By Hadia Chaudhry
I think I speak for many when I say vacation can be boring. As a teenager on vacation, you have too much time on your hands and not enough resources to make it entertaining. Your parents can only take a few vacation days to try and entertain you with travel, shopping, and other activities that coincide with a legitimate vacation. It’s the most they can do to keep our brains entertained.
According to an article written by Dr. Carl Pickhardt for Psychology Today, kids get extremely bored because “the young person wants freedom to be independent, but what he or she discovers is that freedom is one birthplace of boredom. Now that you have more choice, what are you going to do with it? In many cases, the adolescent simply doesn’t know.”
As teens we crave freedom from the perceived ruthlessness and demanding environment of school, but once we earn the freedom we longed for, we don’t know what to do with it. For most of the year, teenagers spend hours in class, completing assignments and projects; so to be suddenly relinquished of all duties related to school is rather overwhelming. We are accustomed to having too little time and suddenly we have too much time on our hands.
In order to satisfy that boredom, teenagers turn to electronics. Ranging from Netflix to gaming consoles, there are numerous devices one can use to sedate boredom. However, this method of managing boredom is a contributing factor to a teen’s boredom, according to Dr. Pickhardt. The teen’s natural resourcefulness to seek entertainment is diminished due to his or her abundant reliance on electronic devices, which create entertainment for them. Rather than creating their own entertainment, they rely on the entertainment of technology.
Technology has become a hub for entertaining content. As someone who relies heavily on streaming sites such as Twitch, Youtube, and Hulu to provide me with quality entertainment, I find myself to be bored more often when nothing on the internet suits my taste.
However, the flaw with technology is that it isn’t satisfying to sit in front of a screen for hours. Sometimes, I have felt my vacation to be worthless because all I did was binge watch shows. While binging an entire series may be entertaining, it is not fulfilling. In order to take advantage of your break, therefore, you need to accomplish something more than scrolling through social media and binge watching shows.
One way to stay entertained over vacation is to establish fun goals to achieve. Childhood activities are always fun to do so try to take part in them again. Go on and make the wildest pillow fort possible one day and settle down to read a book in it the next day. Even better, go ahead and read two or three books. Try painting or experiment with photography. Your own home isn’t a bad place to fiddle around with a camera. Go swimming or engage in an epic water balloon fight with some friends. Pick up a few recipes and try to cook. All these activities can become a goal for your vacation.
Vacation dismisses teens of their school work which allows them to enjoy their free time. That time can easily become one full of boredom. Go ahead and play a video game, but be aware that electronics don’t entertain the human brain for long. A young mind is gifted with a bright and fruitful imagination, which is why vacation time is an excellent time to put it to good use and let it run wild.
The Plaid Press 