Bored to Life

Sometimes I, a millennial college prof, sit in meetings and listen quietly, attentively, to complaints about how millennial students are too distracted, too bored, until I start to think that my entire generation must have leapt from the pages of an Isherwood or Waugh novel, and was not in fact scraped fully formed from Instagram’s databases, as everyone knows. On such occasions, I often think of the boredom chronicler and British child psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’s reminder that “the best thing we can learn from children is how to lose interest.” The young — like social media users, millennials, and their junior compatriots Generation Nobody-­Knows-What-to-Call-Them — are not necessarily mired in boredom, but they are rather good at losing interest when it’s time to learn something new or at acting bored when it seems expedient.