We’ve all been there: feeling bored on the plane is perhaps the least fun part of going on vacation, and no amount of drinks you order can change that (well, no respectable amount, anyway). But, as Zack Cahill argues, going without any entertainment at all – a practice known as raw-dogging – and instead embracing the boredom might not be such a bad thing in a world that constantly seeks to distract us.
A tweet from a few years ago lives in my head rent-free. Well, not so much that I remember it word for word. But the gist was the tweeter expressing bafflement and admiration for a man who sat beside him on a flight to Paris and didn’t read a book, watch a film or listen to a podcast the whole journey. He simply sat and drank a glass of water. The tweeter described it as ‘raw-dogging’ the transatlantic flight.
Who knows what the man was thinking, what madness possessed him? Maybe he was a Terminator? It seems unthinkable and pointless to me, but it’s fair to say he must have been exercising some sort of mindfulness.
Mindfulness, like cardio or having an ISA, is one of those things that everyone knows is good for you but few actually practice. Because you don’t have to. You have a rectangle in your pocket that contains every piece of entertainment ever made. I realised a while back that I can’t even remember the last time I experienced boredom. And that can’t be good, right? Boredom is a prerequisite to mindfulness. The fiery crucible in which true zen is forged. And there are probably people reading this who don’t remember, but before about 2008, there was a hell of a lot more boredom.
You want mindfulness? Try taking a dump in 1995. Try rewinding video tapes. Try waiting in a doctor’s office with only a five-year-old copy of Take A Break with all the crosswords completed to keep you company.
Mindfulness. All of it. Enforced mindfulness. Maybe that’s why the nineties were so objectively awesome. When I boarded my first international flight, do you think they had seat-mounted interactive screens? Oh no. The flight attendant rolled out a TV at the top of the aisle and showed several episodes of Mr Bean.
Why the mostly silent Mr Bean? Because there were no headphones. We just watched it over the hum of the engines, the crackling of announcements and the rustling of peanut packets. We raw-dogged that in-flight entertainment. We were built different, baby.
I definitely read more books back then. Christ, on one quiet shift at a pub I read the biography of Roy Keane almost cover to cover. But I also practiced a lot of mindfulness. My teens were a blur of hour-long bus journeys into Dublin city centre to meet friends. Looking out the windows, lost in teenage reveries and, occasionally, surprising experiences.
I was unexpectedly joined on one such trip by a woman known as Dancing Mary, one of a roster of ‘famous Dublin Characters’ (which is a politely Irish term for people with undiagnosed mental illness).
She was well known for dancing for hours in O’Connell Street, smiling unselfconsciously at passers-by. She had a deep, stentorian voice and was always immaculately turned out, made up and dripping with jewellery. She sat beside me and spoke for the whole bus ride about how she’d been an award-winning hairdresser with her own salon in the sixties and travelled the world.
That was a memorable journey. But for the most part, I’d sit on my own and stare out the window. And from that boredom arose creativity. I was in a band at the time and many song lyrics were written in my head as the 46A bus crawled through Donnybrook.
The journalist Johan Hari’s book Stolen Focus discusses how as distraction has pervaded every aspect of life, diagnoses of ADHD have exploded. 30% of boys in the United States are diagnosed by the time they’re eighteen.
It’s Hari’s (admittedly controversial) contention that what we’re calling ADHD is actually a rational response to less exercise and being surrounded by apps, games and media designed to be hyper-addictive by very clever people in Silicon Valley. I don’t know about you, but I resent my attention and emotions being dictated, monopolised and monetised by a handful of California dickheads.
I know this all sounds a bit like ‘old man yells at cloud’, or perhaps like an incredibly shit episode of Black Mirror (‘What if phones but… too much phones?!’). But just because it’s a tired idea doesn’t mean there’s nothing to it. There’s good evidence that boredom, like that experienced by sixteen-year-old me riding a bus into Dublin, breeds creativity. It is a catalyst for the brain to seek more rewarding thoughts. It sparks imagination and heightens observational skills.
Philosophers agree too, like OG existentialist Søren Kierkegaard, who said ‘the more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes. A solitary prisoner for life is extremely resourceful; to him, a spider can be a source of great amusement. What a meticulous observer one becomes, detecting every little sound or movement’.
I’m not saying that guy raw-dogging the flight to Paris was a prisoner (though, aren’t we all, in Economy?), but he was certainly limiting himself. What did he notice? What creative thoughts did it spark in him? What the hell was going on in that psychopath’s mind?
Or, going further, what could we all have produced, how many songs, books and paintings languish unmade in the ether because we were too busy fiddling with our phones when we should’ve been staring at the back of a headrest?
I shudder to think. It’s enough to drive me to distraction.
Illustration by Martin Perry, photography via Unsplash
