More boredom please
From a post on Michael Easter’s 2% Substack.
We all know we spend too much time on our phones. There are thousands of articles offering tips on how to use your phone less. But these often miss an important point. When people reduce their phone screen time, they often get bored—and immediately replace it with another screen, short-circuiting the very mental state that drives creativity. Taking a couple of hours off your phone screen time only to add in more TV time is like replacing cigarettes with chewing tobacco.
Yeah!
Easter’s larger point is that, rather than telling ourselves we need to look at our phones less, we should try to increase the time we spend not being stimulated by a screen.
“Instead of less phone, more boredom,” he said in a different podcast/interview.
It’s a simple and obvious observation. One that is so simple and so obvious that people (myself included) don’t think it.