Boredom is the fertile ground for inspiration. It’s an important frame of mind because it allows your thoughts to wander over topics or ideas you would normally be too busy to notice.
While it seems we’ve declared war on boredom in modern times, what we’ve actually succeeded in is occupying our hands and pacifying minds. We aren’t engaging our thinking by passively watching television or listening to stories or podcasts.
“Boredom with life does not result from exhausting life’s riches, but from skimming them.”
– Brain Jay Stanley
Boredom is helpful
Boredom is good because it prompts us to think creatively and spurs us to move.
Boredom is a sign you have the time, desire, and energy to spend doing something that matters to you. Without boredom, we are on a never-ending assembly line, switching from one task to the next. Boredom is the opportunity of realizing that you’re not happy with your current activity and you’d like to do something else. It represents an opportunity to choose an engaging activity. Too often, we just occupy ourselves instead of asking what we’d like to do or thinking about the hobbies and interests which we enjoy.
In an interview with The Atlantic, Mary Mann describes boredom as an “irritated restlessness”. It motivates and inspires movement. This is why I think boredom is something to be embraced, even to make room for. When we have moments where we aren’t pressured or sure of where to spend our time, it poses a potential to be creative. It’s in these open-ended moments that inspiration strikes.
Children need to be bored
As children, we have a developmental need for boredom as it fosters creativity and helps develop a sense of identity. Psychologist Lyn Frye told Quartz,
“I think children need to learn how to be bored in order to motivate themselves to get things done. Being bored is a way to make children self-reliant.”
We learn to identify what we enjoy and make efforts to accomplish those things when we are bored, which helps us build a tolerance for boredom as adults.
As adults, boredom signals that we are unhappy in our current situation and would rather be doing something else. As psychologist Art Markman noted, boredom tends to happen when we are in an environment where we have little control, like slow afternoons at work or waiting for an appointment to start. When we don’t have control over when things happen, our minds can wander in search of more interesting ideas.
We’ve established that boredom provides an opportunity, but what satisfies boredom? Researcher Andreas Elpidorou writes:
“What alleviates boredom is not simply a change of activity. Rather, what alleviates boredom is a change from an uninteresting, unfulfilling, or non-stimulating situation to one that is perceived by the agent to be satisfactory and in line with her plans and wishes.”
Boredom moves us toward fulfillment. It’s our mind and body’s way of urging us to find something requiring more thought, action, or emotion.
Boredom Documented
Historically, people have found all sorts of different ways to relieve their boredom. In the seventeenth century, men and women occupied their time by gardening, shooting, learning to play piano or violin; they learned other languages, or played croquet. They wrote and read, and practiced sewing or painting. The 1900’s saw radio and scenic drives in the country take hold culturally, too.
Jefferson played violin until a wrist injury ended his ability. Winston Churchill wrote, painted, and laid brickwork. Bill Gates plays bridge, and Warren Buffett plays the ukulele. Active and mindful hobbies help us all spend our time in worthwhile ways.
Even growing up, my siblings and I all played sports and musical instruments. Truthfully, I don’t recall complaining of boredom often because I was usually lost in book about animals or a mystery or playing outside in some form. Today as an adult, I maintain an exercise schedule, craft, read, and still play instruments. The hobbies of just fifteen years ago were more fulfilling than today’s practice of watching television or scrolling through posts for hours on end.
Historical Perspectives
We tend to think of boredom as something to be shooed away, in favor of “productive” endeavors. It almost seems like a personal failure to admit to being bored, as though realizing you’d rather be doing something else were a negative thing. The greatest minds in history have pondered the merits and potentialities of boredom and they agree with the aforementioned psychologists – boredom is a good thing.
Kierkegaard offered his candid thoughts:
“Generally, those who do not bore themselves are busy in the world in one way or another, but for that very reason they are, of all people, the most boring of all, the most unbearable… The other class of human beings, the superior ones, are those who bore themselves… They generally amuse others — at times in a certain external way the masses, in a deeper sense their co-initiates. The more thoroughly they bore themselves, the more potent the medium of diversion they offer others, also when the boredom reaches its maximum, since they either die of boredom (the passive category) or shoot themselves out of curiosity (the active category).”
– Either/ Or via Brain Pickings
Nearly a century before homes were saturated in wireless internet and devices began to be freely given to children, Bertrand Russell wrote this prescient observation about parental attitudes on boredom,
“The capacity to endure a more or less monotonous life is one which should be acquired in childhood. Modern parents are greatly to blame in this respect; they provide their children with far too many passive amusements… and they do not realize the importance to a child of having one day like another, except, of course, for somewhat rare occasions.”
He continues,
“I do not mean that monotony has any merits of its own; I mean only that certain good things are not possible except where there is a certain degree of monotony… A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase.”
Finally, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips concluded nearly thirty years ago,
“It is one of the most oppressive demands of adults that the child should be interested, rather than take time to find what interests him. Boredom is integral to the process of taking one’s time.”
