There was a Tuesday in October, 1994, when I spent three hours on the carpet of my grandmother's sunroom doing absolutely nothing. I remember this specifically because my mother, when she picked me up, asked what I had done, and I had no honest answer to give her. I had watched the radiator tick. I had counted the pleats on a lampshade — twenty-eight — and then counted them a second time to make sure. I had read, without much interest, the first four pages of a Reader's Digest from 1988 about a woman in Nebraska whose dog saved her from a tornado. I had lain on my back and traced, with my eyes, the water stain on the ceiling that looked like Italy. This was not a punishment. I was eight, the television in that house only got channel 4 and channel 11, and it was a Tuesday afternoon in October, 1994. This was what Tuesday afternoon in October, 1994 was like. And I remember it better than I remember most of last week.
The thing I want to convince you of is not that the nineties were better. They weren't, in most of the important ways. They were whiter, meaner, flatter, and the music on the radio was, on balance, worse than the music on the radio now. What I want to convince you of is something narrower and stranger: that the nineties were the last time in American life when it was possible, for a whole afternoon, to have nothing to do. Not nothing you were willing to do — nothing available to do. The distinction is everything. A bored person in 2026 is bored against an enormous backdrop of things she is declining, at every moment, to look at. A bored person in 1994 was bored against a wall.
I have been trying for most of a year to describe this difference to a friend who is ten years younger than I am, and I keep failing. She is thirty, she is smart, she had an iPhone at fourteen, and when I describe the Tuesday afternoon at my grandmother's she looks at me the way I used to look at my own grandmother describing the rationing of butter. It is a historical curiosity to her. When I press on it — when I say no, I mean three hours, with no book you liked, no person to call, no show to stream, nothing on the radio but adult talk — she says, politely, that it sounds terrible. And it was. That is exactly the point. It was terrible, and I was allowed to have it, and having it taught me something that I don't know how else to teach.
The specific texture of 1994 boredom — and I think you have to get granular here, or the whole argument evaporates — came from the fact that the world was small and mostly finished for the day by around four in the afternoon. The mail had been delivered. General Hospital was on ABC and then it was over. If your father was at work, your father was simply at work; he was not reachable. There were twelve channels on basic cable and three of them were religious. The VCR had one tape in it, probably Free Willy, and you had seen Free Willy. The phone rang occasionally and when you answered it you did not know who was calling. This was the condition of normal life. This was not deprivation; it was the amount of world there was.1
Against this wall, boredom was not an interruption of your life — it was the medium your life happened in. Most of what I now think of as me was assembled during those empty stretches. The fact that I like Updike was decided during a summer week in 1995 when the only book in my grandmother's guest room was Rabbit, Run, and I read it because I had finished counting the pleats on the lampshade. The fact that I can draw a recognizable horse was decided over approximately two hundred boring Sunday afternoons at my kitchen table, where I drew horses because there was nothing else to do and eventually the horses got better. The specific catalogue of things I know about — how a carburetor sort of works, the names of most wildflowers in a Pennsylvania meadow, the plot of every episode of Murder, She Wrote broadcast between 1990 and 1994 — is the exact catalogue of things that were available to me when there was nothing else to do.
I didn't choose any of it. That is the part I have been trying to get at. A child with a phone chooses, and what she chooses is what the algorithm hands to her, and what the algorithm hands to her is not, mostly, Updike and wildflowers and the internal layout of a carburetor. The algorithm has nothing against these things; it simply has never heard of them. The algorithm hands her what has worked on children like her, and what has worked on children like her is optimized for the eleven-year-old's attention, which is, by a decent approximation, optimized against the eighteen-year-old she will become. The version of me that got assembled in 1994 got assembled partly by accident and partly by the fact that a Reader's Digest from 1988 about a dog in Nebraska was, for about forty-five minutes, the most interesting thing in the room.
A bored child is a child who is running her own algorithm. The question is whether we are willing to let her keep running it.
This is the part where the neurologists are supposed to come in and explain the default mode network, and I will spare us both that.2 You can find, in the literature, plenty of evidence that the brain does specific and important work when it is not being handed anything — that memory consolidates, that associations form, that the self as a continuous narrative gets stitched together at exactly the moments when nothing is happening to it. I trust this literature; I have read a lot of it. But I don't think the argument needs to be made at that altitude. The argument needs to be made at the altitude of the carpet in my grandmother's sunroom. What I was doing on that carpet was not nothing. I was running, on whatever hardware an eight-year-old has, my own operating system for the first time. Nobody had sent me anything. I had to generate everything from what was already inside.
It is tempting, and I have seen a hundred essays do it, to turn this into a complaint about phones. I don't want to write that essay. The phones are a symptom. What the phones did — this is the important part — is they closed the last door in American life through which boredom could still walk in. There used to be dozens of these doors. The school bus, forty-five minutes each way, no one to talk to if your friends weren't on that bus: a door. The dentist's waiting room with the Highlights magazine from 1991: a door. The grandparents' house when the grandparents were watching 60 Minutes and you weren't allowed to change the channel: a door. The long drive to the relatives in Ohio: a door. The Sunday afternoon after church when everything was closed: a door. Each of these doors has been closed, one at a time, over the course of about fifteen years, and the people closing them did not realize that on the other side of every single door was a small, ugly, necessary room in which children were being left alone with themselves.
