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Many teenagers report that they’ve never been so bored

63 points by ytNumbers 9y ago

kuon 9y ago
I'm the most creative when I am bored. Being bored is important.
- announcerman 9y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted, boredom is incredibly important if you want to synthesize data. We're constantly absorbing huge quantities of news and information all day but never sit down and actually think about it.
  - 52-6F-62 9y ago
    Also known as reflection And no doubt. Especially with people (myself included at times) peering and swiping through lists of content as we try to coax ourselves to sleep at night— traditionally an optimal time for reflection. I think it can't be emphasized enough how necessary it can be to just reflect a while without that everlasting pull to some other flighty distraction
- soylentcola 9y ago
  Yep! I've tried explaining this to my gf. I told her that I just need days where I have the freedom to sit around and do nothing for a few hours because without feeling rested and bored, I don't have as much mental motivation to try new things or finally tackle projects that have been kicking around in my head for months. When I'm never bored I feel like I'm too busy. Then when I get some small bit of downtime, I don't want to do anything because I never know when I'll get the next small bit.
  - wizardforhire 9y ago
    I have a mentor who loves to define this any chance he gets. Recreation: re-creation. It’s not what we do for fun, it’s what we do to recreate ourselves. Arguably one of the most important activities we may be so fortunate to partake in. In my freelance circles we have an idiom “getting your no.” It applies to when one learns to say no to things and has the courage to use it. As in “I finally got my no.” Those two lessons have been invaluable for my wellbeing.
    - athenot 9y ago
      Wow, I never realized that. [Quick lookup]... indeed, the etymology is from Old English via Old French going back to Latin "recreare" and seems to have had that meaning all along. This comes at the perfect time for me as I've been reflecting on my hobbies and how to make the most of them for my life.
  - slothtrop 9y ago
    This has gone one of two ways for me. Sometimes boredom can effectively lead me to channel some creativity, but often it has been a source of sheer anxiety for those situations where I was left not really finding interest or meaning in anything in particular. I would try to remedy this with a brooding walk outdoors and bookhunting. Ultimately interest in my personal projects has been fleeting and merely theoretical, the application for which tended to stress me out. I took to cooking quickly for this reason as I found the process therapeutic and you could expect some sort of result quickly.
- chisleu 9y ago
  Absolutely. I deleted facebook and reddit. I've been bored out of my mind for days. I'm using it to do machine learning training. The Google crash course is excellent.
hashkb 9y ago
Do they still even know how to entertain themselves IRL? Can we get Calvin and Hobbes in front of these kids?
- Balero 9y ago
  Yes they do. Whilst I also like a bit of C&H, it's a cultural artifact from another generation. "(T)hese kids" don't need our C&H, they have their own, or will make it themselves.
artichokeheart 9y ago
It's not just the kids. I've never been so bored with the internet.
- kowdermeister 9y ago
  I'm on the other side, I can't make enough time to read, explore and process all my interests online.
- freehunter 9y ago
  Same thing with cable TV and satellite radio. 500 channels, and after a very short period of time you realize it's the same things playing on repeat. And very little of it has any substance to keep you engaged. It's like someone with a lifetime supply of Hostess snacks saying they're hungry. "But you have all the food you can eat!" Sure... for certain definitions of food. When you've been used to getting that cheap and quick hit of dopamine but then suddenly you're not getting the same positive feedback from your brain, it's jarring. And eventually you have to find some complex carbohydrates that take time to digest. It's not as immediately satisfying as sugar, but it balances out the highs and lows. The Web to me these days is a maintenance dose. Just enough to keep me distracted for the amount of time I want to be distracted for. But nothing more.
- return0 9y ago
  good point. i know i m getting older but if you browse HN from 10 years ago you 'll realize there was a lot more excitement, nowadays i just can't read the 1000th rehash of some javascript thing. Of course it has a lot to do with business opportunities which get less by the year and reward is what keeps excitement going. Side question: Where do people find the freaks on the internets nowadays?
- chrisvalleybay 9y ago
  It's the "commoditization" of the Internet. The other day I started thinking about how amazing toilets are – how much time they save every day. Bare with me. I went on thinking about the history of toilets, musing back to an ancient one I visited in Ephesus, Turkey. There were no toilet stalls. Between 6-10 holes in a bench, with flowing water underneath. According to our guide, this is one of the first toilets of its kind (citation needed). It must've been so amazing when they got this toilet. They probably talked about it all the time, and wanted to go there to hang out. It was a place of communion. Today toilets are utilities. They aren't exciting at all. You barely stop to wonder about the marvel you sit on. How much time it has saved you, or how the mechanics actually work. The Internet will sort of become like that one day too. Just a utility.
dingaling 9y ago
> "Sometimes I feel like I’ve seen everything there is to see on the internet" That's very sad, and a direct result in my opinion of the gamification of digital attention. If it's not on ${social_network} and doesn't earn you Likes then it might as well not exist. Even just pressing Random Article in Wikipedia would be a step up out of that abyss. But first teenagers have to relearn the ability to self-discover, like previous generations did in libraries, instead of sitting staring at a feed waiting for something to be pushed to them. And the second lesson might be that not everything has an immediate feeback. I still reach back to things that I learned about by chance on the Web and Usenet back in the 90s.
- freehunter 9y ago
