How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life

by Catherine Price

the importance of boredom to creativity is summed up by this quote from Lin-Manuel Miranda, the award-winning, crazy-talented genius behind Hamilton: An American Musical: “I remember when I was a kid, I was in a three-hour car ride with my best friend, Danny,” Miranda told an interviewer for GQ. “Before we got in the car, he grabbed a stick from his front yard, and the entire drive home he made up games with this . . . stick. Sometimes the stick was a man, sometimes a piece in a larger game, or he’d give it voices, pretend the stick was a telephone. I remember sitting there next to him with my Donkey Kong thinking, Dude, you just entertained yourself for three hours . . . with a f-ing twig! And I thought to myself, Wow, I have to raise my imagination game.” When I read this, part of me thinks that I should be spending more time playing with sticks. And another, more cynical part of me thinks, “I bet someone is going to make an app for that.”