Continued from: distractedly entertained  (part 1) (2026 Jul 31)

Technology has supplanted boredom.

I’d love to pry that phone out the Kid’s hands some day, lock it in a box, and tell her that she’s got it mixed up. She razzed me the other day because I was vibe coding. She literally shouted in my face that I shouldn’t be using AI. “Dad! That stuff is evil.”

I shook my head and kept my cool and told her that security checking my web code through Claude for hacking vulnerabilities was not the same as generating slop in a chatbot. Both AI, sure, but different realms.

And besides, I thought later as I was out for a walk alone (exercising the dog and daydreaming up my next article) you have your face plugged into a phone screen ninety-five percent of the day. Creativity is not going to bubble magically through that device and make you a better human, is it?

Grumpy old man could shake his fist in the air and shout “oh, the kids these days…” but it’s not just the kids, is it?

When was the last time you left your phone in a different room—and the outside the bathroom door is not good enough of an answer, though that’s getting rarer and rarer too if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by.

Boredom is the heart of my personal creativity.

Boredom—when I turn off the screen, leave out the headphones, walk without conversation, run without headphones, sit without a television, lay in the grass without a book or a game—that’s when the good stuff flows.

We’re all increasingly distracted by entertainment and technology is a garden of distraction.

What hope does boredom have in the face of unlimited options to consume our minds. What hope does human creativity have at the loss of true boredom.

This was cross-posted on Dispatches from Nowhere.

Wabisabi is, as I understand it, a valuing of beauty emerging from imperfection and the stories that are part of an object that has impermanence in the world. In other words, something grows in worth when it passes through hands, chips, cracks, is repaired, is broken and patched, and lives in and through the history of our hearts and hands.

It is the reason we take the “good plates” out when any old occasion strikes. It is why I don’t wrap my furniture in plastic. It is a reason to put stickers on your laptop. It is patching holes in a favourite sweater or replacing a broken zipper on a jacket even though the colour may not match. All these things add to the history and story of the object and make it more interesting. In the parlance of a world rife with AI slop, the authenticity of something grows with the life it lives.

To generate perfection from an algorithm is to give something a history that starts with no story… well, besides the weight of questions about the agent: who built it, who prompted it, who trained it, and what data was it trained on?

Whether we think about it routinely or not, many of us value the answers to these types of questions about many aspects of our life: Do you greet the barista at the cafe who made your coffee? Do you check the country of manufacture on a pair of socks or a new car? Do you read the bio of the artist who’s song you just downloaded? All of it is story that emerges from the bits of human imperfection of those things, no matter how industrial the process.

But now we’ve not only tried to remove the human but the story, and I’m not sure where that leaves authenticity—or where beauty can fill cracks that don’t exist.

The day before I’m writing this we took the dog for a walk and she started telling me about a contradiction she encountered in her first days of classes this term. 

Her profs, uniformly, told her that use of AI in any way, shape or form would be grounds for referral for academic disciplinary action. It would not be tolerated. Stern warning proffered.

Quite differently, her boyfriend, who is doing a business degree, was told virtually the opposite rule: AI is the new reality, so we kind of expect that you’ll learn how to use it effectively.  Collective academic shrug followed.

Same university. Different colleges. Opposite inclinations.

“Look,” I told her. “You’ve come up against the troubling rift in defining what AI actually is. For a business student—or similarly a science student or an engineering student—AI is a fancy calculator that double checks their work and makes them more efficient at getting to the answer.” 

Heck, I’m a writer and I use a spellchecker without hesitation. I’d be crazy not to use one.

“On the other side, when you’re doing an arts degree, they are trying to teach you how to think, how to analyze, how to create and make and flex that very human muscle in your head.” the conversation continued. “AI is no longer just a tool to assist your work in that situation. It’s a replacement for your whole brain. A generative AI writes the whole answer.”

For that same kind of effort, my writing will never, ever—ever, ever, ever—use generative AI. I will under no circumstances use AI to turn my thoughts into paragraphs of generative text.  Fixing my spelling and catching obvious technical mistakes is one thing, but replacing my brain and style and the very joy of doing the work itself, well, that is a whole other vibe.

“I guess so.” She shrugged. “What’s the point of paying for a degree that’s meant to teach you how to think critically and to use your brain if you just let a computer do all the work?”

What’s the point indeed?

Being a creative-minded guy has been who I am my whole life.

For as long as I can remember I was the guy writing stories, drawing pictures, making stuff and inventing worlds for all of it to inhabit.  There are a lot of us out there doing that, loving it, and letting that identity wash over us.  

A lot. And that meant a lot of competition for audience—even before AI.

We were a supportive community, of course. We share and uplift and applaud the efforts of fellow humans who are out there giving it there all to make interesting stuff.

But how do we, any of us, compete against an opponent that doesn’t sleep?

That’s the real fear of this AI, true or not, hype or reality, that at some point no matter how much we make or write or code or dream, a machine has immeasurably more output than any of us, maybe all of us.

There is a lot of recent speculation that not only is AI unsustainable but that the perception of a magic brain that can replace us all is as much marketing slop as reality: but that does not negate the fact that fatigue and disillusionment by us mere mortals is a real thing.  That doesn’t mean the algorithm is going to need to do anything but not drop from exhaustion from the race before us.

Branched · part 1 Continued on: distractedly entertained  (part 2)

Technology has supplanted boredom.

I’m going to say it: we don’t know how to be bored anymore.

Over on my other writing project I pen a parallel daily-ish set of articles about creativity and living a creative life. I’ve never really dug too deeply into the idea of boredom, but anecdotally I will tell you what is easily the number one killer of my creative productivity: distraction.

And technology is a garden of distraction.

Endless feeds of controversial conversation are just a tap away.

Apps are stuffed to the gills with complex news stories.

Games are readily available to kill a few contemplative moments with anything from a crossword puzzle to a battle royale. 

Hey, I used to get up each morning and from six am until breakfast I would work on my game project, write code, and debug interesting problems until everyone else in the house was up and ready for the day.  Lately, I do some word games on my phone and then doomscroll over a cup of tea. Distraction supplanted the boredom that drove me to create… but maybe that’s just me.

But beyond creative productivity, some scholars have argued that boredom is important to mental health, leaving our minds to wander and explore new ideas, and even a core aspect of culture: “Boredom is often considered a trivial and inconsequential emotion, but recent studies have shown that it can have a significant impact on our wellbeing, productivity, and even our health.“^[1]

Technology, it can be argued—and often simply observed—ensures we are never bored: there is always a device to pull from our pocket, a screen to gaze into, words and messages and images swirling around our brains.

What’s that doing to us?