we forgot how to be bored

I used to get bored on the bus. Really bored. Staring-out-the-window, watching-the-same-street-pass-by bored. I don't remember when that stopped.

Now there's a five-second gap between my hand and my pocket. Waiting for water to boil, waiting for a page to load, waiting for a friend to finish a sentence — the phone is already out. Not because I decided to check it. Because my hand decided for me.

The strange part isn't that I'm on it too much. It's what's missing when I am. I scroll through a hundred people's best five seconds and feel further from all of them than I did before I started. I "talk" to more people in a day than my parents did in a month, and somehow I know fewer of them.

I don't think social media is evil. I think it's just very good at being easier than the things that actually feed you — a real conversation, a walk with nothing to look at but the street, being bored long enough that your own thoughts show up. It replaced the boredom before I noticed the boredom was doing something.

I'm not quitting anything. I just wanted to write this down before I opened the app again.