The Dream of Calm Boredom
I spend a lot of time talking to youth, and one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to stereotypes about them is that they’re “addicted to their phones”.
Most of the young people I hang out with are being quite thoughtful about what they do with their time, are being purposeful with how they consume information, and are trying to calm down the noise in their brains vs. increase it.
I’ve noticed a real trend of this cohort actively trying to disconnect from technology, and find their way back to the natural world, and called up my young friend Sophie in Amsterdam, to talk through what this looks like for her and her friends.
Meg: First off – what does nature look like in your own life?
Sophie: In my current life, it’s a bit sad. I live in Amsterdam and it’s just the nature that we’ve created for ourselves. It’s like nature with a goal. We’ve groomed the natural land and it’s quite artificial. It’s parks, it’s canals that we’ve dug ourselves. But I dream of mountains and the sea – real nature that we haven’t had much influence on.
M: Will you talk to me about what your time in real nature looks like?
S: I spent the summer volunteering on a biodynamic farm, with a group of other volunteers. Day in and day out, we were in the field either reaping or sowing, putting together packages of vegetables. So: the main focus of every day was our vegetable babies – how are they doing, how is the land doing? Oh shit, it hasn’t rained in so long. The sun is shining, but we’re not happy for once because it means that the ground is drying even further. It’s raining, thank God it’s raining. Things you would usually not say as a city person, and it was great.
M: Did your body and brain feel different during that period than they do in the city?
S: Way calmer. Way calmer. This is kind of a cliche, but in the city everyone is overstimulated all the time and there’s so much that’s unpredictable. When you’re in the middle of a field with vegetables around you, what’s the most unpredictable thing that can happen? Not much.
M: What do you think is the biggest thing you learned from that experience?
S: That I don’t get bored as easily as I think I do.
M: Talk to me about modern day boredom. When you’re not on the farm, why do you think you get bored?
S: Because in urban life you have so many things to do and so many obligations. In the city, I have to be doing stuff all the time and when my agenda isn’t 100+ things that day, it’s like, oh no, I have nothing to do. I only have 80 things to do today. I’m so bored. While that’s really not true. On the farm, I would do one thing and that would keep me so happy & fulfilled the entire day.
M: What are your thoughts on the stereotype of young people being addicted to their iPhones today?
S: It’s not true. In my circle, most people have gone back to old Nokia phones because they don’t want to have a phone that influences them the whole day. They don’t want to be dominated by a piece of electronics.
I mean, everyone is so focused on their buzzes, on their notifications, on everything. When you go to a restaurant with a group, half of them have their phone out on the table. It’s quite ridiculous.
And I think people want to escape that. People are tired of that – of overstimulation, and not having the space to think and hear yourself.
M: Much like the shift from iPhones to Nokia, do you think young people are finding big cities as aspirational as they used to or romanticizing rural life and smaller towns?
S: Yes, but I also think it’s quite a privileged position to crave that rural life. You have to have lived in a busy city. You have to have experienced all of that overstimulation. I mean, living in big cities is usually extremely expensive. It just is. Having an iPhone is expensive. Having a MacBook is expensive. So I do feel like only a very select privileged group of people do get to have that craving of, oh, I’ve experienced city life now, so let me just go back to a more primitive state.
M: What did community look like when you were on the farm?
S: When I worked on the farm, I had a very tight sense of community because there were several projects and a restaurant – lots of people working together and we were very, very up-to-date about how (and what) everyone was doing.
While in Amsterdam, I’ve lived here for three years and don’t know anyone in my building. Community is really hard to build in a big city, where everyone is so busy and focused on their own lives and jobs.
On the farm, I had the time to build that communal feeling because I only had one task that day. My inbox was not overflowing and my to-do list was just to keep the vegetables alive, so I had the emotional space to really care for the people around me.
M: Do you ever dream of a more permanent rural lifestyle?
S: Yes, but not just yet. I’m only 23, but I would love my own small piece of land someday. Just growing my own crops, having some fruit trees. I would love to have some animals and I would like to keep it as natural and as harmonious as possible.
The self-sufficiency – eating out of your own garden the whole summer, would just be so nice. I live in a city apartment, with the tiniest balcony. I would just die to have a garden that I could work in every single day.
M: There’s something interesting about nature being a free activity, in this time of me spending $10 every time I even breathe in New York City.
S: In the fact that nature is so accessible, I think it’s very visible & important that so many different people, of all demographics, actually make use of it. When you go to the expensive matcha bar for your “self care time”, it’s like ten of the exact same people there. But when you go to the beach or whatever, the people you see there are all so different.
Accessibility to nature is a very connecting kind of function – where you really see people who might seem drastically different from you, just trying to live an okay life.
Nature brings us together, calms us all down, and makes us feel more human.
– Megan Weisenberger