Boredom is an unpleasant but inevitable feeling. We’ve all experienced that moment when you have nothing to fill your time with, making the minutes feel like hours. When I was a kid, before technology integrated itself into my life like a parasitic symbiotic relationship, I used to have a wide array of interests that I could look to in times of boredom.
Now that I’m older, I have a quick fix for this ‘boredom problem’: my phone. I always have it on me. I never leave the house without it, and making sure it’s fully charged is always one of my top priorities. This one small device holds lines and lines of code that give me multiple options to kill my boredom at the source. But a quick fix isn’t always a good one.
Since getting a phone and especially since downloading social media, my attention span has declined drastically. My phone is the first thing I reach for in the morning and the last thing I look at before I go to sleep each night. I can’t stop myself from picking it up and scrolling through TikTok, even when I’m watching a movie. And if I don’t power it off and put it in another room while doing homework, I won’t get anything done.
My short attention span horrifies me whenever I stop long enough to think about it properly. I love to read, but my phone becomes my main form of relaxation and entertainment when I feel too tired after school work (which is always). I’m a big film and TV fan, but I seldom watch anything without being on my phone at the same time. It has reached a point where I feel incapable of reversing this effect.
This short attention span effect is also bleeding into other objects. Sometimes, it’s not even my phone distracting me but anything that will pull my attention away from a task.
I’m severely concerned about my focus abilities as a result and am desperately doing everything in my power to fix this. I want to be able to read again for hours on end without needing to look at my phone or watch TV without finding something else to do at the same time. Sometimes, multitasking is good—it builds efficiency and often saves time if you can do it correctly. But multitasking and a poor attention span are two different things.
So, this year, one of my goals is trying to reroute these dangerous attention issues I’m struggling with so I can start feeling like myself again. I don’t want my phone to control my life and I don’t want to feel reliant on something so unimportant in the grand scheme of things. I think being able to find peace in enjoying a good book or a TV show or just being around others without an imposing device getting in the way is something everyone needs.