  Eh... I'm not Gen Z and I get this quite often too. Sure there are a few dozen new articles on the front page of HN, but not all of them are interesting to me. Sure there are thousands of subreddits but good ones are hard to find and eventually you'll run out of interesting content there, too. Random Wiki pages are fun, but for every good one there's a hundred boring ones. I used to use StumbleUpon but again, the signal to noise ratio is just silly. I don't think your assumption that these teens just don't know how to discover content is correct. The problem is that content isn't interesting. There's only so many times you can hit random on Wiki and stare at "List of famous dogs from Bollywood movies" before you want something more engaging. Your comment, to my ears, sounds like "these kids need to put down their Nintendos and go play a nice game of kick-the-can!"
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    > Sure there are a few dozen new articles on the front page of HN, but not all of them are interesting to me. I think the problem is deeper than that. The problem is that even many of the interesting articles are only interesting in a certain way. I'm looking for something, and what I'm looking for isn't really here. And after a few years on HN (or Facebook, or Reddit, or Twitter, or whatever), I start to realize that the next article isn't going to really supply what I'm looking for, just like the last thousand didn't. So I'm bored even while I'm looking at the next HN article, hoping it will do the trick, and at the same time knowing that it really won't.
soylentcola 9y ago
They touch on something later in the article that sounds perfectly familiar to me from my teen years: eventually that unavoidable and universal boredom can lead to creativity. Just as people my age saw TV go from 13 channels to 150+ channels and wondered how you could ever run out of things to entertain yourself, today's teens run into the same limited ability of "consumption" to keep their minds stimulated. Eventually there's nothing on that you feel like watching, your mobile media feed runs out of new posts, and you get tired of playing the same video games. That period of boredom can be just what you need for ideas to start percolating in your head and occasionally lead you to make something or do something different. Boredom is what got me screwing around with simple programming on my old Commodore computer or figuring out how to use a mix of cables, adapters, and stereo inputs on my boombox to experiment with rudimentary multi-track recording. To this day I love having a good supply of parts, bits, pieces, craft supplies, and yes--boredom available on occasion because that's when I try out new ideas. When the alternative is just sitting around doing the same old things, the barriers to trying new ones tend to drop.
- jbob2000 9y ago
  Boredom is a double-edged sword; it can lead to creativity, but it can also lead to drug and alcohol abuse. Small towns and counties are rife with substance abuse and everyone will tell you it's because "there's nothing better to do". If boredom can be reasonably structured, then I think it's a good thing, but unfettered boredom is a bit risky in my opinion.
  - nkrisc 9y ago
    My personal view is that there is always something better to do, but they may not be aware of those things or have been taught/conditioned to avoid them. Reading, drawing, hiking, writing, building something, any other creative pursuit. Realistically though I understand many of those better things to do might fall under the umbrella of things kids have been taught or conditioned to avoid for various reasons, both unintentionally and intentionally. But this is what happens when "intellectual" is used as a slur.
  - liberte82 9y ago
slfnflctd 9y ago
That was... a lot of fluff. A 15 year old kid who has "seen everything there is to see on the internet"? I mean, really. This is the exact same 'restlessly disengaged' phenomenon humans have been experiencing since the dawn of the species. It's part of having a complex brain. Other animals probably even have it. There is no end of stuff to do and see! Sometimes you just don't feel like doing anything. And that's okay. It might be better in my mind to consciously redirect, or to take a nap instead of zoning out on a screen, but to each their own.
- slothtrop 9y ago
  >A 15 year old kid who has "seen everything there is to see on the internet"? I mean, really. This isn't necessarily a literal statement. There's just so much noise and nonsense to wade through as to be demoralizing. Or the excess stimulus is enough to just turn you off everything, in part why I try to minimize aimless surfing. It may take a conscious effort to stumble upon something of interest.
Mononokay 9y ago
As someone who falls into 'Generation Z' (at least technically. The line between generations is a special kind of confusing), I'd say on average that's the exact opposite of true - there's so much to do I'm almost never bored, but the result of that's been absolutely disappointing - it's made it infinitely harder to dedicate myself to learning new things, or reading books. There's simply so much to do that it feels almost neglectful not to try and get everything done. Then again, I suppose that might just be a chronic lack of an attention span, which I've had years before I had internet access, so my experience is more than likely less common than average. There's simply too much to do and not enough hours in a day. EDIT: I will say, though, that the internet's been incredibly beneficial to most, if not all, of those who've grown up with it - the world's never had a better comprehension of the English language.
- smoyer 9y ago
  The lines between generations are definitely blurry - if you stretch the unofficial start and end dates apart, my father and I are both parts of the same generation (how does that work)!
  - Mononokay 9y ago
    I'm in the same situation, actually! With the dates I've seen for Millennials, at least.
    - smoyer 9y ago
      Youngin' ... my father and I could both be baby boomers.
tomcooks 9y ago
It's easy for me to think "first world problems", but that's the aim off such clickbait-ish articles after all. Hopefully this boredom will lead to the end of the society of the spectacle and commodity fetishism (bringing with them consumerism i hope). Maybe this will result in a new approach towards entertainment, how to socialize between peers, art; it would be amazing if boredom would lead to a renaissance driven by science and helping others - let's see
return0 9y ago
I am shocked by the amount of people browsing the internet on mobile/tablets. If you are not going to make the effort to get yourself on a seating position so you can actually create stuff efficiently, you 're definitely going to be bored because feeds are just other people's ideas and you can only have so many before you lose yourself.they should try a desktop machine
- yoz-y 9y ago
  Well, you could also say that on a desktop machine one will just open 20 tabs with long-form articles to "read later" and then end up scrolling down a bite sized feed anyways. I know it happens to me.
  - return0 9y ago
