I’m 68 and I can still sit on a porch doing absolutely nothing for an hour — and watching my grandkids start to panic after ninety seconds of it is the clearest proof of what we quietly traded away

One of the quiet pleasures of my life is sitting on my porch in the evening doing absolutely nothing.

Not reading, not on the phone, not waiting for anything in particular. Just sitting, watching the light go, letting my mind drift wherever it wants.

I can do it for an hour and come back inside feeling like I’ve been somewhere. My grandchildren cannot do it for ninety seconds.

I’ve watched it happen more times than I can count. They’ll plop down next to me, full of good intentions, ready to “just sit with Grandma.” And then it starts.

The foot begins to jiggle. The fingers tap the arm of the chair. The eyes go hunting around the yard for something, anything, to land on. Within two minutes, a hand has drifted to the pocket where a phone usually lives, and if there’s no phone there, the look on their face is something close to panic.

I’m not annoyed when this happens. I’m a little sad. Because I recognize what’s missing, and I remember having it.

We were bored all the time, and it was fine

When I was a girl, there was simply nothing to do for big parts of the day, and nobody treated that as a problem to be solved.

I remember long car rides where the entertainment was the window. You watched the telephone poles tick by. You counted cows. You read the same billboard four times.

If you announced that you were bored, my mother’s answer was a look that made it clear your boredom was your own business, not hers.

Summers were the same.

School let out, and the days opened up into these enormous empty afternoons. We’d lie in the grass and watch the clouds. We’d poke at things with sticks.

We’d sit on the front steps for an hour waiting on a friend who might or might not come by, because there was no way to text and ask. So much of childhood was just waiting, sitting in the in-between.

On rainy days, you were stuck inside with whatever the house had — a deck of cards, a pile of old magazines, a window with the water running down it.

I spent whole afternoons watching that rain and thinking about nothing in particular, and it never once occurred to me to feel sorry for myself over it. That was simply what an afternoon was.

I won’t pretend it was magical. Plenty of it was dull.

But what I didn’t understand until much later is that all that empty time was doing something.

It was where I daydreamed. It was where I made up stories in my head, chewed on problems, noticed small things, and got to know the inside of my own mind. Nobody handed me something to fill the gap, so I learned to fill it myself.

We didn’t have a name for boredom as a crisis, because it wasn’t one. It was just the part of the day where nothing happened, and you figured out what to do with yourself.

Now there’s a screen for every empty second

My grandchildren are growing up in a world where that empty time never arrives.

I don’t mean that as a knock on them — it’s just the world they were born into.

The moment a line forms at the store, the phones come out. The second a show takes too long to load, a thumb is already scrolling to something else.

Waiting rooms, car rides, the five minutes before dinner is ready — every one of those little gaps that used to be mine to fill has already been filled for them, by a device that always has one more thing waiting.

And it isn’t their fault, and it isn’t even really their parents’ fault.

These things are built so that you are never bored, not for a single second. The whole purpose of them is to hand you the next thing before you’ve finished the last one.

A child raised on that never gets to bump up against an empty afternoon and feel around for what to do with it. The gap closes before they can fall into it.

So when they’re on my porch, and the nothing finally arrives, they don’t recognize it as an ordinary part of being alive. To them, it feels like something has gone wrong, like a screen that froze. And they reach for the thing that usually fixes it.

I love my tablet too — but I worry

Now, I want to be careful here, because I am not one of those people who think everything was better in 1965.

I love a lot about how we live now. I have an iPad, and I will not tell you my Angry Birds score, because it is embarrassing how high it is.

I’m on Facebook every day, looking at everyone’s grandkids, gardens, and dinners. When my son was stationed overseas, I got to see his face on a screen every Sunday — something my own mother, waiting weeks for a letter, could never have dreamed of.

These are not small things. A few of them are close to miracles, and I’d fight anyone who tried to take them from me.

So I’m not here to deliver a lecture about putting the phones down. The gains are real, and I have taken every one of them.

But I do worry.

I worry about what it does to a person to never, not once, be alone with themselves. All that empty time I had as a child wasn’t wasted — it was where I learned to keep myself company.

It’s how you find out what you think, what scares you, what you want, when there’s no screen telling you what to look at next. I worry that my grandchildren are growing up without that room, and that they’ll reach adulthood having never sat in the silence long enough to hear themselves inside it.

I see flickers of it already. When the wifi goes out at their house, a restlessness comes over the older one within minutes — a jittery, lost feeling, and he simply does not know what to do with himself.

It unsettles me, because doing nothing with yourself used to be the most ordinary skill a person had.

That is the thing I think we traded away without noticing. I don’t even blame the gadgets — we wanted this, all of it. But somewhere in getting everything we asked for, we lost the knack for wanting nothing at all for a little while.

So I’m teaching them how to do nothing

I’ve decided I’m not going to be the grandmother who clutches her chest and goes on about walking uphill both ways in the snow.

Nobody listens to that, and I don’t blame them.

I’ve gotten sneaky about it instead. I’ve turned doing nothing into a game.

On the porch, we play “who can find the most animals in the clouds.” We have staring contests with the sky.

Last week, my granddaughter and I held a contest to see who could sit the longest without talking or moving, and she made it almost four whole minutes before she cracked up. I counted that as a win for both of us.

I never tell them it’s good for them. I don’t say one word about screens. I just make the nothing fun, so it stops feeling like something is wrong and starts feeling like a place they’re allowed to be.

The other evening, my grandson climbed up next to me, and we sat there as the yard went dark. He didn’t reach for anything.

He just watched the lightning bugs come out, one by one, and after a while he said, “Grandma, this is kind of nice.”

I didn’t answer him. I didn’t want to break it. We just sat there in the nothing together and let it be enough.

Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.

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