What happened to old-school boredom?

By Chuck Thompson | The Shelby Independent

OPINION / HUMOR — I think we have forgotten how to be bored.

Not “I’m bored because there is nothing good to watch on 10 different streaming services” bored. I’m talking about the old-fashioned kind of bored. The kind where you sit there staring at a wall and actually contemplate why the wall is that specific weird color.

The kind of bored where you look around the room hoping something—anything—will happen. The kind of bored where you eventually decide to get up and clean something because you have absolutely nothing else to do.

And no, scrolling through Facebook for three hours while complaining that there is nothing to do doesn’t count.

That’s not boredom. That’s procrastination with Wi-Fi.

There was a time when you could go somewhere without taking a small computer with you. If you were waiting at the doctor’s office, you waited. If you were waiting for someone to call, you waited. If you were riding in the car and weren’t driving, you looked out the window.

Anyone remember playing “punch bug” or the counting cows game? You better hope there wasn’t a cemetery on your side of the back seat or else all the cows you counted died and you’d have to start all over.

And if you were really desperate, you might read the owner’s manual in the glove compartment.

I know. Barbaric.

I got to thinking about this on Wednesday as I baked under the hot Gastonia sky, standing on the asphalt of the Gastonia Airport with the rest of the state and national media outlets while we waited for bottled water and something to happen from about 2 p.m. until the beginning of the Trump-Whatley event at 5 p.m.

All the media were corralled into a specific area, and we weren’t allowed to leave. There was no shade and I couldn’t see the screen on my iPhone due to the sun. On top of that, my phone got too hot and I had to figure out how to cool it off before it would turn back on.

How do you cool off a phone when you have no shade?

Boredom hit a level for me that afternoon I had not experienced in a while.  

Don’t get me wrong – I wasn’t being anti-social, I got to talk to people from WBTV, Spectrum News, Fox, CNN, MS NOW, ABC, CBS and a few others (They were in amazed I got security clearance. And now they know The Shelby independent exists, but that’s besides the point).

I was old-school bored.

I reverted to my childhood. I used my brain and thought about things, but most of the time we don’t do that, anymore.

In today’s world, if we have to wait 30 seconds for a website to load we act like civilization has collapsed.

We immediately check another app.

Then another.

Then our email.

Then maybe the weather.

Then Facebook.

Then we go back to the first app because surely 30 seconds is long enough for the internet to have recovered from whatever horrible trauma caused it to stop working.

All things I couldn’t do in the blazing sun at three o’clock in the afternoon on a Wednesday while standing on an airport runway, knowing I had at least two more hours to wait before anything happened.

We have somehow managed to turn waiting into an emergency, and I am just as guilty as everyone else.

With the exception of Wednesday, even when I’m sitting on the toilet, apparently that requires multitasking. I’ll pick up my phone to check one thing and, 45 minutes later, I’m watching a video about a man in Ohio who restored a 1957 Massey-Furgeson tractor.

I didn’t search for that…

I didn’t ask for that.

I don’t even own a tractor. Heck, all I have is a push mower (which runs fairly well if it’s in a good mood).

Yet somehow the algorithm decided this was the information my life was missing.

I got to thinking about that Wednesday as we all waited for Presdeint Trump to arrive.

Maybe that’s the problem…

We don’t know how to sit (or stand, because I didn’t have a chair) quietly with our own thoughts anymore.

Maybe that sounds like a small thing to some of you reading this, but historically speaking, it isn’t.

Before smartphones, before television, before radio, before electricity, people had an incredible amount of time in which they simply had to exist.

They walked.

They talked.

They worked.

They sat on porches.

They read newspapers.

They gazed into fireplaces on a nippy wintry night.

They watched the rain on a spring Saturday. And occasionally, I assume, somebody stared at a wall and wondered why the wall was that color in the doctor’s office waiting room.

Maybe that’s why people used to write letters that were several pages long… They had thoughts.

They had the time to do so. They had nowhere to put those thoughts except onto paper.

It amazes me that today we have 14 different ways to communicate with someone and somehow still manage to say absolutely nothing.

“Hey”

“Hey.”

“Sup”

“What u doin?” (it annoys me to no end that typing the “g” is too much effort to put into the English language via text).

“Nothin. U?”

“Idk”

Congratulations. You have just completed a conversation in the 21st century.

When we get bored, we start thinking – which is how all my Sunday Columns happen – not that I have much time to get bored, but we all have to drive somewhere or take a shower.

Boredom is when we all start thinking. That’s probably why we don’t like it.

Thinking can be dangerous, sometimes. I thought up the idea for The Shelby Independent when I had the flu back in late 2024 but it would be another six months before I left my previous real job in journalism and could move back home to launch the Independent.

You might remember something you forgot, or you might come up with an idea (like a Sunday Column). You might realize you were wrong about something. Maybe you suddenly remember that person you haven’t spoken to in years. You might even discover that you actually like your own company. Who knows! The possibilities are endless.

And heaven forbid you should have a thought without immediately asking Google whether you’re correct, or not.

As someone who works in journalism, I’ve become especially aware of how much information is available to us now. We have more information at our fingertips than any generation in human history. And yet having access to information isn’t the same thing as knowing what to do with it.

Sometimes you just need to put the phone down.

Sometimes you need to stop searching.

Sometimes you need to sit there for a few minutes and let your own brain do some work.

Some of the best ideas I’ve ever had didn’t come while I was frantically searching for them; they came while I was driving, walking, taking a shower, or just doing absolutely nothing at all.

Apparently, doing nothing isn’t always doing nothing. Sometimes it’s where the thinking happens.

So maybe we should bring boredom back.

Not permanently – and definitely not while trapped behind a steel cage, in the blazing Gastonia sun, but once in a while.

I’m not suggesting we return to the days before electricity and spend our evenings staring at a kerosene lamp while discussing the weather.

But, perhaps we could occasionally sit on the front porch, the back deck or in the garage without our phones. With nothing else to focus on but our thoughts.

Take a drive without immediately opening the Spotify app, Pandora for the 40-something year olds (oh, showing my age) or turning on the radio; whatever your preference is these days.

How long has it been since you sat down for dinner without staring at a screen? Or while wait in a doctor’s office without pretending we have an urgent message to answer and have to get up and walk outside just to get out of the waiting room for a moment.

Just sit there and be bored. Let your mind wander.

You might be surprised where it goes.

“But what if nothing interesting happens?” you may be asking yourself right now.

That’s okay.

You can always stare at the wall and wonder why in the heck someone would paint a waiting room the color of mouthwash. I’m sure somebody has already posted a video explaining why various shades of faded pale blue and mouthwash green are found in medical offices.

What about that fake wood paneling from the 70's and 80’s? That could always make a comeback one day; you never know.

I hope you all have a great week.

Read The Sunday Column, every week, only in The Shelby Independent.

Chuck Thompson is the founder, reporter and a columnist for The Shelby Independent.

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