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March 28, 2024 8:31 am
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OPEN FORUM: Learn To Be Bored

By SIDNEY BOUNDS

There is a great film made forty years ago, “Network,” that attempts to bash television and our obsession with it. The basic plot concerns a veteran news anchor, Howard Beale, a sort of Walter Cronkite type, who loses it one night during the broadcast and starts ranting and raving about what a wasteland our culture has become. The top brass promptly fires him, only to rehire him the next night because the public adores him, and the nightly news show becomes more of a variety show than a newscast. “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” comes from that film. The line that strikes the deepest for me, however, comes later. Howard Beale, now called “the mad prophet of the airwaves,” looks right into the camera and says, “Television’s not the truth; television’s an amusement park! We’re in the boredom killing business.”

That, to me, nails the fundamental problem with our society. We are petrified of being bored. We cannot even fathom the idea of sitting in a chair, quietly thinking, pondering life and death and the universe and relationships with other people and the car payment or doing homework or planning a trip or whatever. We have to be entertained; our minds have to be occupied, even if the occupation is the meaningless drivel of a situation comedy or a game show or an obscure sporting event or a movie that we have seen fifteen times already or a video game or our list of tunes on our Ipod or texting someone. We have invented untold numbers of devices that will ensure that we never have to endure even the slightest minute of idle time. We have Ipods, Ipads, cell phones, x-boxes, play stations, online video games, movies on demand, hundreds of cable stations; and, of course, if all else fails, the old reliable television.

Heaven forbid that we might even take some time to write a real, genuine, pen-on-paper letter to someone; compose a short story of our own, practice on a musical instrument, read, take a walk.
Mind you, I’m as guilty as anyone else. I bought a video game years ago called “Silent Hunter.” The game made me the commander of a German U-boat during WWII and put me in real battle situations in the North Atlantic along with all the attendant CGI graphics and visual effects. It was fascinating, and the best part was that if I became stupid and sank the ship along with my crew and killed us all, I could re-boot and go to the next encounter with the enemy. I say fascinating, but it really was more like being hypnotized and addicted. I suddenly realized one day that I was averaging about three to four hours a day glued to my periscope and doing absolutely nothing productive. It was tough to make myself quit, but I knew that for my own good I needed to take the game off the computer, and did. I remember an interview with Larry Gelbart once, the creator of “M.A.S.H” and several other really well written shows.

He said the first safeguard he made to his creative principle when he first obtained a computer was to take off all games. He knew his weaknesses, and he knew if there was a solitaire or hearts game on the computer, he would waste most of his time trying to beat the game,e.

The point is we need to be bored. We need to have nothing to do. We need to have down time when we are doing absolutely nothing pending. We need to be forced to create something from nothing on our own. That’s how symphonies are created, plays are written, novels are composed, inventions invented.

That is how we discover ourselves and what we think about life and our place in it and how philosophies are developed. I mean, really, how many plays would Shakespeare have written if his parents had given him a “Gameboy” for his tenth birthday?

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