What did you do with your boredom as a child?
I have removed so much boredom from my life that I have to work hard to find vague memories. Before constant stimulation, information at my fingertips and the possibility of being distracted on demand, what did I do when time was long?
The question has been on my mind since Paul Journet and I received Henri-June Pilote for an episode of our radio show, Crazy ideas. We dedicated the entire hour to the subject of attention, curious about how to direct it to what really matters. The content creator and speaker told us he took a long break from social media while recovering from burnout. It became very clear to him: he had to re-tame boredom if he wanted to stop getting bored online.
But what to do when you do “nothing”?
Henri-June Pilote had the idea of revisiting what distracted him as a child. For months, he wrote down the slightest activity that came to mind. He has created a bank of possibilities to foil his digital reflexes…
Henri-June said he “could no longer trust himself”. His brain, conditioned to excitement, told him that he should check his emails, Google a recipe or check something on Instagram. Anything but dead calm. The content creator therefore had to learn to outwit himself. Not easy.
His testimony resonated with me.
He reminded me that we have already known how to live with platitude. Growing up sheltered from digital technology, we experienced slowness and, above all, we let it get to us. Since Henri-June’s visit to the ICI Première studio, memories have come to the surface.
Walking while the wind picks up and making up a crazy storm, finding all the toads in the yard to gather them into a “village”, orchestrating a weekly birthday party for my cat, listening to the soundtrack of the series Ally McBeal imagining being in a music video, reading, reading again, reading more. Observing my older sisters and trying to understand through them what it means to be a girl. Waiting for my mother to finish her long shift at the restaurant spying on customers. Tell myself stories, basically.
I miss those brief years when the escape was from within. Where I had a stable relationship with my imagination.
(At the same time, is it socially acceptable to collect live toads at 35?)
In his essay The Comfort Crisis, journalist Michael Easter recalls that around 100,000 generations before us did not experience anything digital in their lives. Today, we use digital media (cellphone, TV, computer) on average more than 11 hours per day. This is not without consequences.
The author draws on the work of researcher James Danckert, from the University of Waterloo, to explain that basically, our brain has two modes: focused or not. The first is called upon as soon as we need to pay attention to something, whether it’s the words of a friend or the nonsense on our cell phone. When you don’t have to concentrate on anything specific, the other mode takes over. Visiting this zone of “non-focus” allows us to nourish the resources essential for productivity, creativity and the processing of complex information. Which made Michael Easter write that the 11 hours a day we devote to the digital world are not free, they require great effort and can exhaust us mentally.
We must relearn how to wander in our mind and/or in space.
PHOTO ALAIN ROBERGE, THE PRESS
Henri-June Pilote
I called Henri-June Pilote a few days ago. I told him that I wanted to inform you of his approach, since it had made me think so much. He’s a generous guy, he gave me his permission. I took the opportunity to ask him what he did when he was bored as a child.
“I remember spending hours sitting around making up episodes of the TV shows I loved. I sang out loud, too. I made up lyrics. »
We would have been friends.
“After months of trying to rediscover your old reflexes, what have you finally learned?
– It’s funny, but when you’re a child, you can’t wait to grow up. I remember waiting, waiting, waiting… And realizing that I had finally grown up, but I still had this waiting! When I was young, I passed time by reading in the park, I felt the sun on my skin and I was able to be fully relaxed, but at the same time, I obsessed about my future. Except I’m an adult now. I got where I wanted to go. I can finally just relax. »
During spring break, children will be bored. I wish it to them, at least. They may not know it (and it’s certainly not our pace of life that will tell them the story), but being able to watch the minutes pass is a small opportunity.
And I hope their parents will take this opportunity to remember that there was a time when boredom was a luxury they too allowed themselves. It is perhaps even by exploring it that they have developed important parts of themselves: their creativity, their contemplation, their inner voice and their anxieties (it’s not all perfect either).
We have arrived where we were impatiently waiting to go. We’re big, we’re busy and we have a thousand and one ways to distract ourselves to reward ourselves… But why did we stop singing invented lyrics?