    the point is not to read more, but to try things real-time.
    - yoz-y 9y ago
      Having a desktop computer may be useful if what you are making/trying has to be done on a computer. However, most of the things you read about on the internet can be done without it no? For example you could be looking up music sheets, or some tutorials on how to craft something. I get your remark that the massive passive consumption leads to boredom, but I do not think that the format is the real culprit here.
_bxg1 9y ago
I think part of it is that mainstream technology has become so homogenized and consolidated. Both hardware and software. Phones these days, for most people, are no longer empowering pocket-computers, but same-y glass rectangles that all hook you into the same handful of content streams. That's incredibly boring. In 2018 you have to go out of your way to remember how novel and diverse both the internet and personal computing can be.
Agathos 9y ago
I'm bored by roads.
danschumann 9y ago
I'm 32. I only see people on a few days of the week, some days I don't leave my house. I'm not axious, but I seem to think, "Why leave? My stuff is here, I can do all my work and socialize from the internet." Part of the problem is I'm starting a company, and am on low finances until it launches. So, I'm car-less, in a city not really meant to be walked, and it's a small town, so not much happens anyway. Part of me wants to take a cheap job washing dishes, so at least I see people regularly, but I know it would be a waste of my talent, and I would hate it and quit after a day ( seeing how futile it was ), but seriously.. yea, I get what they mean. Sorry I'm not being extremely articulate, I'm trying to wrap my head around the utility and role of the internet in my life moving forward.
- bufferoverflow 9y ago
  I find most people IRL are very boring. Out of all the people surround me there's one guy who I can talk to about life extension, robots, AI, etc. Everyone else is busy with meaningless everyday news and/or sports and/or generic entertainment shows, almost nobody has cool hobbies or even interests.
  - hobbylobber 9y ago
    There are other interests besides what you might find on HN. Talk to someone about law or music or philosophy or art. Not everyone particularly cares about life extension, robots, or AI (I certainly don’t). Maybe it’s not that everyone is boring, but rather that they simply don’t share your interests.
- soperj 9y ago
  I moved to a big city (Toronto) and was doing the same thing, and felt like it was equally hard to meet people. I took a job making $8 and half a quarter and hour (weird owners) in the warehouse of a music store. Still some of the best people I know were ones I met there.
- ohyes 9y ago
  > but I know it would be a waste of my talent But if it would make you happier, how can it be a waste?
turc1656 9y ago
The teens are bored because 1) they are misusing the technology/resource that is the internet and 2) they never learned how to entertain themselves, probably because of the internet. I'm a Millennial and had several friends complain regularly in high school and college that they were bored. They couldn't stand to be alone because they didn't know what to do with themselves. I never understood this. I was fine in groups and could be social and I was perfectly fine being alone for extended periods of time. I genuinely can't think of a time when I was bored when I was left alone. Sure, I've been bored in my life - but it has been when I was forced to do something or be somewhere I didn't want to be. Alone and in charge of my own time, though, there was always something I wanted to do, learn, etc. I think people like some of my friends and apparently Gen Z never learned to be alone or how to get lost in their own mind, whether that be through creativity or curiosity. I've also noticed another troubling trend with Gen Z. Many of them have no passion, drive, or ambition. They don't really care about much of anything and simply want to be entertained all the time. I think that's the other side of this. I have younger siblings as part of this generation and nieces and nephews and they all seem to be aimless in life. Granted, they are still young and may not know for sure what they want to do, but for all but one of them they seem to have no interests or hobbies! This wording might make me sound old and cranky but...when I was their age I was not like that. This isn't some romanticized hindsight bias from my childhood. I remember clearly. I had several interests that I was really, really into - science/math, computers/programming, tennis, and science fiction. I was fortunate enough to have parents who could afford to send me to places like tennis camp in the summer as well as computer camp (yes, that actually existed back in the 90's, believe it or not) so that I could further these areas of interest. My pure entertainment was through movies, music, and yes, gaming. But gaming wasn't done out of boredom. It was done for one of two reasons. First was the social aspect of multiplayer games like Counter-Strike and Goldeneye (which at the time had to have everyone in the same place). The second was for the fantasy aspect of gaming so that I could allow myself to get wrapped up into a well-told first person story with games like Myst, Half-Life, and System Shock. Lastly, what truly astounds me is Gen Z's lack of curiosity. When Google and Wikipedia came around, I entered a whole new level of learning online. I could find and learn anything I wanted to, without having to hike to the library and try to figure out where to find the information I wanted (which I never did, because I hated going to the library). The internet became a massive educational resource to me. But Gen Z doesn't even use it for this purpose, as far as I can tell. I don't think, as the article suggests, that the cause is that we have adapted. Instead, I think society has changed in a few other ways where instead of trying to curate children's curiosity and imagination, we have instead decided to follow stricter structures and schedules in a one-size-fits-all attempt at schooling, while decreasing funding for the arts and entirely getting rid of things like shop class. Combined with these structural changes, children have tablets from shortly after birth and they learn that entertainment (a.k.a. the eradication of boredom) is just a click away...until it suddenly isn't. And then when that hits, they don't know what to do, because they have never been in that situation ever before. Their mind literally can't function in the same way because it was never taught how to handle that scenario. So they click around through apps like zombies, accomplishing nothing, learning nothing, and remaining unfulfilled.
JustAnotherPat 9y ago
