Bored. Ian Bogost asks “What did people do before smartphones?”, and answers, basically, “We were bored all the time! Thank goodness for smartphones!”
To this I want to answer “Speak for yourself, bud.” Not the way I remember it at all.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time recently asking just this question, but in the hope that a serious answer will help us (me, really) to find a way back to some things we’ve lost. I was hoping for some help from the article, but was disappointed.
The article did bring back some amusing memories of reading anything at hand just to be doing something. I can remember sitting in waiting rooms leafing through gun magazines and copies of Cosmopolitan, because that’s what there was. I’m not as sure as Ian Bogost, though, that playing Match Blast Quest on my phone is an improvement. These days, I don’t take a smartphone to the waiting room: I take a book, as I could have done back then. If I forgot my book, I look around me! Not so bad either.