This didn’t happen: a short history of time wasted


For a time, when I was bored or couldn’t sleep or had nothing better to do, I would play Solitaire on my iPod. This was a dreadful thing, in so many ways. The user interface was miserable: move virtual playing cards around an inch-high screen by rubbing your thumb in circular motions. It was boring. There was no reward, apart from (one third of the time) completing a game, where there was nothing wagered, no truth or semblance of truth offered as you played, not even the sense of getting better at filling in your tax return, as a game like Sudoku confers. And yet I played and played and played, when I could have done something worthwhile, like contemplate my existence.

And now I have an RSS reader.

In between, post iPod, pre smartphone, I had Twitter. I subscribed to a bunch of people who I had nothing in common with, and then montonously checked their statuses and read articles they tweeted links to. In some of these links, people stuck things up their bums. That was about as profound as it got.

But again, I’d lose hours to Twitter, usually precious hours early in the morning or late at night, when I could be asleep, or writing,or learning Spanish verbs, or running. I couldn’t stop myself, desperate to believe that the next thing I read would be incredible and awe-inspiring and perhaps not involve somebody’s account of the time they stuffed something up their bum.

This didn’t happen.

One day, I read something Lewis CK said, about how Twitter and its ilk prevent us from proper contemplation of our lives, instead providing constant, attention-span-sapping little distractions when we’d be better off thinking about what makes us human.

Because the average person, when bored, will begin to carefully consider their rational life plan, or lack of one.

Actually, that never happened either. When you’re bored, usually you’re just bored.

However, every subsequent time I looked at Twitter, I remembered Louis CK’s words and realized that even if I wasn’t going to be carefully considering how to be a better person, checking Twitter was still taking me further away from ever doing so.

And that took all the fun out of it, so just like Facebook, I removed the app from the home screen of my phone and stopped checking it.

Unfortunately, then I discovered RSS readers, which I’d been largely oblivious to until Google shut down Reader, at which point I went to see what the fuss was all about, and before I knew it I was subscribed to ten different interesting feeds, all full of thought-provoking articles, which provoked precious little thought from me because I was always on the home page of the app, hitting refresh to see what new news had appeared.

And I was still letting myself be bored.


2 responses to “This didn’t happen: a short history of time wasted”

  1. I follow A L Kennedy and yesterday she retweeted the story about 30 wild boar roaming, er, wild near Bridgend. I found this both amusing and meaningful. It reminded me of that Oregon farmer who was eaten by his pigs. I don’t think they ever found out how that happened.

    • That could be the solution. I need somebody else to curate Twitter for me, and tell me what I should be reading.

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