What boredom might teach us in an always-on world – Editorial
THE FACTS
- Devices provide constant entertainment, reducing opportunities for boredom and critical thinking.
- Harvard Professor Arthur C. Brooks links the lack of boredom to increased depression and anxiety.
- The Education Review Office reports improved student behaviour and achievement with the “phones away for the day” policy.
Knowing how to be bored is a dying skill.
Those hand-sized devices of plastic, metal and glass that we carry around in our pockets mean we have entertainment on demand.
Waiting in a doctor’s office? No problem, I’ll browse my Facebook feed.
Sitting on the toilet? Wonderful, I can sit down and watch some TikTok videos.
Taking the kids to the playground? Great, they can play while I get some Christmas shopping done online.
Standing in line at the supermarket? Let me just check my Instagram notifications.
There’s no reason to be bored when we all have instantaneous access to a quick dopamine hit in the palm of our hands.
Boredom is uncomfortable. We begin to think – and often, those thoughts are about uncomfortable things, like our never-ending to-do lists or the problems we need to solve.
But uncomfortable as it is, boredom is important for those very reasons – our brains need that thinking time.
Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks said in the Harvard Business Review that boredom “sends you to the types of questions that you can’t get your mind around” and replacing those thoughts with scrolling makes it harder for a person to answer the “big questions” in their life.
“One of the reasons we have such an explosion of depression and anxiety in our society today is because people actually don’t know the meaning of their lives, much less so [than] in previous generations. Tons of data show this and furthermore, we’re not even looking ... We figured out a way to eliminate boredom. We’ve been able, almost completely, to shut off the default-mode network in our brains.”
Is it any surprise, then, that banning phone use at schools has resulted in improved student behaviour and achievement?
The Education Review Office (ERO) published a report last Thursday that said the Government’s “phones away for the day” policy was working, though parents undermined it and many schools allowed some use of phones for educational purposes.
Sixty-one per cent of teachers surveyed for the report said student achievement had improved since the policy was introduced last year and 77% said student behaviour had improved.
That’s a big difference, so much so that the ERO has recommended that the Government consider further restrictions on devices, such as removing digital smartwatches and limiting student access to social media during school hours.
As a student quoted in RNZ’s story about the report said: “I love using my phone. It has everything on it. It’s efficient.
“But with this ban, it taught me some restraint and I would say that I am able to focus better because I can’t use it. I got to do my work now. It just taught me how to prioritise things better.”
We’re never going to completely get rid of cellphones. We, as a society, have quickly become entirely reliant on the little contraptions.
But if we can remember how to sit in our own thoughts for a while and embrace that boredom, it can benefit us all.