Hanging a sign out

There was a wire news story a while ago, I'll track it down and pop it in here, about how young people are bored.

Think of it: a generation with more access to knowledge and entertainment than any group in our species' history, young people who grew up with zillion-channel cable TV and video games, kids who have computers and the Internet and chat rooms and MySpace and YouTube and cellphones and text messaging - and they're bored out of their gourds.

There's a big part of me which has zero sympathy for a young person who claims to be bored. Nada. Zip. When I hear them moan that there's "nothing to do" my immediate response is "Go Ride A Bike!" Or take a hike, or read a book or look for shapes in the clouds or watch a spider build a web or go to the library or watch an old movie or throw a frisbee around or look at rocks with a magnifying glass or brush the dog or... well, you get the picture. This part of me is especially likely to come out when said young person is affecting a world-weary, "been there done that" attitude. Me, I'm 46 years now and I expect to be around at least another 46 and I plan to be somewhere and doing something right up to the moment I kick.

Kids, the worst sin of youth is to be dull. The whole function of youth is to explore, to learn, to stir about and understand the world you have come into and see what you like about it and what you don't like and what you might change and how you might leave your mark. That's Your Job. And it should be your joy. And I've got news for you - the world-weary thing doesn't hack it, not when there is a whole world to be understood and you haven't even scratched the surface. Trust me, it's a big place and it only gets more interesting the more you look into it.

Here's the saddest thing: when someone says they are bored, it is the same thing as announcing that they are boring. Bottom line. If you tell me that you can't find anything to be interested in, you are telling me that you have no imagination or zest or verve or, well, liveliness. When I hear someone say that the world is dull, they are actually saying that they themselves are not worthy of interest. What was intended as a complaint about the world is revealed as a statement of "Don't bother with me."

That's my first reaction. "Been there, done that"? Hah! C'mere and let me slap you - pretty obvious you haven't been there and had that done to you, ya whiney baby!

But there is another part of me as well, with another reaction. And that is perplexity, and sadness, and rumination. And the question rattles and rolls around inside my head:

How have we come to a world where children

are so easily bored of it?

and

Where did we go wrong?

By "we" I mean everyone older than those young people. If it is the job of young people to take an interest in the world, it has been our job to help them appreciate how interesting the world can be. (I almost said that it was our job to provide them with an interesting world, but that is humanocentric arrogance - the world is perfectly capable of being interesting without us.) And we seem to have failed in our job. Perhaps we have let our own interest slide. Perhaps we have transferred the interest we once had in the world around us to an interest in ourselves. And an argument may be made that we are so busy in furthering our own interests that it is difficult to foster the interests in others.

When a young person says "I'm bored" they sometimes intend it to be a ringing condemnation: the world has let them down. I believe that they are unintentionally saying that they are letting themselves down, and youthfulness. But maybe there is a grain of the original intent which is correct. Maybe we deserve the pointed finger, for not communicating to young people the marvels inherent in life and living, for not giving them the tools to be endlessly entertained and impressed by the details of existence, for not helping them be explorers. Perhaps we deserve condemnation, and rather than talking about those damn lazy unimaginative kids, we should be re-addressing our own views of the world.

It's easy to point at possible causes - video games, the TV as babysitter, reliance upon others to raise our kids. But there may be an overall principle at work here. If you have lost your own sense of wonder, it is hard to communicate it to others. And if you are too tied up inside your own life, you close off both your connections to the larger world and your connections to your fellow travellers through it.