On boredom and the Middle Ages

Boys,

Put every idea in the world into a hat and try to draw one less exciting than boredom — it’s not easy to do! But I think boredom is important in an age where attention is at an all-time low. I believe that the ability to be bored is becoming more of a skill, which is a weird thing to say. But I believe it to be true.

I am going to try really hard not to make this a “when I was your age” post, but what I will say is that when people my age were younger, we did a lot more “waiting around” than you two do today. And, believe it or not, I think all that waiting helped us in so many ways.

I’ll start with me. I find myself having a harder and harder time being bored. The other night, your mom and I put you two to bed and your mom was feeling very tired from the day, so she went to bed too. I wanted to watch the National Championship game between Miami vs. Indiana, so I made myself a mocktail (#MocktailMonday) and settled in to watch the game.

Let me paint the picture. So my spot on the couch is all the way to the edge closest to the kitchen. I have the armrest where I can put my drink. I pull the ottoman up so I can prop my legs up, and I kind of shimmie a pillow between me and the armrest, and another pillow on my other side. So I’m kind of cradled into the couch looking directly head on toward the TV. I set the remote and my phone just off the left side pillow for easy access. If you can picture this, you can see how settled in and comfy I am as I’m watching the game play.

So the game is going on, but my hand keeps reaching for the phone. I open up Instagram and look at the first post or two, then close it and refocus on the game. A few minutes go by, and I do the same thing with X…back down and back up again with Instagram. I will pick up my phone randomly and look at all the apps without really any intention about what I am looking for. I’ll even look at Instagram, put it down, and a minute later, do the exact same thing.

It’s not healthy.

One of the times I saw something on X about the Middle Ages and I realized that I don’t know a whole lot about the Middle Ages… nobody does. So I do what anyone would do in 2026, and I type some long prompt into Gemini.

As a sidebar, I’d love to make a coffee table book about the stupid-long prompts people type into LLM’s to get the information that they want. I think people think, “the longer I type into this thing, the better the answer will be.” Anyway, here is what I said (keep in mind, I’m watching a National Championship football game that I was really excited to watch):

I want to understand the Middle Ages in europe and the Middle East. I want to write a book about it in a way that is captivating to a large audience. I want the book to span the entire length of the Middle Ages around the time of the Crusades. I want to have context for what it was, how it started, and what happened afterward. What are the lasting effects from that time? I want you to write the book, then provide me a cliff notes version with key headers, bullets for each key event or figure, and a 10 sentence preface and epitaph on either end.

This is what people do in 2026. Anyway, some funny things came out of this like the book title, “Shadows and Silk: The Forge of the Modern World.” Anyway, I’m sitting here reading this thing that I asked for, and I’m now barely paying attention to the game. I’ll sort of catch wind of what I’m doing and put the phone down again, but by this point, I’m more curious about who Richard the Lionheart was and what he did than what Fernando Mendoza is doing on the field.

“I wonder what he looked like.”

<follow up text in GPT>

“What did Baghdad look like when it was the cultural hub of the world?”

<thats interesting>

“How big was Sancho VII “The Strong” of Navarre”

<we’re losing him>

Now I’m all in. It’s 10:00 and it’s halftime, so I go up and get ready for bed. Your mom is already asleep. As I get in, she kind of wakes up and we say our goodnights, and I turn on TV. Still halftime… I genuinely pop over to Youtube and I’m about to find some 30 minute video on The Fourth Crusade, but I stop myself when I think about what your mom would say to me in her dream state about me watching something like that. When your mom is half asleep, there is no telling what she’s capable of saying and I didn’t want to be on the bad side of that conversation.

Anyway, might be slightly off track here, but the point is that we ALL, you and me both, need to be OK with being bored. We need to be OK not having all the information right away and having to wait through a commercial to get back to our show.

I see it in you two especially. It’s nearly impossible to wait for your food at a restaurant without an ipad or a distraction. If we’re driving for more than 20 minutes, you crave having a screen to look at to pass the time.

I think it causes a lot of issues too. Reagan, you have a hard time at school with focus. I know it’s also who you are and I’m not trying to blame screens for all our issues, but I think that it’s more of a generational problem we’re all dealing with. Even your shows you watch on Disney are made to hold the attention of the attentionless. Characters have to be crazier-looking and crazier-sounding than anything I ever watched growing up. Music is chaotic. Creators, especially for kids’ programs, have to be loud and make everything seem CRAZY and there need to be graphics and sound effects happening at all times.

Again, this isn’t me wagging a finger and telling you that it doesn’t affect me too.

One thing your mom started doing that I think is really great is building puzzles. One thing that I think isn’t so great is taking over the kitchen table with her puzzling (don’t worry, she also bought a puzzle board that sits on top of the kitchen table too). But it’s a great way to force focus and she’s been really great about making time to do that where she would have otherwise been ‘gram-scramming on her phone.

(She probably wouldn’t have been looking up facts and key figures from the Middle Ages, but who am I to judge?)

OK, this post has gone on long enough and I’m pretty sure you’ve stopped reading by now. My guess is that when you’re older, you’ll just upload this whole project I’ve been doing for however many years now into your brain and will have read every word within a nanosecond. Then again, that is the subject of a very different post.

My hope for you boys, for your mom and me, and frankly, for everyone with access to screens and the internet, is that we find a happy medium between using technology for good and being able to step away to think for ourselves. In some ways, I believe that we’re built to be bored. I believe boredom allows our brains to wander, to iterate, and to create.

So forge ahead, boys, and remember boredom is just a chance for your brain to reset and find creative ways to pass the time. Maybe you’ll find inspiration for something you love to do, or maybe you’ll realize that there are things you don’t know much about. And if you do, great! You can always find time to look back into that thing later — even if it happens to be during one of the biggest football games of the year!

Love you boys.

Dad