Are We Just Bored?

I need to address something. It’s come to my attention my brother, Mud, was feeling a bit… how do you say?... inspired, and thought it would be a neat idea to inform MY fans of a certain type of “news” or “update” every Thursday. Even going as far as calling it “The Mud.” (what an egotistical name), but before I drop his idea in the blender, I thought we should go over my rules one more time…

Dirt is always right.

When Dirt is wrong, see rule number 1.

Not so bad, right? Just make sure you don’t forget…

“Dirt! Get your paws off the computer!”

Sorry about that! Sometimes, Dirt grabs the computer while I’m in the other room and starts ranting about his emotional injustices.

Dirt’s been jealous ever since Mud decided to have something for himself. He’s the sibling you have to buy a gift for, even when it’s not his birthday. He has a complete cow-dog breakdown when anything is not all about him.

The truth is, and let’s keep this between us, I think he’s bored. But I don’t think it’s just Dirt who’s bored. I think we’re all experiencing a little more boredom today than we realize. Maybe you can relate?

I’m noticing myself spending time on things that feel like I’m doing something when I’m not doing much at all. Social media and television are the obvious occupiers of our “boredom escape.”

I suspect whoever invented the “doom scrolling” strategy was thinking of how they could capture the attention of those precious times when we typically would ride a bike, build a fire, or call a friend — the times when we realized we were bored.

When was the last time you said to yourself, “I’m bored?” Maybe we’re different over here, but I feel like I used to say it a lot more. Whether the result after was something useful or not, it certainly wasn’t scrolling.

When Dirt gets bored, the first thing he does is head to the bathroom and look for a roll of toilet paper to destroy. If there’s no toilet paper (we’re mainly on wet wipes these days), he moves on to his next act: grabbing his dog bed and trying to take it outside.

When we get bored, we get destructive.

I remember first learning that newspapers work as fantastic fuel for starting a fire. I must’ve been seven or eight. My neighborhood buddy, John, and I hatched a plan to snatch some periodicals and box matches from our houses and meet in our fort deemed “The Den.” I ran home, grabbed the obituary section and a small box of strike-anywhere fire sticks from the medicine cabinet next to where my mom hid her soft pack of Seneca cigarettes for “emergency jellyfish stings,” and ran back to base.

When I arrived, John had managed to boost not only a newspaper but an entire recycling bin with a week's worth of dispatches, magazines, and even the jumbo-sized king of them all, The Sunday News.

“Ain’t it something?” John said, with a wide-eyed gaze as he dropped the green recycling bin on the ground.

“It sure is,” I whispered in awe.

“Let’s light it up.”

After finding and saving the coveted Victoria's Secret catalog, we got down to business.

I pulled the box of matches out of my pocket, struck one, and tossed it on the overflowing stack of useless publications and Publishers clearing house. We leaned back and covered our faces, peaking through the wedges of our fingers, prepping for the eruption of fire and ink we were extremely unprepared for.

“Dang. That’s not what happens when my dad does it,” I said, watching the unlit match make contact with the sports section sitting on top.

“Yeah, mine, either. But my dad doesn’t use matches.”

“What do you mean?”

“My dad uses this.” John reached into his pocket and pulled out a long, red-handled, metal, black-tipped, military-grade mini-flamethrower. Or, as the adults called it back then, a “grill lighter.”

“No way!” I exclaimed.

“Oh yeah! It’s time to turn these papers into ash.”

We never could get the mini-flamethrower to work. It had some high-level safety mechanism called a “child lock,” which we couldn’t figure out.

We discovered, however, that if you dump all the matches into one big pile and then put a match to those, the fire department will arrive at your exact location in under six minutes. And with that, “The Den” and our freedom were gone.

We were bored.

The other day, we were in one of the large pet superstores looking for discount frisbees and we noticed they had an entire aisle devoted to calming aids. My first thought was to buy the strongest OTC they had, drug the boys for a few days, and give myself a seventy-two-hour reprieve. Don’t go calling PETA, I settled for forty-eight hours instead.

Anyway, it made me ponder, how many dogs need to calm down versus how many dogs are just bored? Having an aisle devoted only to calming aids means there must be quite a market of dog owners needing to calm down their dogs. But what if we’ve been tricked into this type of thinking? Do we think our dogs are overly energetic because they interrupt us during our “boredom escapes?”

What if we’ve traded our boredom for artificial progress like “doom scrolling,” and the result is destroying the moments we used to be forced to find creative outlets like building forts or tearing up toilet paper rolls?

Just something to think about...