Millennials Were the Last Generation That Had to Be Bored

Before there was always something to watch, scroll, play, or answer, sometimes there was simply nothing to do.

Practice ended 20 minutes ago.

At first, there were other kids waiting with you. Then their parents started pulling into the parking lot. One by one, everyone left.

Now it’s just you, sitting on your equipment bag in the late-afternoon light, wondering where the hell your dad is.

Maybe he forgot. Maybe there’s traffic. Maybe practice ended early and nobody told him.

You have no idea.

And unless there’s a payphone somewhere, you have no way to find out.

So you wait.

This was not considered a meaningful exercise in independence. Nobody was trying to teach you the value of boredom. Your dad was just late.

There used to be a lot of time like this.

You waited in the car while your mother went into a store. You waited through commercials. You waited for your brother’s practice to end. You waited at the doctor’s office with three old Sports Illustrateds and a Highlights. You waited for your favorite song to come on the radio. You waited for the school bell.

And when there was nothing to do, there was often genuinely nothing to do.

Millennials weren’t the last generation to get bored.

We may have been the last generation for whom entertainment routinely ran out.

Entertainment had edges

Let’s not pretend we spent the 1990s whittling sticks and admiring clouds.

We watched a shitload of television.

We had Nintendo and Sega and Game Boys. We rented movies. We played computer games. By the time many millennials were teenagers, we had AIM and Napster and increasingly functional internet access.

We loved screens just fine.

The difference was that everything had an edge.

The Nintendo was connected to the television downstairs. The computer was in the office. The Game Boy batteries died. The movie ended. Your show wasn’t on until 8, 7 Central. Sometimes there really was nothing good on TV.

Even the early internet could tell you to go find something else to do.

For many American households around the turn of the millennium, getting online still meant using a dial-up connection over the telephone line. In 2000, dial-up internet use vastly outnumbered broadband use among American adults. Broadband wouldn’t overtake dial-up until later in the decade.

Which meant an entire generation knew the absurdity of sitting down at the family computer, clicking Connect, listening to the modem make a series of noises that sounded like two robots being murdered, and not connecting.

Or Dad was on the phone. No internet. That was the end of the troubleshooting process because there wasn’t another internet in your pocket.

Give six kids an empty field

Put six kids in a field with nothing planned and eventually something is going to happen.

Somebody finds a ball. Those two trees are the goals now, the driveway is out of bounds, and you can bounce it once, but not twice. Then somebody realizes that rule makes it impossible for him to win, so now you can bounce it twice. By tomorrow, the game has a name.

This is how childhood produced an endless supply of games that were enormously important to the 11 people who knew the rules and completely unknown to everyone else.

Wall ball. Manhunt. Ghost in the Graveyard. Four Square variations governed by local laws more complicated than the tax code.

Some games traveled. Some belonged to a neighborhood, a playground or a single group of kids.

Kids still do this, of course. Give a group of first-graders enough afternoons without a planned activity and somebody will eventually invent Scatterball, a dodgeball-ish game whose rules seem to change depending on who’s losing.

The kids didn’t become more imaginative because someone took away a screen.

They had a problem to solve: What are we going to do?

Give those same kids unlimited entertainment and you’ve already answered the question for them.

We filled the little spaces, too

It wasn’t only summer afternoons.

Childhood was full of small stretches of time nobody had bothered to program.

You finished the worksheet before everyone else. There were 11 minutes before the bell. You were sitting through your sister’s dance class. Your parents brought you to a house where the adults were talking and there wasn’t another kid your age.

So you drew in the margins of your notebook. You made paper footballs. You read ahead. You bounced a tennis ball against something until an adult told you to stop. You studied the back of a cereal box with the concentration of a medieval scholar.

Sometimes being bored was just boring. But sometimes you found something to do, and sometimes that something was another kid.

You didn’t have to schedule hanging out

Childhood kept putting you near the same people.

The kid at the bus stop. The family three houses down. The other kids at the pool. Your parents’ friends’ children. Your teammates. Your teammates’ siblings.

You didn’t even have to be the kid playing travel soccer. Maybe you were the little sister dragged along every weekend. Another family had a little sister too. Neither of you chose to be there, but there you were, week after week, for years.

Eventually that kid was part of your childhood.

Researchers have long found that repeated proximity creates opportunities for relationships to form. Childhood supplied a remarkable amount of it.

Adults schedule lunch three weeks from Thursday. Kids get stuck at soccer together, and if neither one has anything else to do, eventually somebody says something.

Then the empty spaces started disappearing

There wasn’t one moment when this changed. The edges just started moving.

Broadband meant the internet didn’t tie up the phone anymore. Wi-Fi untethered it from the desk. Laptops moved the computer around the house. MP3 players put thousands of songs in a pocket.

Then the smartphone swallowed nearly everything else.

In Pew Research Center’s first dedicated survey of smartphone ownership in 2011, 35% of American adults owned one. Today, roughly nine in ten do.

The important change wasn’t simply better entertainment. It could come with us: the waiting room, the checkout line, the passenger seat, the five minutes before someone arrives. The toilet.

And eventually feeds solved the final problem: endings.

A television show ends. A movie ends. An album ends. A feed can keep going as long as you can.

The television could waste your entire Saturday in 1997.

Now 47 seconds waiting for the microwave is enough time to need something to look at.

We wanted this

None of this was imposed on us.

Being bored sucked. Waiting after practice sucked. Sitting through a six-hour car ride with nothing to do sucked.

There’s a reason portable CD players, Game Boys, iPods, broadband and smartphones felt miraculous.

We spent decades solving boredom because we didn’t particularly enjoy being bored.

And we solved the hell out of it.

There is now almost no amount of time too small to fill. You don’t even have to decide what you want to do with it. Open an app and something will already be waiting.

That’s an extraordinary convenience.

It just means that something that once happened automatically now has to be allowed to happen.

Kids still know what to do

Nobody needs to recreate 1994.

Kids don’t need dial-up internet. They don’t need three television channels. They don’t need to sit alone outside soccer practice wondering whether anyone remembers they exist.

And they certainly haven’t forgotten how to play.

A version of the old summer doesn’t require vintage toys or ’90s snacks. Sometimes nothing is planned, and sometimes there isn’t a device. The kids go outside and figure it out.

Maybe somebody invents Scatterball. Maybe somebody draws. Maybe somebody talks to the kid who’s always there. Maybe absolutely nothing interesting happens. That’s fine too.

Most boredom never turned into anything. We stared out car windows. We watched clocks. We kicked dirt. We complained.

But every once in a while, the empty space became a game. A running joke. A friendship with the other little sister at soccer. A hobby nobody assigned you. Something you got weirdly good at because there wasn’t anything better to do.

There used to be moments when nothing was trying to entertain you.

You had to take it from there.