Boredom has become an art ...

Does anyone get bored anymore? I long to be bored. I long for the endless boring Sundays of my childhood, when it was Afrikaans on the telly and everything was closed and everyone was napping; when I was so bored I’d climb onto the roof to see if there was anything of interest happening a little closer to the sky. There wasn’t, but I’d lie there, looking into the blue, going: “Please, let something happen.” It did, eventually: I grew up. And then along came TV on demand, and the internet – with so much information that I’m forever skimming and playing catchup – and smartphones, and social media, and instant messaging, and time-devouring apps.

And, lo, nobody can ever be bored again. Stressed, isolated, lonely, over-stimulated, anxious, and addicted, yes. But never bored.

(On that note, I downloaded Two Dots again, just for emergencies – when I’m waiting in a queue or at a doctor’s reception and I may become, God forbid, bored. Now my day is punctuated by joining dots and the dubious validation of winning at something utterly pointless.)

Even my daily walk isn’t a mind-clearing amble anymore, because I’m forever taking photos or checking my step count. Last week, I literally walked into two men because I was so busy on my phone. But they were on theirs too, so we all looked up, glazedof-eye, ashamed, before vaguely apologising and walking on.

This made me think of a prescient tale from the annals of science:

In the ’70s, probably at about the time I was lying on the roof, bored, a scientist ran a series of experiments on captive pigeons. First, he put buttons in their cages, and every time a pigeon pecked the button it was rewarded with a food pellet.

Then he tweaked it so a pellet was no longer a certainty, presuming in time the pigeons would grow despondent from button punching with uncertain results.

But the opposite proved true. The pigeons actually pecked the button twice as often as before, their bird brains producing double the dopamine pleasure hit for an unpredictable pellet than when it was assured.

And that’s exactly how we are: caged, but high on punching buttons.

I miss being bored, but I fear I’ve forgotten how to be.