Things started going bad during the covid. My daughter paid less attention in class during those stupid on line sessions. The kids can turn off the camera and no one is the wiser. Sometimes the sound too.
Then she took to taking long naps in the afternoon. Now she still does. This last year she claimed she had her homework done in school and she was always tired when she got home. She might take a two or three hour nap in the afternoon. No she is not on drugs (she is 13) and she is doing fine in school, only math a bit of a problem and dont get me wrong, sleeping is not bad. A teenage brain needs more sleep. So, I let her sleep in the afternoon. As long as it doesnt keep her up later at night, which surprisingly it didnt.
The actions that get me really crazy is the inactions. AND, unfortunately, she is also very good at doing nothing. So good that I started taking notes on her various ways of doing nothing. So I come to this post, inspired by my daughter, variations on doing nothing.
1. Writing people on message services. I cant stand it. I start nagging that she has watched enough tv for the day and get off the device. She yells back that she is texting her friend from school. Grrr. It is a form of doing nothing. You know, you write something stupid or what you are doing now, or that your father is yelling at you , or what happened after school etc and then you wait for an answer. Its a back and forth of nothing. Remember when kids used to telephone their good friends just after they left them from walking home from school? This is the updated version. Same old, same old doing nothing. If she has to give me a good excuse, she says she is waiting for her friend to give her the homework or notes or something from school. Just doing nothing.
2. Lying on the floor and doing nothing. This might be combined with another form of doing nothing, like texting, or watching a stupid application. But quite often it is just lying on the rug, doing nothing. Now, you might not be doing nothing. You might be thinking big thoughts, doing math problems in your head, meditating, or working on a novel or a thesis in your head, but this is quite often not the case. She is just doing nothing.
3. Looking at useless applications. Yes, tik tok is really that stupid. Yes people really are that stupid. And yet, who is stupider, the maker or the viewer? Lying there on the rug scrolling through short videos of people cooking or doing inane things. The epitomy of a world doing nothing. Looking at instagram? Again, the epitomy of valueless action, looking at peoples pictures? Sometimes you dont even know them, you just look at their picture. Another wonderful activitiy supported by those wonderful people (sarcasm) at the truly ethicless FaceBook, now meta. (an aside, I should be impressed that Sheryl Sandberg broke some sort of glass ceiling by being an important woman at a valueless company that has two billion people around the world doing nothing for some portion of the day? O...K. Clap..... Clap) Snapchat design filter. "Look dad, I can make myself look like a dog." Oh. My.Dog.
4. Playing useless shoot em up or jump higher video games. This is what finally made us put limits on their gadget use, that and serial tv watching. It just got to be habit forming and playing for hours on end, and we had to say, enough. You are addicted and we have to put limits on this. Just like any bad food, you cant only eat candy and cookies all day. The way they keep you playing hour after hour is getting you interested in reaching a higher level. It really is like drugs, and useless. Everybody says that physical games are dead, that everybody just plays online, but I have yet to see an involved game on line like world at war or minecraft. The big space big mmorph games are still on disc and are too big to download. Most of the stuff people play online on their phones is just mindless crap. Jumping over the train or Brawl shooting people behind hedges. It is another version of doing nothing. You ever watch people on public transportation playing these shoot jump games? it is just to pass the time while riding on the public t from point a to pont b. it has no value whatsoever except to kill your time while you are doing nothing. But you are still doing nothing. Might as well look at the outside scenery, or the people around you, you are doing nothing.
5. Useless sleeping. As I said at the beginning, I dont mind sleeping. It is good for teenagers and helps the brain. All for it.... except when it is used as an excuse to not do something and wanting to do nothing and as a result doing nothing. I yell at my daughter cmon now you have watched your allotment of TV for the day, time to practice now or do some house or homework. "But dad," comes the reply? " I am so tired now, I am going to take a nap". She knows I dont mind her sleeping. But this sleep is useless sleep to get out of doing something. And it is nothing. I get angry. She is still doing nothing. This is no value sleeping
I listened to two Bob Dylan albums while writing this post and I think I will get Saved. To cap off this post. You cant imagine how much Bob Dylan has done in his life. And you know what? His worst project, his worst album is heads taller and better than anything Facebook, instagram has EVER done. I hope one day Facebook will be swept into the gutter garbage of useless cultural items discarded as "what the hell were we thinking".
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