever sitting in front of a window with nothing to do but think about everything. Even if they never make it above the lower-to-middle stations in life, they might learn how to make life more interesting, and they might accidentally figure out how to enjoy their lives better, and in the process of being so bored, they might learn how to become happier, more interesting people. 

The “Pull the Plug!” People

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“We can rebuild you. We have the technology. We can help you live longer.”

“But I don’t want to live longer!” we say when we find out they’re talking about aggressive, life-prolonging treatment. “I want to die with dignity!”

Most of the conversations we have on this weighty topic do not involve doctor, patient confidentiality, in doctors’ offices or emergency rooms. Most of them occur in bars and employee cafeterias, where we say, “I hope I never have to face such a situation, but if I do, I don’t want machines keeping me alive. I’ll choose dying with dignity.” The conversation participants are often thirty-to-forty somethings who hopefully won’t face such scenarios for forty-to-fifty years.

“What we’re talking about is being hooked up to machines and/or computers, and that’s scary.” Of course it is. If it’s not scary, then the patient is either the bravest person we can imagine or someone who doesn’t understand the question. Some take it to terrifying heights in hypotheticals, which leads me to believe they’ve probably seen too many worst-case scenarios, in the movies. They think if we fall prey to our desire to mess with nature, or God’s plan, by living a few more months or year, they’re going to wake in a hospital to see a half machine, half human cyborg staring back at them in a mirror.

“I don’t care, I don’t want any tubes sticking in me, and I don’t want wires sticking out of me,” they say, “I ain’t going out like that. I want to die with dignity.”  

Talk is cheap of course, and I think most of us will choose life, depending on the bullet points of the detailed explanation we face, but there are the “I don’t care. I ain’t going out like that” types who become combative when someone approaches them with a mask, an intravenous needle, or an intubation tube. 

We’ve all heard real-life scenarios involving gruesome illnesses, and we sympathize with the decisions that have to be made, but I just don’t understand the hypothetical and categorical denials of advanced care. I think it boils down to tradition, as we’ve all heard the horror stories our loved ones envision when it comes to technological advancements, and their repetition influences our answers. It makes no sense to them that machines and computers can prolong life. “Anytime you put something in, something else falls out,” and “For every action there is a reaction,” they say to make note of the unnatural, irrational, and in some ways immoral technological extension of life. They believe that messing around with nature, or God’s design, will produce unforeseen consequences.

“When it’s my time, it’s my time, and I’ll be ok with that,” they say, and we all smile and gain greater respect for them saying that.

“Ok,” I want to say, “but what if there is a chance that you could live a quality life following a procedure. Will that definition of a quality life be somewhat reduced, likely, but what if it could still be a quality life?”  

Most of the people I know, through these conversations, categorically reject any form of hypothetical talk of some diminishment, and they drop that “Dying with dignity!” line. It might just be the people I know, or it might be human nature, but most of us default to cynicism when we make leaps to worst-case scenarios when it comes to the technological advances that other faceless entities developed. It’s that term faceless entities that we

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latch onto, as we develop fears that these technological advancements have occurred with little to no human involvement. (I think we can thank/blame the repetitive messaging from sci-fi movies for that.)  

I heard a story about a person who was so adamant that they let her die that “she became fighting mad” when the talk of prolonging her life occurred. In her defense, the prognosis was that “they” figured they might only be able to prolong her life six months to a year, with treatment. Those last two words stoked her ire. “What does with treatment mean?” she asked, but she stopped them in the midst of their explanation. She didn’t want to know. Talk is cheap, as they say, but she didn’t want to hear such talk. “I don’t fear death, or being forgotten. I want go out gracefully.”

Hearing what she went through, and her fighting stance, this is my proclamation: “If I’m lying there on my death bed, with nothing but machines keeping me alive, don’t pull the plug, resuscitate as many times as you have to, and keep me alive no matter what. I don’t care if I’m a vegetable who can only communicate through a series of beeps, like that Stephen Hawking guy. I love life, and I don’t want it to end. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.” 

That’s funny, right? Is it funny because no one says that, even at lunch in employee cafeterias and afterwork, barroom hypotheticals. Everyone I talked to says pull the plug, turn it off, and do not resuscitate. They don’t even need a moment to think about it. It’s almost an instinctive response now. No one says I want to live as long as I can, no matter what. Most people choose death with dignity, because the opposite is the opposite that they don’t even want to discuss. Yet, if you talk to these people often enough, you’ll learn that dying with dignity seems more important to them than living with dignity. Some of the things they do, and we have to keep in mind that if they’re telling us about these things, what are they too ashamed to reveal. When you hear these things, you realize that they don’t mind doing things that make us think less of them in life, but when it comes to death, they choose dignity.

