I grew up on an island outside the coast of Papua New Guinea, called Bougainville. There were no shopping malls, cinemas, fancy restaurants or much of anything to be short. A day would pass where I would just visit my friend’s place and we would use our imaginations to create these wacky scenarios to enact in. Or a day would be spent visiting the beach or just going playing in the backyard with my dog. In the case of television, we had just the one television channel, called EMTV, em meaning “That’s tv”. However, I never once felt bored with the apparent lack of entertainment.

These days I am bombarded by television channels, shopping malls, cinemas and movies to watch, computer games, and the internet. There’s just too much to do. Ironically I feel more bored and unsatisfied. I have an abundance of computer and video games to play, an abundance of books to read, movies to watch and channels to surf. Yet when I get a spare moment from work, I don’t know what to do. I play a game for a couple of minutes and would rather be doing something else. Perhaps the plethora of activities have left me with a short attention span, which reminds me of an article I read detailing how social networking sites will spawn a generation with an even shorter attention span. The short updates (i.e. Facebook status or twitter), is slowly taking over but that’s another story. However it seems counter-intuitive that we feel more bored with the increase in activities to do.

I would rather be devoid of this new era of entertainment. I would rather just live in the land of far far away and enjoy one thing at a time. It’s hard to keep track of so much information. People may view a country lifestyle as boring and uninteresting, but there’s a certain appeal to it. I would rather sit under a tree enjoying a book, than sitting in front of my computer surfing the information super highway. I would rather just concentrate on one thing at a time to fully digest on the one thing. Simplicity is a beautiful thing.