I don't blame the people who closed the doors. The doors were, individually, unpleasant. The school bus was boring in the bad sense, the way a root canal is boring. The dentist's waiting room was worse. If you had asked me, at eight, whether I would like an iPhone on that school bus, I would have sold my grandmother for one. Children are, correctly, against boredom; it is the adults who are supposed to be for it.3 The adults in 1994 were not for boredom because they had some abstract theory about default mode networks; the adults in 1994 were for boredom because they had nothing to hand a child instead, and a bored child, they had noticed over several thousand years of raising children, tended over time to become a tolerable adult. It was not a theory. It was a practical observation, passed down the way observations about not eating the yellow snow are passed down.
The observation is no longer being passed down. It can't be: the people who would be passing it down are themselves the first generation raised against boredom, and what they learned about boredom was that it was a thing a competent parent, with a decent phone plan, could eliminate from a child's life the way polio was eliminated. The elimination was so successful, so total, that the word "bored" now means something different than it meant in 1994. When my niece says she is bored, she means the current thing on her phone is not interesting enough and she is considering switching to a different thing on her phone. When I said I was bored in 1994, I meant I had been staring at the ceiling for forty minutes and the ceiling had stopped being interesting and so had my own thoughts and I was approaching, reluctantly, the point at which I would have to invent something.
That point — the point at which you have to invent something — is the point at which the boredom starts paying off. Every adult I know who does interesting work for a living can trace the work back to exactly that point, reached dozens or hundreds of times in childhood, under circumstances they now describe with a kind of tender disbelief: I used to lie on the floor and, I used to walk around the yard and, I used to spend whole afternoons in the basement and. These are not stories about what they did. They are stories about what there was no choice but to do, and how, after the third or fourth hour, that no-choice revealed a thing inside them they would not otherwise have met.
There is a specific worry I have about the children who have never had a Tuesday afternoon in October, 1994, and the worry is not that they will be less creative, though they probably will be. The worry is that they will not know that they have a self at the specific resolution at which a self becomes interesting to its owner. A self, as far as I can tell, is not delivered at birth; it is the slow accretion of the things you have had to think about when nobody was handing you anything else to think about. The algorithm is, in a very literal sense, a different self — a collaboration between your idle moments and a corporation whose model of you is optimized for something other than your becoming. The Tuesday afternoon in October, 1994 was a collaboration between my idle moments and nobody. The output, whatever its flaws, was mine.
I don't know what to do about this. I am not going to take phones away from children; I don't have children, and if I did I suspect I would give in to the phone the way every other parent I know has, because the alternative — a child in a restaurant, a child on a plane, a child in the back of a car on a long drive — is actively painful, and a phone solves the pain immediately, and most parenting is just a long sequence of choices between a slow unmeasurable good and a fast measurable relief. I understand why the relief wins. I would choose the relief, most afternoons, too.
What I would like, though — and this is the small and perhaps foolish thing this essay is actually asking for — is for us to be honest about the trade. The trade is not: we used to be bored, now we are entertained, net good. The trade is: we used to have long, ugly, unstructured hours in which we were forced to be the company we kept, and out of those hours came a lot of what we later turned out to be, and we have traded those hours away, and the thing we got in return is very good at holding our attention but has no interest in what we become. That is a real trade, and it may even have been worth it. But it was a trade, and I would like for us at least to know we made it, the way people who sold their farmland in 1978 for what seemed like a lot of money at the time knew what they had sold.
My grandmother died in 2003. The sunroom where I spent the Tuesday afternoon was sold with the house. I have, as it happens, no photograph of that room. I have the room very clearly in my head — the radiator, the lampshade, the water stain on the ceiling that looked like Italy, the smell of the Reader's Digest, the particular quality of light coming through the screen in October. I carry it around. I did not take a picture because I was eight years old and had never considered taking a picture of a room, and because in 1994 the taking of a picture was still a specific decision you made with a specific object — the camera — which lived in a specific drawer and had a finite number of exposures left on its roll.
That is what I mean by the last boring decade. Not that the 1990s were boring, although they were. Not that the boredom was good, although I think it was. What I mean is that the 1990s were the last decade in which an eight-year-old could have three hours in a sunroom and the three hours could be, entirely, hers — not documented, not optimized, not interrupted, not shared, not scored. Just three hours on a carpet with a radiator and a lampshade and a woman in Nebraska whose dog had once saved her from a tornado. I would like, for the children who come after, at least some version of this. I don't know how to give it to them.4 I am afraid we have stopped knowing how to give it to them. I am afraid we have stopped knowing that it was something we were ever giving.
The lampshade, by the way, had twenty-eight pleats. I counted them twice. I am, to this day, absolutely certain.