Palimpsest

Pining for boredom seems absurd. But I think there’s something to be said for an empty space you then have to fill. I spent a vast amount of my life daydreaming and I had a rich interior life when I was a kid, a real kid, before I had the focus of music. I used to have stories in my head and I don’t really know what’s going on in my son’s head. He doesn’t seem to spend much time staring into space. He’s always flitting between his computer and his various games and devices. He’s a totally modern, networked kid. He has emailing and all these things. He has a YouTube channel where he makes these little videos and stuff. I don’t get the sense these things have the function that daydreaming had for me. His metabolism seems much more hyped-up and he seems more restless than I would have been – where I would just sink into reveries as a child or I would write and draw, stuff like that. My son does those things a bit, but there’s this whole array of distractions for him and I wonder if a lot of people are like that because that’s how the technology kind of encourages you to be.

Given that universal access to all forms of culture is normal in the digital age, does digital nostalgia mean yearning for a time when we were not overloaded with information? Does modern-day nostalgia manifest as a yearning for boredom?