The boredom metre

Western attention spans are awful. In the interests of empirical research though, let me be more specific: my attention span is awful.

Sitting at home in my apartment back in Waterloo, I could get bored the second a yawn stretched my jawbones, even when I was surrounded by a bevy of distractions. Guitars and an amplifier. An MP3 library of some 10,000 songs. Computer consoles and more games than I can be bothered to count. A television with digital cable. A shelf full of DVDs – many of them unwatched. Next to these, unread novels. An equally bored-out hamster to play with. What to do, Louis, what to do? “Feed me!” he would scream. “NO!” I would reply. My list at home goes on, and is dwarfed by the possibilities outside of my abode – friends, cinemas, shops, cafes, parks, bars.

On those days when I had no specific task at hand – nothing that genuinely required doing - I would become bored, listless, fatigued, ho-hum. What made things even more mind-numbing, though, was that I was simply spoilt for choice of things to do – and had no real reason for doing any of them other than to fill time. I sporadically suffer from self-inflicted attention-deficit disorder. I get bored very easily, and it bothers me. I expect the same might be true for many people in the west.

It's this particular affliction of mine that has shed a unique light on my observations of the citizens of Tanzania. They can cope with boredom more adeptly than I ever imagined a human being capable of. Because they really aren't spoilt for choice of things to do. A lot of the time, there's very, very little for them to do at all.

It's a common sight to see someone simply sitting in the shade on the side of the road, watching the day grow old; or a group of elderly men standing around waiting for the hours to pass by, chatting idly to each other. Call me a scrooge - it's a lifestyle I don't feel jealous for, but it's all they've got. Options for “entertainment” in the middle of their day are relegated to mostly just face-to-face socializing. Some people might think of this as quite utopian. They spend their lives working, and when they're not working, they relax and talk amongst each other.

I'm not sure if I can make a comment, as I'm not really certain that locals themselves would describe their lives as anything nearing “utopian”. I'm also generalizing, referring really to just the people I see in towns. Perhaps they're bored out of their minds, but can do nothing about it. I don't know if they would (given the choice) rather be reading books, watching movies, whatever. Maybe they'd be jealous of the infinite number of entertaining distractions available to me. Whatever the case – if they're spending their downtime better by just doing nothing, rather than superficially filling their time in with all of the leisurely activities enjoyed by us westerns – it's definitely going to have an impact on the way I evaluate my sense of boredom back home.

Have our lives really become just like the future satirically prophesied by Aldous Huxley (apologies for the segue, I'm reading Brave New World right now) – where we feel driven to spend our free time engulfed in complicated activities (like playing rounds of Obstacle Golf or listening to the Super-Vox-Wurlitzeriana), rather than just simply sitting next to someone and doing nothing in particular?

If the great Meaning of Life is “Don't get bored,” then an evaluation of what constitutes boredom is most certainly in order for me. This trip has at least set the gears in motion for such philosophizing.