In a world without moments of boredom, the annoying somewhat anxious feeling we get when we have nothing to do, we would never feel a need to change, a need to explore new things, we would become very stagnant.
A world without boredom seems to be slowly becoming a reality though, with our mobile pocket computers, capable of granting us access to inconceivable amounts of information. We are experiencing first hand many of the issues that constant access to stimuli can cause.
With most of the population having constant access to such a powerful tool, it would make sense that we would be rapidly advancing at an exponential level, due to the ease in which we could gain knowledge. We should be accomplishing so much, so quickly, that it's like we added more hours to the day.
However, for all every benefit to mankind that cell phones have contributed, there seems to be several nasty side effects plaguing us, and moving us backwards towards a vegetable-like stagnation of the human experience.
Without the hours of boredom, allowing the mind to wander, wading through its own thoughts, where is there to draw inspiration from? The human imagination is one of its biggest assets, and we waste a lot of its potential by wasting time not creating, but passively sucking in unhelpful information.
Although social media and cell phone access are still in their infancy, we are already seeing the negative effects that they can have on the population, with some, like James Williams, arguing that the release of this technology to the world was actually unethical.
As a regular cell phone user, my first instinct is to reject the notion that my phone is hurting me. I've long-since antagonized and ignored anyone who has tried to preach to me how evil my cell phone is, and I think most people who are under the age of fifty have done the same.
The cell phone has become so deeply ingrained in our society that it seemingly has become harder to function, especially as a working person, without one.
The rapid integration of the cell phone into every aspect of human life have made owning one, and having some competency in using it, basically mandatory to survive.
The cell phone seems to do everything for us, like a magical thousand tool swiss army knife, aiding us in every situation imaginable.
Every moment we would have spent bored, staring at the wall in the past, now we open up twitter and instagram, constantly refreshing, checking for notifications, looking for anything new.
Our society is becoming one without the moments of nothingness. Boredom is becoming less and less of an issue we regularly have to deal with, and now, a few days into self-quarantine, having been basically fired from my job for the time being, I am learning first-hand how helpful boredom can be.
I have done my best the past few days to avoid wasting too much time on my cell phone on social media, which seems like the least natural thing to do in the middle of a pandemic forcing you to stay at home, but the lack of distractions has been extremely helpful to my progress as a creative.
Although Covid-19 is wreaking havoc in many ways, I'm having the time of my life.
The world is slowly slowing to a halt, and most of my obligations are simply disappearing in front of me for the time being as the world seemingly falls into chaos.
For the first time in a long time, I feel free, I feel like I can breathe, my mental health is better than it's been in a very long time.
I've spent the past several days constantly creating, locked in with a few other musicians, and without the mental and time constraints of my normal, busy life, constantly checking for assignments and notifications, I've become exponentially more productive than I would have otherwise.
The increased creativity and energy I've gotten from our pandemic precautions has illustrated to me just the lack of freedom we have that Williams was talking about.
Had coronavirus not changed everything for the time being, William's words would have far less meaning to me than they do now.
Social media, and all of the time wasting infrastructure put in place that we blindly accept and live by, is just means to keep us a distracted, malleable, sheep-like population, and once a major event like this occurs, it serves to highlight just how ridiculous the way we live our lives is.
The fact that we are as a society trapped in our own world of distractions is common knowledge, however, rarely do we ever get an opportunity like now to actually sit around and think about the implications of this reality, we were "too busy" before.
One can only hope that our time out of the loop allows us to reflect and actually make some change for when things "go back to normal".
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