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My grandson looked up from his phone last weekend and asked me, “Grandpa, what did you guys do before the internet?”
I opened my mouth to answer, then closed it. Opened it again. Nothing came out.
Because the real answer? We were bored. Deeply, profoundly, magnificently bored. And that boredom did something to us that I can’t explain without sounding like I’m dumping on his entire generation.
But I’m going to try anyway.
See, we didn’t have endless entertainment in our pockets. We had long stretches of nothing. And in those stretches, something happened. We had to figure out how to fill the time. We had to get creative. We had to become the entertainment.
1. We had to learn how to tell stories
You know what we did on job sites during lunch? We talked. Not texted, not scrolled, just sat there with our sandwiches and told stories.
And here’s the thing: if you were boring, nobody wanted to sit with you. So you learned how to tell a story. You learned timing. You learned which details mattered and which ones to skip. You learned how to build to a punchline.
I remember this guy on my crew who could make a trip to the hardware store sound like an adventure. He’d have us crying laughing about arguing with the clerk over a bolt size. That was his superpower. He could find the humor in anything.
These days, when conversation dies, someone pulls out a phone. Shows a video. Problem solved. But back then? If conversation died, you had to revive it. You had to dig into your memory, find something worth sharing, and figure out how to make it interesting.
That’s how you developed a personality. Through practice. Through bombing terribly and learning what didn’t work. Through sitting in uncomfortable silence until you figured out something to say.
2. We had to get good at something real
When I was young, if you wanted to be interesting, you had to actually do something. Learn guitar. Fix cars. Build things. Cook. Something.
My buddy spent two years teaching himself card tricks because what else was he going to do on Saturday nights? Another guy learned to juggle. I learned guitar, badly, but well enough to play at parties.
We didn’t learn these things to post about them. We learned them because we were bored, and mastering something filled the time. Plus, it gave you something to contribute. You became the guy who could fix anything, or the guy who could play any song, or the guy who could cook a meal out of nothing.
The thing is, getting good at something takes time. Lots of dead, boring time where you’re terrible and frustrated and want to quit. But we pushed through because the alternative was staring at the wall.
Now my grandkids can watch someone else play guitar perfectly on their phone. They can watch someone else fix a car, cook a meal, do magic tricks. Why struggle through being bad at something when you can watch someone who’s already good?
But here’s what they’re missing: being bad at something and getting better is how you build character. It’s how you learn that you can push through frustration. It’s how you discover what you’re capable of.
3. We had to learn how to be alone with our thoughts
I spent countless hours in my van driving between jobs with nothing but the radio. Sometimes not even that. Just me and my thoughts.
That sounds like torture now, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t. It was where I figured things out. Where I had imaginary arguments and won them. Where I planned my future. Where I replayed conversations and figured out what I should have said.
Being alone with your thoughts teaches you who you are. What you actually think versus what you’re supposed to think. What matters to you when nobody’s watching.
My grandson is never alone with his thoughts. There’s always something to look at, listen to, interact with. When does he get to know himself? When does he get to be bored enough to daydream?
I worry about that. Not in a judgmental way, just in a concerned way. Because those boring drives shaped me more than almost anything else.
4. We had to commit to plans
If we said we’d meet at the park at 2 PM on Saturday, we showed up at the park at 2 PM on Saturday. No texting to change plans. No checking in to see if everyone’s still coming. You just showed up.
And if nobody else showed up? You figured something out. You shot baskets alone. You walked around. You met somebody new.
This taught us commitment and adaptability. You learned to be reliable because flaking meant letting people down with no way to explain. You learned to handle uncertainty because plans went sideways all the time and you couldn’t call an audible.
But more than that, it forced us to be present. When you met up with people, that was it. You were there. No escape route, no better option popping up on your phone. You had to make the most of whatever was happening right in front of you.
5. We had to pay attention
You want to know how I learned to read people? By having nothing else to look at.
Standing in line at the bank. Sitting in waiting rooms. Riding the bus. We watched people. We noticed things. We picked up on body language, overheard conversations, saw how people treated each other when they thought nobody was watching.
That’s how you learn about life. By observing it. By being bored enough to really see what’s happening around you.
My grandkids miss all of it. They’re looking down. They’re somewhere else. The world is happening right in front of them and they’re watching someone else’s world on a screen.
I’m not saying we were better people. We weren’t. We were just bored people who had to figure out how to make life interesting. And in figuring that out, we accidentally became interesting ourselves.
Before I go
Look, I’m not saying the internet is bad. I use it every day. It’s incredible what we can access now.
But that boredom we had? That empty space? That’s where creativity lives. That’s where personality develops. That’s where you figure out who you are when you’re not being entertained.
My grandson doesn’t need to know any of this. His world is his world, and he’ll figure it out his own way. But sometimes I want to tell him: be bored sometimes. Put the phone down and stare at nothing. Let your mind wander. Learn something that takes months to get good at. Have a conversation that goes nowhere.
That’s where the interesting stuff happens. In the boring spaces between.
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