>"Sarah, a 14-year-old in New York, describes it this way: “I’ll go on Insta and it’s just people all talking about the same things. I’m like, I already heard that or I already saw that. It’s like, when you’ve seen everything there is to see in your Insta feed or on the internet. We see the same lip gloss, the same eyebrow style, the same meme like 14 times. It all gets old and then you get bored.”" Incredibly sad that this is what the internet has been reduced to. It's not the internet that's boring; it's your vapid social circle!
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  Maybe the medium is partly at fault. How can you sustain any sensible discussion in the noisy mess of Insta etc? You can try but it reduces to catchphrases and catty remarks so easily. Even here on HN its a constant fight to keep folks on topic and contributing usefully. How much harder in the wild, wild internet!
  - srtjstjsj 9y ago
    YouTube is full of fascinating stuff for all hobbies. But it's hard to find because there's no quality filter, only popularity filters that promote clickbait.
    - ytNumbers 9y ago
      There's plenty of great content on YouTube. If you spend a day or two watching quality videos, YouTube will then start recommending other quality videos with a similar worldview. How do you find that first day or two worth of quality YouTube channels? https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7xn6yv/what_youtube_channel_is_great_to_binge/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7xn6yv/what_yout...
- turc1656 9y ago
  Yes, exactly. Also, the other problem is that the sites rolled into these teens' definition of "the internet" is probably no greater than about 10-12 websites, most (if not all) being social media - Facebook, Instragram, Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest, Youtube, and Reddit. Those 8 sites right there probably account for 97% of their entire "internet". It basically boils down to, "you're doing it wrong!"
ponderatul 9y ago
It's great that our bodies have this mechanism to reject this artificial progress, the kind that is so fast we can't even get accustomed to it. There is so much, SO MUCH, to do, to see outside our black mirrors, that we don't even realise. But it's much harder now than ever. Because our phones have made everything seem so easy, it cheapened many experiences (e.g. social interactions). Now that we have to go back we have to realise that the pace is much slower in real life. reminds me of: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
jodooshi 9y ago
>boredom is actually a crucial tool for making our lives happier, more productive, and more creative. -Gretchen Rubin It reminds me of a book I read last year: Bored and Brilliant[1]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Bored-Brilliant-Spacing-Productive-Creative/dp/1250124956 https://www.amazon.com/Bored-Brilliant-Spacing-Productive-Cr...
ashelmire 9y ago
We're all getting bored because microconsumption is inherently unsatisfying. You're waiting for others to produce a tiny bit of content for you to consume. Perhaps we will see a renaissance of long form consumption, dedication to work and study, and doing things for their own benefit rather than for social gain.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  > We're all getting bored because microconsumption is inherently unsatisfying. Well said. > Perhaps we will see a renaissance of long form consumption... The problem can perhaps be considered one of opportunity cost. In the time it takes to read that long form article, I could read a whole lot of "tiny bits of content". And in many ways, I have spent the last N years tuning myself for those tiny bits. So the long form article has to pay me back for the time I spend reading it, not just at the end of the article, but at least at the rate that the tiny bits of content do. Otherwise, I'll feel like the article is wasting my time, and I'll quit part way through, looking for something more stimulating. Of course, the flip side is that all those tiny bits of content have their opportunity cost, too. The problem is that, for each one, it's just a tiny opportunity cost. But add them all together through a day (or worse, a year), and I lose a huge amount of time and mental energy on tiny little searches for stimulation.
oblio 9y ago
Teenagers being bored? Is this a news report from the 50's? :)
ender89 9y ago
I'm a definitive millennial, I have access to multiple video streaming libraries, 3 game consoles, literally 100s of video games, all of the internet, and any book I could want. I still find myself looking at my copious amounts of entertainment and think "I don't want to do any of this right now." I may have a netflix queue in the hundreds and entire series I want to watch, but I experience the boredom that only comes when you have so many options you can't pick one. I don't think this is unique to teens.
- moistoreos 9y ago
  I think it comes with changes in personality. I used to get into a new game every 3 months or so (and I still buy steam games on sale like that) but I find my way back into two games for months. I think it has to do with side work and hobbies. I definitely don't binge netflix or gaming like I used to.
smoyer 9y ago
"Sometimes I feel like I’ve reached the end of the internet" Sometimes I've jokingly asked my family members if they've finished reading it (the Internet) yet. It's so sad that these limits are imposed - sometimes by ourselves but also often by the invisible walls of the corporate, private gardens. I guarantee there are enough educational (history/technology) and maker videos on youtube alone that I'd never get bored. But if you're specifically looking for more to do where your friends are, you're going to be limited in the same way you would be in real life. When I started traveling extensively for business in the mid '90s, I made a point of being friendly to people in airports, restaurants, stores, etc. (Well ... those that wanted a conversation anyway). Expanding the pool of people that you talk to will inevitably lead to information pools that you weren't aware of. As an analogy, it always amazes me to watch someone else using software - take git or even bash for example. I'll say "I didn't know you could do that" and when they ask how I accomplish a task, they generally learn something new too. I have (by far) more sites bookmarked that I've learned about here on HN than from any other source. I guess it's because we don't just repeat lip-gloss and fingernail polish styles here?
neonate 9y ago
The Onion article almost writes itself.
forgottenpass 9y ago
So, 57 channels and nothing on?
rabboRubble 9y ago
Question.... is boredom felt differently by people in different eras? I was terribly bored as a teenager. I didn't have the luxury of blaming the internet at the time. I was boring.
krasicki 9y ago
Never

