“I’m bored.” Ah, the timeless lament I used to toss at my parents with regularity. The response was always swift: either “I wish I had time to be bored” (with a dramatic sigh, of course) or “I’ll give you something to do,” which usually meant an impressive lineup of chores. Suddenly, my boredom was far more appealing.
Back then—back in t’olden days—boredom wasn’t something you could swipe away. You had to sit with it, face-to-face. Either that, or you’d find yourself cleaning windows. We were forced to interact with the actual world around us, with whatever resources were physically at hand and whatever ideas we could conjure up. Adventures could spring from a discarded tyre or hours of making “art” with flattened Quality Street wrappers. One whole summer, my friends and I dedicated ourselves to building a rope swing over the local stream. We gathered all the bits and bobs we could scrounge, debated our “blueprints,” and failed epically. But it was team-building—before that was even a thing. We laughed, argued, sulked, then laughed again. The swing was an epic fail, but somehow, we all still wanted to try swinging to the other side.
Fast forward, and now we have entertainment on demand. No more reading cereal boxes at breakfast—now I can shop, learn, message, and work with a tap of my thumb, all while spooning cornflakes into my mouth without actually tasting them. I went from a world without the internet until my twenties to today, where a tech tsunami has washed over me, and I’m left frantically treading water in the digital sea, just trying to stay afloat. Back then, no one had heard of “dopamine-driven feedback loops,” and followers would have been seen as creepy rather than a social hierarchy.
Honestly, I feel lucky to remember life before the internet—a time when all my youthful antics weren’t immortalised on social media. We could make mistakes without broadcasting them to the world. Do I pine for the simplicity of those days, or am I just underestimating the convenience and connection that the online world has brought? Without Tescos delivery, my family might just starve, and Facetime—once a sci-fi dream—now lets me see loved ones in real time. But then, there’s the infuriating “computer says no” moments (did you say it in THE voice?). Not to mention my own rising dread every time I have to learn some new techy trick because “that’s just how things are now.” When my son casually says, “Mum, it’s intuitive,” I can practically hear the outrage in my soul, as my own experience says otherwise.
Growing up without the internet, I believe, helped ground me. It left me with a deep connection to nature, an instinctive pull to places where I can process, reflect, and reset. We didn’t have a world of distractions at our fingertips. If anything, we didn’t need mindfulness—we simply had no choice but to sit alone with our thoughts.
So as I sit here, ironically typing on my laptop onto google sheets, with spell check as my wingman, ready to post this blog to interact with people I can’t see, I ask myself is life easier and preferable for me today?
In the end, maybe this is less about longing for a simpler past or struggling to keep pace with a fast-moving present and more about the search for balance. Growing up without the constant lure of technology taught me to fill empty moments with creativity and connection. Now, with everything at my fingertips, the challenge is learning to navigate this abundance without letting it drown out those quieter, valuable experiences. It’s easy to get swept up, to let FOMO and endless convenience dictate our days. But perhaps there’s value in pausing, in choosing a moment to feel “bored” again—just to see where it might lead. In doing so, we might rediscover a bit of that freedom we had before technology filled every silence. Finding that balance could mean merging the best of both worlds: embracing what technology offers without losing touch with the joy of unplugged, unstructured moments.
Boredom was our teacher, and I think we might be the better for it.