I feel really relaxed and not bored at all when I go on vacation somewhere my phone gets little or no reception. It's amazing. There's so much to do without the Internet! Books are a thing, and there's more than enough top-notch fiction to last a lifetime, without re-reading. Writing is a thing. Sketching. Hell offline video games are a thing, for that matter, and you can mine the back catalogs of older consoles for (mostly) less money than something new, and have about the same amount of fun. You can keep yourself in more excellent video material than you can reasonably watch with a Netflix DVD subscription and a trip to the library every week, no Internet required (aside from managing your Netflix queue, I guess—do that on your library trips, when you pay your bills). Board games & tabletop games & card games rule. Inventing any of those is fun. Lawn games. Sports. Playing music. Listening to music. Building stuff in the garage. Programming in any language/ecosystem with decent offline documentation. Hardware stuff.

I only, only have Internet service because it lets me work from home and keeps my wife from having to stay at school until 7:00 4 nights a week for 9ish months a year (teacher) since friggin' everything they do is online now (Google, mostly). I mean I have a couple streaming services and such since we have to pay for Internet service anyway, but aside from those two (admittedly great) things that require it I wouldn't bother to pay for it.

That's the thing. That's never changed. Vacations have always been more fun. The change is that now, when you're doing boring mundane things, you can pull out your phone and have at least some modicum of entertainment.

I mean chillin’ in an Airbnb, not hiking or seeing the sights or whatever. Even that part’s better, without the Internet.

[EDIT] and yes I get the irony that AirBnB requires the Internet. Occasional Internet is handy to take care of necessities and create convenience. Constant Internet? I'm a skeptic.

This implies boredom is inherently bad. As a child, a lot of creative play came from boredom. Of course, we're all bound to lose some of that as we mature, but I can't help but feel that the availability of cheap distraction in the form of boundless information is allowing me to sabotage myself.

I think our relationship with boredom over the past 30 years mirrors that of hunger post-industrial revolution.

Humans evolved in environments where both calories and information were very sparse. Natural selection encouraged a continious psychological drive to seek those resources whenever and wherever possible. Over-consuming food or stimulus was such a rare condition that we have very few naturally in-built mental mechanisms to avoid it.

And then all of a sudden our environment drastically changed. Sometime in the 20th century the central risk related to food went from starvation to obesity. In the 21st century the central risk of stimulation has gone from mind-atrophying boredom to compulsive zombie-like wire-heading.

To resist obesity we had to re-evaluate our relationship with the feeling of hunger. Always giving into our base impulse would mean that we gorge on calorically dense, hyper-palatable, nutritionally poor food from morning to night. Modern people had to learn that feeling a little hungry sometimes is okay. It's necessary for a baseline level of healthy physiology, and actually not that unpleasant when you get used to it.

I think we have to re-learn the same lesson with boredom. The skeptics are right. The average level of moment-to-moment boredom in 1980 was extremely high, and well past the point of necessity or even marginal benefit. But virtually no one with a smartphone ever experiences anything like 1980 boredom on a daily basis. While a lot of boredom is bad, we have to learn that a little bit of boredom is necessary for healthy cognitive and emotional functioning.

It was boring. A lot of TV was watched. There were some video games too. You could program too. The only thing you could do outside of that would be to read or socialize. You could read a gauntlet of things that you can do today as well. But YouTube, podcasts, blogs are great.

> The only thing you could do outside of that would be to read or socialize.

Hike, play sports, build stuff with your hands, make art, write, go swimming, and a bunch of other things.

I don't recall being particularly bored growing up before the internet became a big deal. It's just that now I'm used to having online access to so many things, it's easier to be bored without access to that.

It's probably more likely that you just grew up and the things you found exciting then you don't find exciting now. Because you could just do those things now without going on the internet! They're separate things.