More from Generation Distraction

Serendipitously, just happened upon this piece by The Boston Globe's Carolyn Y. Johnson, which explores the ennui of Generation Distraction, arguing that "boredom is essential for creativity" and that the quick and easy access to stimuli is the mental equivalent of the overabundance of calories that has lead to the obesity epidemic. It seems our "mental fatness" is clogging our arteries of innovative endeavor, after all. "The most creative people...are known to have the greatest toleration for long periods of uncertainty and boredom." She summons the patron saint of boredom, Marcel Proust, to elucidate the edifying power of idleness:

Dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake," Proust wrote. "And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory... I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal.


"I'm not bored, I'm profound"

Kathleen Cumiskey, a professor of psychology and women's studies at the College of Staten Island, is quoted echoing my metaphor to drug addiction: "Our society is perpetually anxious, and a way to alleviate the anxiety is to delve into something that's very within our control, pleasurable, and fun. . . .It feels like it has all the makings of addiction." Paradoxically, the more stimuli people receive to alleviative boredom (email, Facebook updates, funny videos), "people do not seem to feel less bored; they simply flee it with more energy, flitting from one activity to the next." Jerome C. Wakefield, a professor of social work at New York University and co-author of The Loss of Sadness suggests a dosage of boredom shock therapy, to reacquaint the patient with "a comfort level with not being linked in and engaged and stimulated every second."



So, Generation Y, I prescribe that you sit down on a park bench outside for two hours ruminating on the petals of a nearby flower, and call me in the morning.

Or, maybe just read The Affected Provincial's Companion.