I'm So Booooooored.

And I kinda like it.

When I was a kid, the worst torture was boredom.

I’d stare sullenly out the rainy window. I’d kick the living room rug as I walked around its perimeter. I’d tease the dog. I’d annoy my mother. I’d whine.

These days, I’m so rarely bored—except at bad dinner parties or when looking at Facebook. There always seems to be stuff I want to do—things to learn, to explore, to experience. If anything, the problem is having too many options. And too little time.

But I vividly remember that “I’m so booooooored” feeling from being eight or nine and refusing to occupy myself with my shelves of books, bins of toys, and boxes of crayons.

I’m having a version of it today.

Our Internet service is out (they promise it’ll be back by 3:21 PM—so specific and so unbelievable). I can’t watch YouTube while eating my lunch or distract myself with Instagram.

When’s the Internet coming?

I guess I’ll write something instead. Today’s the day I typically start to draft this weekly essay, so let’s get down to that instead.

I gaze at my bookshelves, thumb through some random pages. I look through the folder on my phone that is my virtual commonplace book, an endless archive of highlighted quotes from other people’s books and blog posts.

It’s the late-night feeling of looking in the fridge for inspiration for something to snack on. Nah, nothing looks good.

My hard drive has an archive of ideas I’ve never used. Stuff I thought of in the shower, on a walk, while watching Netflix. Half-baked. Abandoned. Ideas that seemed viable, but I was too lazy to write at the time.

I rarely publish one as is. I usually use them as grease for my cerebral wheels. What comes out the other end bears no resemblance to what went into the machine.

Fine. Whatever. I’ll just start typing and see what happens.

What if the internet never came back?

What if this is it—the great unplugging, the apocalypse of connectivity?

We’d all be standing around like confused penguins on an ice floe, refreshing our browsers and getting nothing. Civilization would crumble. Governments would fall. Dogs and cats, living together.

Or maybe not. Maybe we’d just... make stuff again.

Draw things. Write things. Build things with our hands. My grandfather carved duck decoys in his back shed. Did he need Wi-Fi for that? He needed a block of wood and a knife and probably some vague idea of what a duck looked like. The rest was just hands moving and wood chips falling and time passing.

I’m typing faster now. Where is this going? I have no idea. Something about ducks. Something about the internet being a giant distraction from the fact that our imaginations are right there, waiting, like dragons we’re too afraid to climb on because what if they take us somewhere weird? What if we end up drawing a witch fighting a tuna sandwich in a forest made of old word processors? What then?

Well, what then? At least we’d have a drawing of a witch fighting a tuna sandwich. At least we’d have made something that didn’t exist before.

The router blinks back to life. Little green light, so proud of itself.

I keep writing anyway. The boredom is gone. I’m just me again, hands moving, making stuff. That’s all it ever takes.

Your pal,

Danny

🥱 P.S. If you think you might be bored this weekend, join me on Saturday for my new workshop. Find out more about it here. I promise — it will not be a bore.

📺 P.P.S. I just finished a new short film called The Artist Who Hated His Art. I’ll be sharing it with all of YouTube on Tuesday, but here’s a sneak peek just for you.