A good friend of mine who was once my roommate once found some videotapes from the 1990s, one of which is actually a time capsule. He had tested his new camera by filming us, friends and roommates, for a whole evening, which must have been a small Monday at the apartment, because we are obviously not on the party. It was a shock to see that, because we seem to live in another space-time.
We watched for a good two hours only to find that we were just hanging out that night, in a way that no longer exists at all today. We chat while jumping from rooster to donkey, we are silent, we leaf through magazines. We peer at the ceiling as a gang, I swear, and we hadn’t even taken drugs. It seems like we live in slow motion, unless the present has become too fast to understand what is happening in these videos.
Like young people today, we watched little TV, because our lives were spent outside, at university, at work, in discotheques and countless parties. We were in that period of life where the worst thing that could happen to us was watching TV on a Friday night dressed in slacks. My television culture of the 1990s is particularly weak for that, and those who fear the death of this medium seem to forget that one is not supposed to devote so much time to it when one is at the age of first love and the development of his social network (with real human beings, should I specify).
In short, we had ended up forgetting the camera that was filming, and that’s why we are seen so much in the natural. There were no social networks, no worry about these images becoming public and no need to be interesting to go “viral”.
These rediscovered hours, of astounding boredom, are almost an animal documentary on the pre-internet world. For something to happen, something had to be created, otherwise nothing happened. We weren’t getting alerts every second notifying us of gossip and shit on the planet in real time.
But were we bored? Honestly, I don’t remember. It seems to me not. When we felt a little too bored, we had to act. Call a friend, open a book, go to the movies, draw in a notebook. We had to fight boredom with our bare hands. Sometimes what worries me when I see people taking out their phones in a restaurant or at a party is that they’ve come to find flesh-and-blood human beings boring and can now run away from them by being in the same room. But that, the misanthropes have always felt, nothing really new.
Unless we suffer from loneliness or suffer from a bedridden illness, boredom is a blessing, which confirms that our life is more sweet than flat – tell the overworked parents who don’t have a minute to them, and who must sometimes be bored… to be bored.
Only children can’t stand boredom. It’s an unbearable feeling for them, because they don’t have the same relationship to time. The older we get, the more the hours seem to slip through our fingers, whereas as a child, an hour can seem endless. Yet it is from there that we invent a thousand games to defend ourselves.
PHOTO PASCAL RATTHÉ, ARCHIVES SPECIAL COLLABORATION
THE flip phone is making a comeback among young people who feel the need to disconnect.
Boredom precedes action and creation. There is no doubt that I would not have developed such an interest in reading if I had had the internet when I was younger, because in a way, I never really experienced the boredom of being surrounded by books. Born in another millennium, I tend to miss a good book after a scrolling orgy on Instagram. I found my colleague Léa Carrier’s report very interesting on these young people returning to flip phone1. If it could make them want to experience the strange freedom of walking around with nothing in their pockets but their hands, just to savor the freedom of being unreachable and at the mercy of chance encounters, it wouldn’t be bad either. But you have to be up to date, and I admit to being nostalgic at times for an environment where the world didn’t come to me vibrating in my pocket in such an intrusive way.
Being bored is good, if only to escape the attention economy for a few hours, when all the platforms, on the web or on TV, compete fiercely to capture and keep our interest 24 hours a day. It is probably on our fear of boredom that they make their fortune. In doing so, they may have killed the boredom, which still had some qualities, even if I doubt it a little by looking at old recordings from another era…