63 points by ytNumbers 9y ago

kuon 9y ago

I'm the most creative when I am bored. Being bored is important.

announcerman 9y ago
Not sure why you're being downvoted, boredom is incredibly important if you want to synthesize data. We're constantly absorbing huge quantities of news and information all day but never sit down and actually think about it.
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  Also known as reflection And no doubt. Especially with people (myself included at times) peering and swiping through lists of content as we try to coax ourselves to sleep at night— traditionally an optimal time for reflection. I think it can't be emphasized enough how necessary it can be to just reflect a while without that everlasting pull to some other flighty distraction
soylentcola 9y ago
Yep! I've tried explaining this to my gf. I told her that I just need days where I have the freedom to sit around and do nothing for a few hours because without feeling rested and bored, I don't have as much mental motivation to try new things or finally tackle projects that have been kicking around in my head for months. When I'm never bored I feel like I'm too busy. Then when I get some small bit of downtime, I don't want to do anything because I never know when I'll get the next small bit.
- wizardforhire 9y ago
  I have a mentor who loves to define this any chance he gets. Recreation: re-creation. It’s not what we do for fun, it’s what we do to recreate ourselves. Arguably one of the most important activities we may be so fortunate to partake in. In my freelance circles we have an idiom “getting your no.” It applies to when one learns to say no to things and has the courage to use it. As in “I finally got my no.” Those two lessons have been invaluable for my wellbeing.
  - athenot 9y ago
    Wow, I never realized that. [Quick lookup]... indeed, the etymology is from Old English via Old French going back to Latin "recreare" and seems to have had that meaning all along. This comes at the perfect time for me as I've been reflecting on my hobbies and how to make the most of them for my life.
- slothtrop 9y ago
  This has gone one of two ways for me. Sometimes boredom can effectively lead me to channel some creativity, but often it has been a source of sheer anxiety for those situations where I was left not really finding interest or meaning in anything in particular. I would try to remedy this with a brooding walk outdoors and bookhunting. Ultimately interest in my personal projects has been fleeting and merely theoretical, the application for which tended to stress me out. I took to cooking quickly for this reason as I found the process therapeutic and you could expect some sort of result quickly.
chisleu 9y ago
Absolutely. I deleted facebook and reddit. I've been bored out of my mind for days. I'm using it to do machine learning training. The Google crash course is excellent.

hashkb 9y ago

Do they still even know how to entertain themselves IRL? Can we get Calvin and Hobbes in front of these kids?

Balero 9y ago
Yes they do. Whilst I also like a bit of C&H, it's a cultural artifact from another generation. "(T)hese kids" don't need our C&H, they have their own, or will make it themselves.

artichokeheart 9y ago

It's not just the kids. I've never been so bored with the internet.

kowdermeister 9y ago
I'm on the other side, I can't make enough time to read, explore and process all my interests online.
freehunter 9y ago
Same thing with cable TV and satellite radio. 500 channels, and after a very short period of time you realize it's the same things playing on repeat. And very little of it has any substance to keep you engaged. It's like someone with a lifetime supply of Hostess snacks saying they're hungry. "But you have all the food you can eat!" Sure... for certain definitions of food. When you've been used to getting that cheap and quick hit of dopamine but then suddenly you're not getting the same positive feedback from your brain, it's jarring. And eventually you have to find some complex carbohydrates that take time to digest. It's not as immediately satisfying as sugar, but it balances out the highs and lows. The Web to me these days is a maintenance dose. Just enough to keep me distracted for the amount of time I want to be distracted for. But nothing more.
return0 9y ago
good point. i know i m getting older but if you browse HN from 10 years ago you 'll realize there was a lot more excitement, nowadays i just can't read the 1000th rehash of some javascript thing. Of course it has a lot to do with business opportunities which get less by the year and reward is what keeps excitement going. Side question: Where do people find the freaks on the internets nowadays?
chrisvalleybay 9y ago
It's the "commoditization" of the Internet. The other day I started thinking about how amazing toilets are – how much time they save every day. Bare with me. I went on thinking about the history of toilets, musing back to an ancient one I visited in Ephesus, Turkey. There were no toilet stalls. Between 6-10 holes in a bench, with flowing water underneath. According to our guide, this is one of the first toilets of its kind (citation needed). It must've been so amazing when they got this toilet. They probably talked about it all the time, and wanted to go there to hang out. It was a place of communion. Today toilets are utilities. They aren't exciting at all. You barely stop to wonder about the marvel you sit on. How much time it has saved you, or how the mechanics actually work. The Internet will sort of become like that one day too. Just a utility.

dingaling 9y ago

> "Sometimes I feel like I’ve seen everything there is to see on the internet" That's very sad, and a direct result in my opinion of the gamification of digital attention. If it's not on ${social_network} and doesn't earn you Likes then it might as well not exist. Even just pressing Random Article in Wikipedia would be a step up out of that abyss. But first teenagers have to relearn the ability to self-discover, like previous generations did in libraries, instead of sitting staring at a feed waiting for something to be pushed to them. And the second lesson might be that not everything has an immediate feeback. I still reach back to things that I learned about by chance on the Web and Usenet back in the 90s.

