Boredom: a force for good in the world

There’s not enough boredom around these days.

Being a committed misanthrope, I am reluctant to admit to enjoying much in life. When people talk of having a “happy childhood”, I tend to curl a lip and imagine pale milquetoasts playing cup-and-ball indulgently with flowery nannies. That’s not how it was for us. Okay, I grew up loved and comfortable. Yes, I lived in a warm, clean home. Sure, I wanted for nothing. Okay, okay. I had a happy childhood. What do you want from me?

If there was any significant downside to my childhood it was the constant attendance of boredom. When today’s young people complain – as they occasionally must – that there is “nothing to do”, I long to place the little ingrates before a small grey screen that, for a few short hours a day, emits occasional spurts of agricultural news and the odd documentary on Irish-speaking herring fishermen. Don’t bother turning on the radio. Later in the evening, you might dig up a few rogue bars of Boney M drifting in from a central European duchy, but you won’t get any more pop than that.

Shut your pampered mouth. This is the 1970s, baby. Now go weep on some blizzard-blasted playing field and contemplate how much you hate team sport.

One-channel broadcasting

Dreadful young people will, most likely, find it easier to grasp the notion of there being no television at all than the terrifying concept of one-channel broadcasting. After all, they will, from time to time, have found themselves standing in a spot without sufficient phone coverage to play their silly videos.

The television in mid-1970s Ireland was a peculiar appliance. Some still had a dial on the front. Most had a series of plastic buttons arranged in a vertical line. Neither was any more useful than an outboard motor on a deep freeze. Circle through the buttons or twirl the dial and nothing but static would interrupt your journey back to monochrome images of striking postal workers you had fled a moment earlier.

In short, the phrase “there’s nothing to do” really meant something in those days. It may have been even worse in the country. But those people have cows to thresh and fields to shear (or whatever the hell they do). So, there was probably less free time anyway.

Given the entertainment options available to the contemporary person, it is little short of incredible that we ever get round to watching or listening to anything. The awareness that a thousand other options are available lends an unhappy tension to the viewing of any video or the absorption of any song.

The Greatest Generation

The most significant downside to this orgy of choice is that young people don't get the chance to become properly bored any more. They may get tired of something. But they don't suffer the full, overpowering sweep of boredom that the Greatest Generation went through every awful, endless Sunday afternoon.

The most recent autobiography by Johnny Rotten called itself (in honour of a Public Image Ltd lyric) Anger is an Energy. But, rather than "anger", the word that crops up most often in the Sex Pistols' early interviews is "boring". It was boredom that drove the pioneers of punk to create a new music from the ether. It was boredom that generated hip hop. Heck, would Dostoevsky have found the time to write The Brothers Karamazov if, each time he turned to his writing device, three key clicks separated him from the Bojack Horseman Christmas Special?

The Vandals didn’t destroy western civilisation. The Black Death couldn’t quite finish us off. But having too much entertainment might do the trick. Now, back to that dungeon raid in World of Warcraft.

Let us, at this time of goodwill, acknowledge the entity that has, in an often terrible year, done more than any other to cause lion to lie with lamb. Tip your hat to Sony. By capitulating to a vague threat and cancelling the release of The Interview, a modest stoner comedy, it has brought America's assault-rifle right and hemp-sandal left together in a harmonious wave of opposition. Rush Limbaugh and Jon Stewart both accused the media conglomerate of "cowardice". Have these two ever been in such cosy agreement? It makes you feel warm inside.