I’m bored. This constant refrain during the long unstructured summer vacations of my youth has somehow turned into a phrase people will do anything to avoid. We must be entertained. A child uttering the phrase “I’m bored” somehow makes us feel we’ve failed our jobs as parents, that we need to constantly provide some sort of entertainment or find activities for them to do, filling up all of our children’s time with camps and lessons.

As adults, we often feel guilty if our time isn’t spent doing something productive. I don’t like this trend. It ruins my attempts at relaxing. For children, however, it means growing up without knowing any other way. I was perhaps the last of a generation that didn’t have computers and smart phones until I was an adult, so childhood was filled with lots of doing nothing and lots of complaining to my mom that I was bored. We were bored until we thought of something to do.

These days it is virtually impossible to be bored. Life is overstimulating. There are TV screens on the gas pumps, to make sure we are entertained for the couple minutes it takes to pump gas. We all have tiny screens on our person at all times, so any time we have to wait we can pull it out and play a game or watch a video. If there is a long line while we’re waiting to do our next activity, we can simply hand our kids a movie to watch to keep them quiet.

And it’s not just the presence of constant media, it is the media itself. Instead of long form videos, the majority of our media is consumed in one- to three-minute clips on apps like TikTok or Instagram. We can no longer focus for a whole 30-minute video, it feels like such a long commitment, but we are perfectly content to spend several hours scrolling through hundreds of short clips. Recently I overheard a group of teenagers playing music on their phones. I noticed they didn’t even have the patience to listen to a song in its entirety. After getting to the hook or chorus, they were on to their next request.

I am the kind of person who brings a book to the dentist’s office to read while I wait or even to a performance for during intermission. Yet despite my best efforts I am easily sucked into the endless loop of these videos, which provide limitless and mindless entertainment.

I am somewhat discerning. There are two distinct types of these short form videos. Consider one of the topics I like to watch: people baking desserts. The first type has people with manicured nails tapping things and so many cuts my eyes can barely keep up. Why show a clip of slicing strawberries, when you can have twenty cuts to show each knife slice for twenty strawberries? In a one-minute video there will be cuts nearly every second. I don’t like these. I find them nearly unwatchable.

The second type are the ones I like. They have no talking and often no music, so all you hear are the sounds of mixing and eggs cracking. They are longer videos often filmed with one camera angle. The main character of the story is the dessert, so instead of a shot of the influencer taking a bite of dessert at the end, you get an artsy shot of what they’ve made, and maybe a spoonful being scooped. The person is secondary, almost inconsequential, and you may have no idea what they look like, as they never show their face.

This is not just a trend with young people. Virtually all our media now comes in short form. Even our news is overstimulating. It feels like a full-time job just keeping up with the constant barrage. We get brief headlines of new topics everyday. News outlets fill the space with interesting, punchy headlines to keep our attention, but there is rarely in-depth coverage looking at a single topic that fully examines it. Instead we must quickly move on to the next big headline.

I’m not sure if our lives are mimicking our media, or if the media is simply copying our lifestyles, but both are overstimulating. It is again this need to be constantly entertained and this fear of being bored. Perhaps we’ve been tricked into believing that boredom equals lack of productivity. Perhaps we’ve been tricked into thinking that unproductive behavior is not worthy. We seem to be easily manipulated into behaviors that are not good for us.

I want to rebel against this, but it is a constant battle against that nagging in my head telling me I should be doing something useful. I want to sit outside and do nothing but absorb the sun. I want to be bored.

Claire Corkins grew up and lives in Bristol and studied Human Ecology at College of the Atlantic in Maine. After college she worked abroad teaching English as a second language. She currently works with her father in such various endeavors as painting houses, tiling bathrooms, building porches, and fixing old windows. She hikes, reads, plays ice hockey, travels, and wishes she could wear flip flops all year round.