freehunter 9y ago
Eh... I'm not Gen Z and I get this quite often too. Sure there are a few dozen new articles on the front page of HN, but not all of them are interesting to me. Sure there are thousands of subreddits but good ones are hard to find and eventually you'll run out of interesting content there, too. Random Wiki pages are fun, but for every good one there's a hundred boring ones. I used to use StumbleUpon but again, the signal to noise ratio is just silly. I don't think your assumption that these teens just don't know how to discover content is correct. The problem is that content isn't interesting. There's only so many times you can hit random on Wiki and stare at "List of famous dogs from Bollywood movies" before you want something more engaging. Your comment, to my ears, sounds like "these kids need to put down their Nintendos and go play a nice game of kick-the-can!"
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  > Sure there are a few dozen new articles on the front page of HN, but not all of them are interesting to me. I think the problem is deeper than that. The problem is that even many of the interesting articles are only interesting in a certain way. I'm looking for something, and what I'm looking for isn't really here. And after a few years on HN (or Facebook, or Reddit, or Twitter, or whatever), I start to realize that the next article isn't going to really supply what I'm looking for, just like the last thousand didn't. So I'm bored even while I'm looking at the next HN article, hoping it will do the trick, and at the same time knowing that it really won't.

soylentcola 9y ago

They touch on something later in the article that sounds perfectly familiar to me from my teen years: eventually that unavoidable and universal boredom can lead to creativity. Just as people my age saw TV go from 13 channels to 150+ channels and wondered how you could ever run out of things to entertain yourself, today's teens run into the same limited ability of "consumption" to keep their minds stimulated. Eventually there's nothing on that you feel like watching, your mobile media feed runs out of new posts, and you get tired of playing the same video games. That period of boredom can be just what you need for ideas to start percolating in your head and occasionally lead you to make something or do something different. Boredom is what got me screwing around with simple programming on my old Commodore computer or figuring out how to use a mix of cables, adapters, and stereo inputs on my boombox to experiment with rudimentary multi-track recording. To this day I love having a good supply of parts, bits, pieces, craft supplies, and yes--boredom available on occasion because that's when I try out new ideas. When the alternative is just sitting around doing the same old things, the barriers to trying new ones tend to drop.

jbob2000 9y ago
Boredom is a double-edged sword; it can lead to creativity, but it can also lead to drug and alcohol abuse. Small towns and counties are rife with substance abuse and everyone will tell you it's because "there's nothing better to do". If boredom can be reasonably structured, then I think it's a good thing, but unfettered boredom is a bit risky in my opinion.
- nkrisc 9y ago
  My personal view is that there is always something better to do, but they may not be aware of those things or have been taught/conditioned to avoid them. Reading, drawing, hiking, writing, building something, any other creative pursuit. Realistically though I understand many of those better things to do might fall under the umbrella of things kids have been taught or conditioned to avoid for various reasons, both unintentionally and intentionally. But this is what happens when "intellectual" is used as a slur.
- liberte82 9y ago

slfnflctd 9y ago

That was... a lot of fluff. A 15 year old kid who has "seen everything there is to see on the internet"? I mean, really. This is the exact same 'restlessly disengaged' phenomenon humans have been experiencing since the dawn of the species. It's part of having a complex brain. Other animals probably even have it. There is no end of stuff to do and see! Sometimes you just don't feel like doing anything. And that's okay. It might be better in my mind to consciously redirect, or to take a nap instead of zoning out on a screen, but to each their own.

slothtrop 9y ago
>A 15 year old kid who has "seen everything there is to see on the internet"? I mean, really. This isn't necessarily a literal statement. There's just so much noise and nonsense to wade through as to be demoralizing. Or the excess stimulus is enough to just turn you off everything, in part why I try to minimize aimless surfing. It may take a conscious effort to stumble upon something of interest.

Mononokay 9y ago

As someone who falls into 'Generation Z' (at least technically. The line between generations is a special kind of confusing), I'd say on average that's the exact opposite of true - there's so much to do I'm almost never bored, but the result of that's been absolutely disappointing - it's made it infinitely harder to dedicate myself to learning new things, or reading books. There's simply so much to do that it feels almost neglectful not to try and get everything done. Then again, I suppose that might just be a chronic lack of an attention span, which I've had years before I had internet access, so my experience is more than likely less common than average. There's simply too much to do and not enough hours in a day. EDIT: I will say, though, that the internet's been incredibly beneficial to most, if not all, of those who've grown up with it - the world's never had a better comprehension of the English language.

smoyer 9y ago
The lines between generations are definitely blurry - if you stretch the unofficial start and end dates apart, my father and I are both parts of the same generation (how does that work)!
- Mononokay 9y ago
  I'm in the same situation, actually! With the dates I've seen for Millennials, at least.
  - smoyer 9y ago
    Youngin' ... my father and I could both be baby boomers.

tomcooks 9y ago

It's easy for me to think "first world problems", but that's the aim off such clickbait-ish articles after all. Hopefully this boredom will lead to the end of the society of the spectacle and commodity fetishism (bringing with them consumerism i hope). Maybe this will result in a new approach towards entertainment, how to socialize between peers, art; it would be amazing if boredom would lead to a renaissance driven by science and helping others - let's see

return0 9y ago

I am shocked by the amount of people browsing the internet on mobile/tablets. If you are not going to make the effort to get yourself on a seating position so you can actually create stuff efficiently, you 're definitely going to be bored because feeds are just other people's ideas and you can only have so many before you lose yourself.they should try a desktop machine

yoz-y 9y ago
Well, you could also say that on a desktop machine one will just open 20 tabs with long-form articles to "read later" and then end up scrolling down a bite sized feed anyways. I know it happens to me.
- return0 9y ago
  the point is not to read more, but to try things real-time.
  - yoz-y 9y ago
    Having a desktop computer may be useful if what you are making/trying has to be done on a computer. However, most of the things you read about on the internet can be done without it no? For example you could be looking up music sheets, or some tutorials on how to craft something. I get your remark that the massive passive consumption leads to boredom, but I do not think that the format is the real culprit here.

