5 aprile 2024
Dr. Daniele Nappo, Legal Representative as well as Founder of the S. Freud Private School, places emphasis on the fact that today's young people no longer experience, or at least experience it to a much lesser degree, such a feeling as boredom. This decline/absence of boredom can be blamed on technolgy and the reduced ability of young people to concentrate.
It seems that boredom has disappeared or been greatly reduced among young people: perhaps the phenomenon, if so, can be attributed to technology and reduced ability to concentrate. However, it is an indefinable and complicated topic. The disappearance of boredom is also an issue in schools. The difference is made by the smartphone, which has many more functions and is far more prevalent than has ever been the case with other portable objects. A number of researches have remarked in the last two decades largely positive approaches to the interpretation of boredom, understood as the set of feelings and reflections that appear in the absence of any activity: lying there staring at the ceiling, for example, to, perhaps, improve creativity and imagination, and in the case of adolescents that of increasing familiarity with specific feelings such as frustration and sadness. Boredom should not be confused with a potentially harmful condition associated with an increased risk of depression, anxiety or addiction disorders, and psychosocial problems. Instead, it is that feeling that translates something that is missing, but without knowing how to say what (...) Boredom understood as a virtually harmful phenomenon seems to have more historical links with "existential" boredom, a permanent condition independent of what we do or do not do. This analysis also contradicts, at least in part, the common idea that having a smartphone in one's pocket at all times limits the experience of boredom: indeed, it may mean or even promote it. It makes sense to say that anything that captures and holds attention, and keeps our kids/youth engaged only at an ephemeral and disjointed level, will tend to increase boredom. Boredom is partly an individual but partly a collective phenomenon, and it describes a state of things in which the individual has less and less power. One must be able to grasp these difficulties and intervene.
