Boredom and boring places

I think it largely depends on how much a person has learned to supply their own interest. Someone who notices things, say the way a building was put together or how strangers behave in a queue, can be entertained almost anywhere, whereas a person who expects the surroundings to do all the work gets restless within minutes. Knowledge helps as well: a football match is tedious if you don't understand the offside rule, and the same is true of an art gallery. That leads to museums, which bore young visitors mostly because they present objects without a story. A glass case holding a rusty sword with a date underneath tells a teenager nothing. The museums that succeed give visitors something to do or someone to follow; I once visited a war museum where each ticket carried the name of a real soldier, and you discovered his fate at the exit, and nobody in my group was looking at their phone. That said, I don't think everything should be turned into a game. Part of what a museum teaches is the patience to look at one thing slowly, and too many flashing screens defeat that purpose. As for the future, I'm fairly sure people will get bored more easily, simply because the baseline keeps rising. When any gap of thirty seconds can be filled with a video, ordinary waiting starts to feel unbearable. The irony is that we'll have more entertainment than any generation before us and less tolerance for a quiet moment.