_bxg1 9y ago

I think part of it is that mainstream technology has become so homogenized and consolidated. Both hardware and software. Phones these days, for most people, are no longer empowering pocket-computers, but same-y glass rectangles that all hook you into the same handful of content streams. That's incredibly boring. In 2018 you have to go out of your way to remember how novel and diverse both the internet and personal computing can be.

Agathos 9y ago

I'm bored by roads.

danschumann 9y ago

I'm 32. I only see people on a few days of the week, some days I don't leave my house. I'm not axious, but I seem to think, "Why leave? My stuff is here, I can do all my work and socialize from the internet." Part of the problem is I'm starting a company, and am on low finances until it launches. So, I'm car-less, in a city not really meant to be walked, and it's a small town, so not much happens anyway. Part of me wants to take a cheap job washing dishes, so at least I see people regularly, but I know it would be a waste of my talent, and I would hate it and quit after a day ( seeing how futile it was ), but seriously.. yea, I get what they mean. Sorry I'm not being extremely articulate, I'm trying to wrap my head around the utility and role of the internet in my life moving forward.

bufferoverflow 9y ago
I find most people IRL are very boring. Out of all the people surround me there's one guy who I can talk to about life extension, robots, AI, etc. Everyone else is busy with meaningless everyday news and/or sports and/or generic entertainment shows, almost nobody has cool hobbies or even interests.
- hobbylobber 9y ago
  There are other interests besides what you might find on HN. Talk to someone about law or music or philosophy or art. Not everyone particularly cares about life extension, robots, or AI (I certainly don’t). Maybe it’s not that everyone is boring, but rather that they simply don’t share your interests.
soperj 9y ago
I moved to a big city (Toronto) and was doing the same thing, and felt like it was equally hard to meet people. I took a job making $8 and half a quarter and hour (weird owners) in the warehouse of a music store. Still some of the best people I know were ones I met there.
ohyes 9y ago
> but I know it would be a waste of my talent But if it would make you happier, how can it be a waste?

turc1656 9y ago

The teens are bored because 1) they are misusing the technology/resource that is the internet and 2) they never learned how to entertain themselves, probably because of the internet. I'm a Millennial and had several friends complain regularly in high school and college that they were bored. They couldn't stand to be alone because they didn't know what to do with themselves. I never understood this. I was fine in groups and could be social and I was perfectly fine being alone for extended periods of time. I genuinely can't think of a time when I was bored when I was left alone. Sure, I've been bored in my life - but it has been when I was forced to do something or be somewhere I didn't want to be. Alone and in charge of my own time, though, there was always something I wanted to do, learn, etc. I think people like some of my friends and apparently Gen Z never learned to be alone or how to get lost in their own mind, whether that be through creativity or curiosity. I've also noticed another troubling trend with Gen Z. Many of them have no passion, drive, or ambition. They don't really care about much of anything and simply want to be entertained all the time. I think that's the other side of this. I have younger siblings as part of this generation and nieces and nephews and they all seem to be aimless in life. Granted, they are still young and may not know for sure what they want to do, but for all but one of them they seem to have no interests or hobbies! This wording might make me sound old and cranky but...when I was their age I was not like that. This isn't some romanticized hindsight bias from my childhood. I remember clearly. I had several interests that I was really, really into - science/math, computers/programming, tennis, and science fiction. I was fortunate enough to have parents who could afford to send me to places like tennis camp in the summer as well as computer camp (yes, that actually existed back in the 90's, believe it or not) so that I could further these areas of interest. My pure entertainment was through movies, music, and yes, gaming. But gaming wasn't done out of boredom. It was done for one of two reasons. First was the social aspect of multiplayer games like Counter-Strike and Goldeneye (which at the time had to have everyone in the same place). The second was for the fantasy aspect of gaming so that I could allow myself to get wrapped up into a well-told first person story with games like Myst, Half-Life, and System Shock. Lastly, what truly astounds me is Gen Z's lack of curiosity. When Google and Wikipedia came around, I entered a whole new level of learning online. I could find and learn anything I wanted to, without having to hike to the library and try to figure out where to find the information I wanted (which I never did, because I hated going to the library). The internet became a massive educational resource to me. But Gen Z doesn't even use it for this purpose, as far as I can tell. I don't think, as the article suggests, that the cause is that we have adapted. Instead, I think society has changed in a few other ways where instead of trying to curate children's curiosity and imagination, we have instead decided to follow stricter structures and schedules in a one-size-fits-all attempt at schooling, while decreasing funding for the arts and entirely getting rid of things like shop class. Combined with these structural changes, children have tablets from shortly after birth and they learn that entertainment (a.k.a. the eradication of boredom) is just a click away...until it suddenly isn't. And then when that hits, they don't know what to do, because they have never been in that situation ever before. Their mind literally can't function in the same way because it was never taught how to handle that scenario. So they click around through apps like zombies, accomplishing nothing, learning nothing, and remaining unfulfilled.

