Boredom (The Devil's Playground)

Written by Alvin Ravalo | 03 October 2011

"Boooooooooooooooooooorrrrrred!" I don't know how many times I've read this posted as status on facebook. What's the matter with today's young ones? Have they been on too much physical, emotional and psychological stimulation that they're starting to have withdrawal symptoms? Or have they simply lost the ability to think from the sensory overload they're in, that when the stimulus ceases, they don't know what to do?

Have you ever experienced listening to full blast music for a couple of hours, then suddenly turn it off? That is deafening silence. And it's probably what these young ones are complaining of.

Ironically, with so much to do around us, the rate of boredom seems to be skyrocketing. Imagine the time of our great grandparents when there was no electricity, no radio, no TV, no computer, no internet. They took their supper before sundown and slept a little after sunset. The young ones stayed outside for a few minutes more to attend to "extra-household matters". For the children it was "taguan", or "patintero". For the older kids, it was a different kind of taguan, or patintero.

Today, our children are bombarded by a cornucopia of stimuli ranging from their iPod blasting in their ears to the video games searing in their eyes. There is so much being fed to the senses, all while seated for hours without moving a muscle except for their eyes and fingers.

In this age of industrialization where every waking moment is filled with an abundance of sounds, sights, smells, a few minutes without these stimuli has been relegated as deprivation. Our young people in the cities have gotten used to so much noise that silence is being treated as abnormal. Our young people in the countryside will jump at the first opportunity to get out of there and live in the city where they can live their dream.

Life for these young people is slowly becoming a spoon-feeding program wherein they just sit and wait for whatever they will see on the TV screen or computer monitor, and whatever they will hear on the FM radio. Everything is now dictated by the TV and movie producers, and the radio DJs. They just wait to be spoonfed by other people. They no longer try to think of things worthy of doing , books worthy of reading and activities worthy of doing.

And the parents are all the more relieved by this trend in child rearing... prop your child in front of the TV set and do your household chores or internet chatting. Our children are slowly becoming slaves of whatever multimedia will churn out. And then we complain that children these days are no longer like they used to be. And we blame TV, we blame the internet, we blame the video games, we blame the other parents. But we never blame ourselves.

It would be very difficult to try to build a relationship with a teenager who has been raised by the TV set, by video games and by the internet. Children who have been used to being in front of these electronic gadgets will build a pseudo-relationship with it relegating the parents to second choice. This could be likened to being an OFW without having to leave the country. Without having to leave your home. And when you try to impose your authority on your child, you'll be surprised to see the look they give you. The look that seems to ask, "Bakit, sino ka ba?" And we blame everyone else but us.

I bored child may be no big deal. But in this more and more complicated world, it might be a symptom of a problem deeper than we care to dig up.