I’ve had a book on my shelf for a while called Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment. A podcast interview I heard this week with the author Richard Winter spurred me to finally read it. He’s got a British accent, so he must be smart.
He’s disturbed that we have more entertainment available to us than anyone else in history, but still have an epidemic of boredom.
According to Winter, boredom defines us and drives us. He describes the average suburbanite:
She is tired of the magazine she is reading or the television show she is watching and mixes another cocktail for herself. Or perhaps she phones an equally bored friend and they talk for hours about nothing, or perhaps she drifts into an affair that means as little to her as the television show or the magazine article.
Winter says this is a radical shift in Western culture:
Prior to the nineteenth century most people would accept personal responsibility for their own feelings and usually believed that boredom was a sin or the result of some inner deficiency… People did not expect a quick fix to their problems or a pill for every ill. They were more prepared to sacrifice their own self-satisfaction in order to help others, and they usually expected that life would be difficult and often tedious.
Winter convicted me about my own perspective on boredom: it’s other people’s fault (“Why is he still talking?”), it should be fixed immediately (“I need to check my email”), and it’s a valid excuse to avoid loving others fully (“You want me to help you move? That sounds… boring”).
He showed me how much I evaluate things based on how excited or bored they make me feel. And I was doubly convicted when I realized last night that I’m passing this self-exalting perspective on to my kids.
Whenever my kids come home from whatever activity they were involved in, whether it’s school, an outing with mom, a birthday party, a church activity, a soccer game, a field trip, or whatever, I always ask them one question first:
“Did you have a good time?”
As if the most important thing about life is whether or not it gives them continual tingling sensations.
I’m teaching them to live moment-by-moment as fun-junkies, desperately seeking their next fix. I’m teaching them to devalue any learning and growing and work and discipline that doesn’t entertain them.
Most damaging, I’m teaching them to reject the God who frequently gives us experiences that aren’t fun, and does it on purpose to teach us patience, discipline, trust, and dependency.
My kids will be coming home from their first day of school in a few hours. I need to come up with a new question quick.