I thought I knew the worst week of my life. When I was in 10th grade and had just moved to Cameroon I was alone1 in a mostly-empty house while my father went to work, with no internet and no cell service. I was in a country where I knew nobody, and in which I did not feel safe exploring alone on foot2. School hadn’t started yet, and I didn’t have a job. There as simply nothing to do, and the little scraps of entertainment I was able to find have since faded into the trauma-induced blur that hovers over that week.

A few years later I started having arguably worse weeks due to sickness, injury and breakups, but even now that week in Cameroon stands out as uniquely horrifying. For a while I was convinced that the scariest part of that week was how nearly all of the discomfort I felt came from within, from my own inability to not become horribly depressed in the absence of external stimulation, or to seek out entertainment that wasn’t spoon-fed by social media algorithms. I did have access to pen and paper, a large yard and a pool, none of which I used to their full potential to either entertain myself or do anything remotely self-improving.

The thing is, despite handling that week pretty badly, I survived. School started, we got internet, I got a local SIM card and I mostly forgot about the hours I spent pacing around becoming increasingly frustrated with my inability to find anything to do. What really scares me when I think about that week now is just how much worse it would be if I were stuck in a similar situation today.

Like many wanna-be sigma males my age, I’ve attempted to break my content addiction and been both amazed and horrified by the lengths my lizard brain will go to get its “fix.” A while back I removed all social media apps from my phone and very quickly found myself aggressively scrolling back through promotional emails while on the toilet. I told myself I was only going to watch “educational” YouTube videos, and very quickly found myself drawn to endless lists of facts that bombard the mind with far more information than it can possibly absorb in a single sitting, even taking into account my incredible ability to memorize obscure and useless information. There’s some part of my brain that just needs that shotgun blast of new information, whether it comes from thirst traps on Instagram, Reddit comments, or Youtube videos. On the few occasions that I’ve tried to cut out the filler content cold turkey I’ve been able to feel my mood worsening with every instance my mind has craved content and I’ve denied it.

So, with this more recent experience in mind, I’m actually pretty proud of how I handled that week in Cameroon. I was a little depressed, sure, but mostly I just accepted the boredom as a temporary fact of life and knew I’d get through it. I wish I could handle attempting to quit filling my empty moments with short-form content nearly as gracefully. Despite mostly failing to do anything meaningful that week, I do recall engaging in a few extended periods of deep thought that ended up significantly changing how I saw myself and approached socializing in my new school. Now when I end up with a day with nothing to do I almost always lose it to content consumption. Sometimes I wish I could just spend a day being bored.

  1. There is one issue with this story: my stepfather was there as well, and was not working at that point. I honestly cannot recall whether he was there but we simply did not have much to talk about, or if he was off doing something I’ve forgotten about. He had only been married to my father for a short while at that point, and I recall that we didn’t exactly hit it off when we first started living together, so it’s possible we just ignored each other. ↩

  2. I want to be clear, at least when I was there from 2013 to 2016, my neighborhood, Bastos, Yaoundé was not particularly unsafe, and later on I felt perfectly safe to walk to nearby stores and friends’ houses. ↩