JustAnotherPat 9y ago

>"Sarah, a 14-year-old in New York, describes it this way: “I’ll go on Insta and it’s just people all talking about the same things. I’m like, I already heard that or I already saw that. It’s like, when you’ve seen everything there is to see in your Insta feed or on the internet. We see the same lip gloss, the same eyebrow style, the same meme like 14 times. It all gets old and then you get bored.”" Incredibly sad that this is what the internet has been reduced to. It's not the internet that's boring; it's your vapid social circle!

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
Maybe the medium is partly at fault. How can you sustain any sensible discussion in the noisy mess of Insta etc? You can try but it reduces to catchphrases and catty remarks so easily. Even here on HN its a constant fight to keep folks on topic and contributing usefully. How much harder in the wild, wild internet!
- srtjstjsj 9y ago
  YouTube is full of fascinating stuff for all hobbies. But it's hard to find because there's no quality filter, only popularity filters that promote clickbait.
  - ytNumbers 9y ago
    There's plenty of great content on YouTube. If you spend a day or two watching quality videos, YouTube will then start recommending other quality videos with a similar worldview. How do you find that first day or two worth of quality YouTube channels? https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7xn6yv/what_youtube_channel_is_great_to_binge/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7xn6yv/what_yout...
turc1656 9y ago
Yes, exactly. Also, the other problem is that the sites rolled into these teens' definition of "the internet" is probably no greater than about 10-12 websites, most (if not all) being social media - Facebook, Instragram, Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest, Youtube, and Reddit. Those 8 sites right there probably account for 97% of their entire "internet". It basically boils down to, "you're doing it wrong!"

ponderatul 9y ago

It's great that our bodies have this mechanism to reject this artificial progress, the kind that is so fast we can't even get accustomed to it. There is so much, SO MUCH, to do, to see outside our black mirrors, that we don't even realise. But it's much harder now than ever. Because our phones have made everything seem so easy, it cheapened many experiences (e.g. social interactions). Now that we have to go back we have to realise that the pace is much slower in real life. reminds me of: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

jodooshi 9y ago

>boredom is actually a crucial tool for making our lives happier, more productive, and more creative. -Gretchen Rubin It reminds me of a book I read last year: Bored and Brilliant[1]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Bored-Brilliant-Spacing-Productive-Creative/dp/1250124956 https://www.amazon.com/Bored-Brilliant-Spacing-Productive-Cr...

ashelmire 9y ago

We're all getting bored because microconsumption is inherently unsatisfying. You're waiting for others to produce a tiny bit of content for you to consume. Perhaps we will see a renaissance of long form consumption, dedication to work and study, and doing things for their own benefit rather than for social gain.

AnimalMuppet 9y ago
> We're all getting bored because microconsumption is inherently unsatisfying. Well said. > Perhaps we will see a renaissance of long form consumption... The problem can perhaps be considered one of opportunity cost. In the time it takes to read that long form article, I could read a whole lot of "tiny bits of content". And in many ways, I have spent the last N years tuning myself for those tiny bits. So the long form article has to pay me back for the time I spend reading it, not just at the end of the article, but at least at the rate that the tiny bits of content do. Otherwise, I'll feel like the article is wasting my time, and I'll quit part way through, looking for something more stimulating. Of course, the flip side is that all those tiny bits of content have their opportunity cost, too. The problem is that, for each one, it's just a tiny opportunity cost. But add them all together through a day (or worse, a year), and I lose a huge amount of time and mental energy on tiny little searches for stimulation.

oblio 9y ago

Teenagers being bored? Is this a news report from the 50's? :)

ender89 9y ago

I'm a definitive millennial, I have access to multiple video streaming libraries, 3 game consoles, literally 100s of video games, all of the internet, and any book I could want. I still find myself looking at my copious amounts of entertainment and think "I don't want to do any of this right now." I may have a netflix queue in the hundreds and entire series I want to watch, but I experience the boredom that only comes when you have so many options you can't pick one. I don't think this is unique to teens.

moistoreos 9y ago
I think it comes with changes in personality. I used to get into a new game every 3 months or so (and I still buy steam games on sale like that) but I find my way back into two games for months. I think it has to do with side work and hobbies. I definitely don't binge netflix or gaming like I used to.

smoyer 9y ago

"Sometimes I feel like I’ve reached the end of the internet" Sometimes I've jokingly asked my family members if they've finished reading it (the Internet) yet. It's so sad that these limits are imposed - sometimes by ourselves but also often by the invisible walls of the corporate, private gardens. I guarantee there are enough educational (history/technology) and maker videos on youtube alone that I'd never get bored. But if you're specifically looking for more to do where your friends are, you're going to be limited in the same way you would be in real life. When I started traveling extensively for business in the mid '90s, I made a point of being friendly to people in airports, restaurants, stores, etc. (Well ... those that wanted a conversation anyway). Expanding the pool of people that you talk to will inevitably lead to information pools that you weren't aware of. As an analogy, it always amazes me to watch someone else using software - take git or even bash for example. I'll say "I didn't know you could do that" and when they ask how I accomplish a task, they generally learn something new too. I have (by far) more sites bookmarked that I've learned about here on HN than from any other source. I guess it's because we don't just repeat lip-gloss and fingernail polish styles here?

neonate 9y ago

The Onion article almost writes itself.

forgottenpass 9y ago

So, 57 channels and nothing on?

rabboRubble 9y ago

Question.... is boredom felt differently by people in different eras? I was terribly bored as a teenager. I didn't have the luxury of blaming the internet at the time. I was boring.

krasicki 9y ago

Never