The latest video from CollegeHumor asks a piercing and fateful question of each internet user who watches it: Can you be bored for three minutes?
Much like the Saltine cracker challenge, it’s harder than it sounds. And what makes this video wonderful—and terrible—is that the longer it goes on, the more you start to realize that deep down, the obnoxious man in the suit is right. Much like the literal video for Aha’s “Take on Me,” he is describing something that is happening right in front of you, and like it or not, he is telling the truth. It’s a truth you can feel growing second by second in the itch behind your eyeballs and in your fingers, the almost automatic impulse to turn your attention to another tab the moment when your interest wavers, even slightly.
Hell, most people can’t even finish an article. After all, with the panoply of screens, feeds, and apps available to us, we don’t ever have to be bored. But can we? Can you? Has the internet made us weak and soft, like little mollusks shucked from our protective shells? Does a slightly uninteresting three-minute video make us want to scuttle back into the warm, infinitely stimulating embrace of the internet, and its endless buffet of information where each tiny slice of content is both delicious and ultimately unsatisfying? If we continue to flit from plate to plate and tab to tab, can we ever truly be full? Or, as the man in the suit suggests, will the fitful, restless hunger of our hearts and minds consume us forever?
Watch and learn—if you dare.
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