Death by electronics

It was the middle of the night and I was reading a newspaper online. It was the second I’d flicked through in the darkness of my room. I had just returned from a long overseas trip, and I had jetlag. After a while, I noticed that I didn’t feel happy at all. It was true that most of the news was depressing, but I wasn’t feeling depressed. It was something different. As I thought more about it I began to realize that I was suffering from boredom. In fact, I was so deeply bored that it felt like something was dying inside me.

It wasn’t the first time I had experienced this. I realized that I felt something similar whenever I was around computers for too long. The difference this time was that I had only been reading newspapers online for an hour or so. The next morning I mentioned the incident to my wife. She told me she felt something similar when she was online too. When she noticed herself feeling like this she turned to reading her book instead, and the sensation went away.

The trouble with me though, was that I knew that the longer I was back home the more I would become habituated to spending time on my computer, catching up with news, and other people’s lifestyles and the like. Presumably I would also become habituated to that underlying feeling of boredom. I realized that I would be spending my time living a slow death, rather than a long life.

Image credit: Brad Flickinger/flickr