We’ve been spooked. Someone somewhere convinced us that medical procedures, technological advancements, and even a brief stay in hospitals (“I hate hospitals!”) is worse than the alternative. What’s the alternative? “I’ll tell you what the alternative is. It’s preferred!

“If I found out I have diabetes,” Bruce continued, after his award-winning preferred joke. “I’d rather die than go through all their treatments. Have you heard what the treatments are for diabetes? No thank you. I’m not going to monitor my blood sugar levels, take insulin and other oral drugs. They talk about having a healthy diet to combat your symptoms, and that sounds all great and all when you’re sitting in a doctor’s office, until you learn what a healthy diet means. If you want me to maintain a proscribed weight, I have a warning for you. I won’t. I’ll tell you that I will, and I’ll mean it in the moment when I’m sitting in a hospital gown with my ass exposed, but once I put my denim back on, I’m going to eat whatever the hell I want. You might think it doesn’t take much to ascribe to a healthy diet, until they start in on that list. At some point, a healthy diet comes into conflict with what the quality of life. They also talk about engaging in regular physical activity. Regular physical activity sounds as doable as a healthy diet when you’re all scared in a doctor’s office, and we’ll agree to exercise more … for about a week. Then we’ll fall back into our usual routine when we’re feeling all healthy again.” After a couple months, or however long it takes for our refusal to follow their edicts to catch up to us, they’ll eventually put me on kidney dialysis. Do you know what that is? It’s basically a machine that they hook you up to to take all your blood out of your body, clean it, filter it, and all that crap, until it’s time to put it back in us. Can you really picture me doing that, seriously? The final straw will take place when they tell us to at least monitor my sugar intake. The message, therein, will be to try to avoid sugar and carbohydrates as much we can. I’ll be frank with you, I’d rather die. I’d rather die than have anyone see me say no to a Snicker’s bar.”  

Anytime I think I exaggerate the glamorization of death some fixate on, I hear stories that mirror Bruce’s “I’d rather die than go through all that.” I also hear stories about people purchasing caskets, tombstones, and plots when they’re in their thirties! “I want a casket in a quiet, shaded area, because I was forced to live by a railroad that was always so noisy.” We dream about our funeral, picturing our people crying and all that, and we want them to say something like, “She denied treatment, because she didn’t want to go out like that. That’s the way she wanted it, and we respected her wishes in the end.” We might get that conversation, but it might also get interrupted when the home team scores a touchdown on the television in the reception area. That’s fine, but it’s so important to us that our friends and family remember that we ‘died with dignity’ that we creatively expand that line. We don’t want the ‘how she died’ to earmark us throughout history. We don’t want others to say, “Did you see her at the end? It was so sad. She was so vibrant and fun for most of her life, but in the end, she was a vegetable.” We don’t want to see that look of disgust, because we know that look, we’ve given that look to others. We all hope that we’re never in these situations, where doctors force our loved ones to make decisions, and if we are, we want them to know we’d rather die. 

Most of us will never face such a situation, with our lives or the lives of immediate family members for whom we must make such decisions, but those who see it on a regular basis, choose death. A recent study found that 88.3 percent of doctors who regularly pursue aggressive, life-prolonging treatment for patients facing the same prognosis, said that they would choose “no code” or do-not-resuscitate (DNRs) orders for themselves. They see what their patients go through, and they prefer death.

Let’s not gloss over this. Those who know far more than we do about these situations choose a dignified death. We can talk about situational hypotheticals all we want, and the intrinsic value of life over death, but those who see the suffering of patients on a daily basis, who know what family and loved ones go through watching their loved one die, would prefer to forego pursuing aggressive, life-prolonging treatment. Is that shocking? I think it is, but I’ve only had one experience with a loved one in such a situation, and the decision we made was basically a forgone conclusion by the time we made it. Needless to say, my answer is an uninformed one, but those I spoke with in cafeterias and bars were just as uninformed as I was, and they chose death. 

The most common response for “no code” and DNR decisions is the quality of life, followed by medical prognosis, personal beliefs, autonomy and avoiding becoming a burden. The latter, we can only guess, is largely financial, but there is also the physical burden of counting on your loved ones to provide physical assistance. Most people don’t care for all that, they prefer death. 

Contrary to much speculation, we won’t get to come back and see how our decisions affected our loved ones. Once we’re gone, we’re gone. Life is over and there ain’t no coming back. Who cares what they say or think, I say, live long and prosper. If there is an afterlife, and we end up looking up, down, or around at the aftermath of our decision, my bet is that we’ll wish that we wrung every droplet of water out of the sponge before we went into the great unknown? I don’t know what I’m talking about here anymore than you do, but if that fateful day ever arrives, and I’m forced to make that decision, I think I’ll choose life.