It appears that my employer might be letting someone go in my department because I have been asked to take on a lot of extra hours...which I don’t have a problem with but...I have to rearrange some things...so I was going to make this post an open thread.
But then I ran across an interesting topic at the “After Babel” Substack about the ubiquitous use of smartphones and the death of...daydreaming.
Can you remember the last time you daydreamed? Or coped with boredom without reaching for your phone? Before the era of mobile technology, most of us had no choice but to wait without stimulation, and often, that meant being bored.
But today we need never be bored. We have an indefatigable boredom-killing machine: the smartphone. No matter how brief our wait, the smartphone promises an alleviation for our suffering.
Of course, I even accessed the post, initially, over my smartphone.
It only makes sense that as more and more people spend time mesmerized by screens as opposed to being bored and daydreaming that our minds change.
It can be a challenge to find those periods of rest throughout our day, and when we do, if we are habituated to the stimulation technology provides, it is difficult to quiet our minds. As Moshe Bar argues in Mindwandering, “the greater challenge is freeing ourselves from the distractions within, which disrupt our attention and intrude on the quality of our experience even when we are in a perfectly quiet place." In other words: we must cultivate habits that allow for mindwandering and daydreaming. We must, every day, try to reclaim the time that technology has colonized.
Why? Anecdotally, history provides many examples of scientific breakthroughs—“aha!” moments—that arose during moments of daydreaming or downtime: René Descartes in bed staring at a fly on the ceiling and coming up with coordinate geometry; Albert Einstein’s glimpse of the Bern tower on a streetcar ride prompting the theory of special relativity; the walk in the woods that prompted Nikola Tesla to devise alternating electrical current.
You can read the balance of Ms. Rosen’s post. For myself, I am absolutely fascinated by Rosen’s mention of komboloi.
“Shepherds do it, cops do it, stevedores and merchants in their shops do it,” technology critic Marshall McLuhan observed in Understanding Media when discussing Greek men’s use of komboloi, or worry beads. The beads, which look like amber-colored rosaries, were used throughout the day to pass the time, a secular version of praying the rosary. Their use of worry beads also reflects the deeply felt human need to fill interstitial time. We all engage in these weird little rituals: Some people doodle or fidget, others knit, a lot of people used to smoke. The late Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called these “the ‘microflow’ activities that help us negotiate the doldrums of the day.” These “small automatic games woven into the fabric of everyday life help reduce boredom … but add little to the positive quality of experience.”
There are quite a few videos on how to use komboloi on YouTube.
Since I will have a little bit of extra money to work with in the short term, I think that I may invest in getting a couple of komboloi. Cultural appropriation issues aside, I would love to have something else to do when I am bored rather than playing another game of bridge or doom scrolling on my smartphone.
If escape is really what I would like, even for a few minutes as I ride on the el, then toying with worry beads whenever I get the urge to doomscroll about the latest shit going on in the news.
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