FROM THE PUBLISHER | The vanished virtue of boredom

Boredom is a highly undervalued condition. Boredom leads people to create, to think, to dream, to imagine and build and connect. Only when you have nothing else to occupy your mind is it allowed to wander, and only the wandering can create visions of things that don’t exist.

You remember boredom, don’t you? You’d just sit there, nothing to do, no external means of stimulation. Your mind would wander, and you’d think up…something. You could go outside and get the neighbor kids to play freeze-tag, or your could read or draw or come up with a money-making scheme or just think about the girl or guy you saw at school. Or maybe you’d dream of hydrogen-powered flying cars, or walkie-talkie wristwatches.

The key was to have nothing else occupying your mind. Nothing in your hand, or your pocket, or in front of your face 24-7 that enables you to do anything you want, without even trying.

Here we are now, entertain us, Nirvana said. And so our society did

And as a result nobody is ever bored, not in the way that drives creativity. If there’s a pause of more than three seconds in a conversation, well, there’s somebody’s Snap or Insta, or a provocative Twitter rabbit-hole to go down. All outrage, all the time.

I suppose all that becomes entirely old-hat, too, which is why the sentence came out of the youngest one’s mouth. He’s starting his first year of college in California, but not until late this month, which means all his friends at K-State and KU have been all caught up in their new lives and he was left waiting tables most nights.

He’s about to be highly un-bored; college is the ultimate antidote to that.

That’ll pass, too, though. And his generation, and all of those that follow, will never really know boredom, and where it can lead. We’ve stamped that out; there’s too much money to be made in entertainment.

What does that mean? I don’t know. Something’s been lost. Probably something gained, too – I notice that this generation can navigate far more complex social environments than I ever could. On balance, though, I have to wonder if we’ll eventually wish we hadn’t stamped out boredom.