Last week, during one of my regular viewings of “The Breakfast Club” in the Harold and Wilma Good Library basement, I took note of the sound. Unlike movies nowadays, there’s not a grand soundtrack accompanying every scene. Some moments are scored with complete silence, just the buzzing of the DVD player and the dialogue between actors. This choice amplifies the tension among the characters and highlights a minor theme of the movie that I believe is worth revisiting —boredom.
Among the younger generations, from Mill-ennials to Generation Beta, there is a total lack of boredom. With the constant stimulation that surrounds them, nobody is just sitting around bored, which explains why people are growing more shallow, art is getting less creative and innovation is diminishing.Back to our example of “The Breakfast Club.” It is in those moments of boredom where the unlikely comrades begin to open up and learn about each other. The reason this movie works so well is because it plays out over the course of a Saturday evening in detention, a setting notorious for harboring bored students. Out of this, curiosity begins to build and they start to understand each other beyond the stereotypes of their archetypical characters.
Our perceptions are constantly being reinforced by the content being fed through algorithms. Remove boredom from this movie and these characters never make an effort to learn about each other. Times are not much different; although it takes place before social media, the kids in the movie have modern-day counterparts. Their influencers are their friends and their algorithms are the information that circulates these cliques.
When removed from these settings and presented with boredom, they challenge their narrow scope of understanding. When we avoid being bored, we miss the opportunity to do this and we end up being a shallow society with perceptions built entirely on incomplete grasps of the contents of people’s characters. This just reiterates our judgment of people we don’t really know and hinders our progress towards growth.
In addition to this, when people are not bored, their creativity suffers. It saddens me to see the amount of papers that are being written entirely by AI at this point. It’s a shame that some people cannot be bothered to try to come up with a point and defend it by themselves. A major component of this is what I’ve come to understand as a string of learned helplessness, one that I have become familiar with in my work with seventh graders. They struggle to come up with answers on their own, so instead of showing initiative and taking advantage of the opportunity to learn, they turn to the easiest option to get it off their plate, effectively giving their dinner to the dog because they don’t recognize it.
Without lingering in that state of boredom, creativity is not realized. In a state of boredom, our minds are like incubators, developing ideas until we feel ready to put them into action. By removing boredom altogether, we rob ourselves of that stage of the brainstorming process and end up producing cookie-cutter products with no authenticity behind them.
It’s a shame to see the younger generations acting satisfied in knowing so little. AI has its many problems, and I could drone on about my feelings about it, but nobody is analyzing the root of the problem. They look at the outcomes, such as lazy students, uninspired work and massive gaps in knowledge and credibility, but that all stems from the lack of boredom in our current online climate.
And trust me, I know boredom sucks. It’s not a feeling that we crave. In fact, it’s the desire to escape it that harnesses creativity. The changes, both personal and societal, that have been realized from these moments suggest that we must find ways to be bored again, a task that grows more complicated with all the temptations of modernity that lie before us. Ask a Boomer: they’ll tell you, “It’s those damn phones.” I always rolled my eyes at them, but maybe they have a point. We need to reintroduce boredom into a part of our everyday lives in order to not diminish the ever-changing culture of humans that we spent so long establishing. So, to “The Breakfast Club,” Bender, Claire, Brian, Andrew and Allison, thank you for emphasizing the role of boredom in personal growth. I won’t forget about you.
Jason DuBois is a senior history and secondary education major. In his free time, he enjoys writing poems, crafting love letters and rewatching “The Breakfast Club.”
