Tami Tomasello

Well, I would start by saying a lot of what I'll share.

I'm going to give credit actually to Manoush Zomorodi, who wrote Bored and Brilliant.

And this is a book, one of three books that we have studied in depth in the Mass Media and Society senior level course.

That I taught at Dalton State.

And so boredom is there.

It's it can be broken up into two basic categories.

There's existential boredom where, you know, there's just nothing inspiring in your life and you're wondering what it's all about and why you're even getting up out of bed in the mornings.

And then there's the situational boredom, and that's really the kind of boredom that we focused on in the class and that Zoma Rohde was focusing on in her book, where we find ourselves kind of at loose ends.

We're in between tasks or events, and we find ourselves not having anything to do.

there's an unpleasant sensation that occurs with that.

And part of that, I think, probably comes from the fact that it's cultural for us.

We live in a society that is expecting us to always be on productive, productive, productive, go, go, go.

And that if you aren't doing something productive, that you're lazy.

And so there's this kind of negative stigma about having time on your hands.

added to that then just the discomfort of being at loose ends.

What am I going to do? And kind of that almost disorienting feeling of, well, what's next? And I think particularly for generations that are growing up now where you have media available to you 24-7 and you carry it around with you, boredom is something that is not a frequent occurrence for them compared to, say, our generation's.

when we were kids, especially, wasn't much on television to keep our, we didn't have cartoon networks and things like that.

So I think as a child, I experienced many more episodes of boredom.

And I do remember that kind of listlessness and just, you know, what do I want to do? I don't want to do this.

I don't want to do that.

But then suddenly in the process of that, having this aha moment of, oh, I could do this, right? And so, but the thing is, culturally, we are pretty much conditioned to try to avoid things unpleasant feelings and boredom ranks up there in that, you know, again, just kind of feeling it loosens, not quite sure what to do, a restlessness and uneasiness.

And then, you know, wanting to try to find a quick fix to, to cure that, that discomfort.

And of course today it's easy.

Just look at something on your phone.

Very often it's social media that people go to, to fill in those gaps.