What did you do with your boredom as a child?
Published at 1:33 am. Updated at 8:00 a.m.
I've eliminated so much boredom from my life that I have to work hard to find vague memories. What did I do when time was short before I had constant stimulation, information at my fingertips, and the ability to be distracted when needed?
The question has been on my mind since Paul Journet and I hosted Henri-June Pilote for an episode of our radio show “Les idées Folles”. We devoted the entire hour to the topic and were curious about how we could focus it on the essentials. The content creator and speaker told us that he took a long break from social media while recovering from burnout. It became very clear to him: he had to tame the boredom again if he didn't want to be bored online anymore.
But what do you do when you do “nothing”?
Henri-June Pilote had the idea of dealing with what had distracted him as a child. For months he wrote down every little activity that came to mind. He has created a number of ways to undermine his digital reflexes…
Henri-June said he “couldn’t trust himself anymore.” His brain, conditioned for excitement, told him to check his email, google a recipe, or check something on Instagram. Anything but absolute peace. The content creator therefore had to learn to outsmart himself. Not easy.
His testimony touched me.
He reminded me that we already knew how to live with platitudes. Growing up in the shelter of digital technology, we experienced slowness and, above all, let it affect us. Since Henri-June's visit to the ICI Première studio, memories have been surfacing.
Walking as the wind picks up and creates a crazy storm, finding all the toads in the garden and gathering them in a “village”, organizing a weekly birthday party for my cat, listening to the Ally McBeal series soundtrack and imagining myself in a music video, read, read some more, read more. I watch my older sisters and try to understand through them what it means to be a girl. Waiting for my mother to finish her long shift at the restaurant, I spy on the customers. Basically tell me stories.
I miss those short years when escape came from within. Where I had a stable relationship with my imagination.
(At the same time, is it socially acceptable to collect live toads at age 35?)
In his essay “The Comfort Crisis,” journalist Michael Easter reminds us that around 100,000 generations before us have not experienced anything digital in their lives. Today we use digital media (cell phones, TV, computers) for an average of more than 11 hours per day. This is not without consequences.
The author draws on the work of University of Waterloo researcher James Danckert to explain that our brains fundamentally have two modes: focused or not. The first is invoked as soon as we need to pay attention to something, be it the words of a friend or the nonsense on our cell phone. When you don't need to focus on anything in particular, the other mode takes over. Visiting this zone of “non-focus” allows us to nourish the resources essential for productivity, creativity and processing complex information. What led Michael Easter to write that the 11 hours a day we devote to the digital world are not in vain, require great effort and can exhaust us mentally.
We have to relearn how to wander in our mind and/or space.
PHOTO ALAIN ROBERGE, THE PRESS
Henri June Pilote
I called Henri-June Pilote a few days ago. I told him that I wanted to share his approach with you because it had given me so much to think about. He's a generous guy, he gave me his permission. I took the opportunity to ask him what he did when he was bored as a child.
“I remember spending hours dreaming up episodes of the television shows I loved. I also sang loudly. I made up song lyrics. »
We would have become friends.
“After months of trying to rediscover your old reflexes, what have you finally learned?”
– It's funny, but as a child you can't wait to grow up. I remember waiting, waiting, waiting… And the realization that I was finally an adult, but I still had that waiting! When I was young, I spent time reading in the park, feeling the sun on my skin and being able to completely relax, but at the same time I was obsessed with my future. Except I'm an adult now. I arrived where I wanted to go. Finally I can just relax. »
During spring break, the kids are bored. At least I wish that for them. They may not know it (and it is certainly not our rhythm of life that tells them the story), but having the opportunity to watch the minutes tick by is a small chance.
And I hope their parents take this opportunity to remember that there was a time when boredom was a luxury that they, too, indulged in. Maybe by exploring it, they've even developed important parts of themselves: their creativity, their contemplation, their inner voice, and their fears (it's not all perfect either).
We arrived where we were impatiently waiting to go. We are big, we are busy and we have a thousand and one ways to distract ourselves to reward ourselves… But why have we stopped singing made-up lyrics?