[OGT] The Death of Daydreaming
As a child, I was a world class daydreamer. By which I mean that my mind was constantly wandering, which was often commented upon with some concern by my teachers.
But I believe this tendency was a key part of how I formulated my identity and my way of thinking. I sometimes wonder how much different I’d be if I’d grown up in the smart phone era.
In The Death of Daydreaming, Christine Rosen ponders some questions I’ve been thinking about a lot, for example:
Can you remember the last time you daydreamed? Or coped with boredom without reaching for your phone? Before the era of mobile technology, most of us had no choice but to wait without stimulation, and often, that meant being bored. But today we need never be bored. We have an indefatigable boredom-killing machine: the smartphone. No matter how brief our wait, the smartphone promises an alleviation for our suffering.
Boredom has a purpose. To understand and harness it, we need to give our minds more opportunities to experience it. In the rest of this post, I will explore the many ways our efforts to conquer boredom through technology have produced unintended consequences, including the near-total capture of our attention, the death of daydreaming, and the end of a healthy sense of anticipation in our daily lives.
I think it’s likely something critical has been lost - the ability to be bored, to ruminate, to think deeply and critically during those quiet periods of daily life when we have nothing else to do. And I suspect it’s changing us all for the worse. I highly recommend the entire article, and thinking about ways you can arrange your own life to be more bored. :)