On Saturday night, I saw Keith Urban in concert. One of my favourites of his songs is Wasted Time. It’s a song that reminisces about the lost days of youth and days spent just hanging out with friends.
When I hear that song, I’m taken back to my teenage days. I have vivid memories of lazy days by the pool, at the beach, or just driving around in the car. One especially vivid memory is of several of us lying on the floor in my friend Christina’s living room late one night. We were staring at the stone fireplace mantle and imagining shapes in the multi-coloured stone.
Wasted Time Has Disappeared
Flash forward to 2024 and that type of simple unstructured “wasted” time has all but disappeared. These days, when you see groups of young people—and even older people—together, chances are they’re engaging more with their smartphones than with each other.
In Do We Have a Loneliness Crisis? I wrote about a talk I’d attended by Jeremy Nobel, author of Project Unlonely, where he discussed the loneliness crisis in our world today. I just finished reading Nobel’s book and was intrigued by a chapter called “The Ubiquitous Smartphone” that addresses the implications of the ever-present smartphone.
Dr. Nobel says the rise of the smartphone has essentially removed downtime from our lives. It has created a sense of urgency where we feel we need constant stimulation.
Instead, the phone has become an enabler of impatience with being alone with our thoughts. We have trouble being bored.
Jeremy Nobel, Project Unlonely
The book cited a 2019 study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics where 82% of adults reported they had spent no time relaxing or thinking in the previous 24 hours. That simple quiet, creative time has been replaced by mindless scrolling. Dr. Nobel believes the biggest downside is we’re missing out on the benefits of daydreaming and the creativity that comes from unstructured time.
This lack of downtime affects us all, but it’s especially problematic for children and teenagers. After studying hundreds of thousands of creativity tests over the last 50 years, Psychologist Kyung Hee Kim found that, since 1990, children have become less imaginative, less humorous, and less creative.
You have to wonder how our children will remember their youth. I fear the nostalgia of hours wasted scrolling through a cell phone will never measure up to unstructured, wasted time and time spent just being rather than being constantly overstimulated by buzzing and pinging phones. I’m fairly certain it won’t inspire a catchy, hit song like this one.
Ain’t it funny how the best days of my life
Was all that wasted time?– Greg Wells, Keith Lionel Urban, James John Abrahart Jr, Wasted Time
Perhaps we all need to challenge ourselves to turn off our phones and build some wasted time into our days. Who knows what kind of creativity a few minutes spent daydreaming will inspire?
Do you set aside time in your schedule for daydreaming? Drop me a comment below and let me know.
Learn more about me in my bio and on my personal blog at BoomerEcoCrusader.com. You can also find me on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest.