The Lost Art of Remembering, Waiting, and Being Bored

Not so long ago, there was a time when our brains were the original smartphones (mine was! Even if I sound pompous!). We actually memorized phone numbers. Initially five, then six and ultimately seven digits lived rent-free in our heads, grouped by rhythm, not contact names. My best friend’s number, the tuition teacher’s landline, even the numbers of extended family members remained perfectly stored in the dusty archives of memory. Today, ask someone their own number and watch them fumble like a contestant on a game show. We have outsourced memory to devices that sometimes forget to charge themselves. 

Letters, too, had their own poetry. They began with “Dearest” and ended with “Yours lovingly,” travelling across cities and states to deliver a piece of our hearts. Every ink blot, every smudge, had a story to narrate. Now we send voice notes that begin with “Umm… can you hear me?” and which ultimately turn into masterpieces of hesitation and background noise. Romance used to arrive in envelopes, and today it gets lost in WhatsApp backups. The art of saying something beautifully has been replaced by the art of saying something quickly. Romeo now records, Juliet double-ticks, and romance hides in deleted audio messages. 

Back then, studying too required a sacred ritual. Sitting under the ceiling fan and pretending to concentrate while tracking its slow, hypnotic spin, I let my imagination run free. That fan was our YouTube, our mindfulness app, our teacher of procrastination. Now, a single Instagram reel can destroy an entire study plan, and we don’t even have the satisfaction of blaming electricity as inverters and power-back-ups have creeped into our lives. When electricity went off, we simply stared into the void, not scroll through it. Now we open one reel “just for a minute” and end up knowing ten conspiracy theories about a murder that never took place.

But perhaps the greatest casualty of modern life is boredom. Remember that quiet, empty space where imagination once lived? We used to stare at clouds and streetlights, invent games with bottle caps, or count mosquitoes just because there was nothing else to do. Waiting was a part of living, and we patiently waited for letters, phone calls, guests and summer vacations. Now, the moment silence enters, we reach for our phones like oxygen masks. We have infinite entertainment and yet, no patience. I remember that doing nothing was actually… something. And now we treat silence like a malfunction. We can’t wait in a queue without scrolling through mindless reviews about strangers’ vacations. We have infinite content but zero stillness. The tragedy? Our thumbs are getting more exercise than our imaginations.

For me,  nostalgia is not about wanting to go back. It is rather about remembering when our minds were busier than our screens, when we felt connected without notifications  and when doing nothing was NOT a crisis. Somewhere between memorized numbers and cloud storage, between ink and emojis, and between tasty comfort meals and healthy protein layouts,  we lost the fine art of being beautifully, gloriously bored.