In Praise of Staring

I was wowed and gratified by Starshine’s dispatch from the End Times titled “Remember Boredom?” It tenderly understates the Creeping Beige Terror that will finally overgrow and suffocate our variously sweet and dumb race of doomed gadget-hounds.

If you try to sell a tween or certain species of adult on the idea of just staring into the middle distance and daydreaming as a way of passing a few moments’ time, you’ll be rewarded with staring, all right. They’ll stare at you like you’re mad.

Today we awaken, blink twice, and reach for our Hamster Snapshot Transducer the way our forebears would roll over and reach for a cigarette, and we end the day in the screen-tapping quietude of vacant cupcake-photo-comparing. When Steve Jobs got a bracing sense of where his energies were leading, he famously, if quietly, began to limit his own kids’ access to the burgeoning world of iCrap. The Bored & Brilliant initiative is a touching indication of the 11th hour hell-inkling that is beginning to stir our collective gut, but the Genie is out of the bottle and evident in every stupefying pixel of Instagram and AmusingToastPatterns.com.