From the time I was about 12 years old, I believed that you always needed to be doing something. Whether it was building a castle out of LEGOs or playing a video game, playing guitar or listening to music, I thought that you constantly needed something to do. After all, our time on this planet is limited, and doing nothing is essentially wasting your time. You could be having fun or making money or working out or doing something to better yourself or someone else. Now that I'm older and more experienced, I have realized that is incorrect. I believe that you do not always need something to occupy yourself. Furthermore, I think that doing "nothing" is, in moderation, a good and healthy thing.
When we were younger, before we all became teenagers or adults, we had plenty of time to do whatever. Sure, school took up a large portion of the day, but when you got home, you had 4 or 5 hours to just do whatever you pleased. You may have had to do chores or go someplace after school, but often you were free. During this time, we would play, read, watch television; again, whatever you wanted to do. But, especially on summer break, you got bored. Occupying yourself with the same activities and routines is only fun for so long, and when you don't have something new to do or somewhere to go, you get bored. And boredom often leads to lying or sitting around, waiting for the time to pass until familiar things become fun again. Daydreaming or whatever. In other words, you were doing nothing. I'd just wind up sitting on my bed or on the couch, daydreaming about stories I could write or about what I could do tomorrow. And when the time came to go back to doing stuff, I was invigorated and had plenty of fresh ideas to pursue. It was a system and it worked.
Or that's what it used to be. Assuming you didn't have endless access to television or video games as a child, you just got bored. That's what happened. There's wasn't much you could do about it really. But then we got smartphones. Suddenly, we had ready access to stimulation whenever we wanted it. Effortless stimulation. All you had to do was turn it on and then your boredome was satiated with a video or an article or something of that sort. And, for me, I could get on it almost as much as I wanted. This is all coming from my personal experience. I know that not everybody had the same scenario growing up as I did, and I don't expect them to. But I feel that what I lived has some universality to it, and that is why I want to share it.
Anyways, now that we were "mature young adults", we had the privelege to remedy our encroaching boredom with endless access to the Internet. Whenever I became bored, instead of waiting around and daydreaming, I will fill it with articles about the Cure song that Robert Smith thinks is most overlooked (It's Not The One You'd Think!) or a video about weird and creepy things in beta Minecraft. Now that I could be entertained with new media whenever I wanted, there was no time for nothing. Because doing "nothing"'s purpose was to be something to do when nothing else sounded appealing, it was invalidated. It had no place anymore.
It's important to say that I wasn't on my phone constantly. I left time for other things that I enjoyed, even if it probably took up more time than any of my other "hobbies". But I would still have a weekly average of about 1-2 hours of daily screen time.