-from On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life
It’s clear, from thinkers and scientists alike, boredom is a healthy, beneficial part of life beginning from childhood. Why, then, do we have so little tolerance for it today?
“Be Productive”
It wasn’t so long ago that people would entertain themselves by playing pick up games, dining with their neighbors, reading, gardening, knitting, or with other enjoyable hobbies. An unfortunate trend over the past few decades, as writer Derek Thompson observed, has been to use our free time for more work. Perhaps it’s the American spirit of capitalism and industry which compels us to perpetually chase a closing, or think that some form of work is always the only worthwhile way to spend our time.
I believe that our focus on always being productive is also large factor in our aversion to boredom. As our obsession with productivity increased, the technology enabling such drastic advances also improved, bringing us the marvels of wireless internet and pocket-sized devices which play a role in our modern distaste for boredom.
Technology, Society, and the Message
Nearly fifty years ago, Marshall McLuhan, in The Message is the Medium, noted with prescience that the existence of technological advancements change society. That is to say, the existence of the smartphone alters society. No, it is not causing us to suddenly lose the ability to focus; no it is not single-handedly destroying friendship and plunging the earth into loneliness and despair. It does change what we consider to be entertainment, and how we participate in that entertainment. It reimagines the possibilities of what you can do while walking around town, or through a train station, and it changes the appearance of the public square.
McLuhan brilliantly contends that the content is secondary to the existence of the technology itself. Therefore, the content put out by the television is of lesser importance and consequence than the changes brought about by the existence of the television itself. Likewise, the content we consume on our smartphones is of lesser consequence than the fact that we all have this technology and use it in more than half of our waking hours. The rise of the smartphone has created a new world with new possibilities, but the question remains regarding the best way for each of us to utilize this technology.
As McLuhan observes, the real currency today is information. We move information from one place to another, largely today. The smartphone has made it possible to move more information more quickly than ever before. This will have consequences regarding what society looks like, expects, and is enabled to do. We’re only ten years into the smartphone, yet, we’ve already become more focused on information and consuming, rather than producing. This has trained us to be passive rather than active, in areas as assorted as listening, employment, finding hobbies, and education.
Constant Consumption
Today, it can seem as though we have an antidote to boredom; the smartphone serviced by a near constant internet connection. While this technology can certainly enable worthwhile interests and pastimes, all too often it is used as a sort of mindless stimulation, holding our interest, but never requiring any real engagement or thought. Our endless apps are mildly stimulating, but they don’t get to the heart of boredom. Likewise, we often think that novelty is the cure for boredom, when it’s really engagement. Having our mind and body focused on a task, large or small, is what banishes boredom.
Boredom has been all but a casualty of technology. The quality of our hobbies and entertainment has declined as technology has improved.
Perhaps it’s not the advent of smartphones we should bemoan, but the loss of our formerly valued hobbies whose place it has taken. In Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport describes taking a month-long break from technology, and replacing that time with analog hobbies. While I read this book, I realized that before beginning my Netflix subscription, I had been studying Hebrew and the history of the Jewish people, as well as doing a deep dive on the literary history of feminism. I had spent my time doing things I found interesting and worthwhile, however, they were slowly crowded out by the easier, ever present option. Perhaps you’ve experienced a similar devolution?
It’s not Netflix’s fault I gradually spent more time “relaxing” in front of their service, and less time on self-directed study. They make sure their service is easy to use dependable, as any business should. It’s a question of what do you want to spend your time doing? For me, watching television wasn’t the answer. This also illustrates the common experience of passive actions slowly replacing hobbies which were fulfilling, analog, and required a higher degree of attention.
Likewise, I don’t think the internet itself is the problem, but, as I’ve written before, the issue is the way we think about (or don’t) using this technology. With the ubiquitous smartphone, we’ve bypassed our realization that we even get bored. We certainly do still experience boredom; it is a key reason we reach for our phones while waiting in line or when we find ourselves stuck in unwanted social situations. We simply don’t register it as boredom because the reach happens frequently and the irritation is sated nearly immediately.
We haven’t lost our ability to be bored; we’re simply denying ourselves the opportunity for it by instinctively reaching for our digital devices. In the days before these intrepid devices, we had time to consider our boredom – to wrestle with our “irritated restlessness” and procure a solution, whether that was complaining to our mothers that we were bored or finding our own hobbies to occupy our minds and hands.
With all the information whizzing by and available at the fraction of a second, it becomes ever more important to consider what purposes technology will serve in our daily lives, and how to keep it in line with the goals and aspirations we have.
Boredom is not an enemy to eliminate. As we’ve seen, boredom is essential for creativity and sparks new thinking and action. The purpose of boredom is to spur us toward things which we find interesting and fulfilling, thinking creatively about the places and surroundings where we find ourselves.
When was the last time you were bored and what did you do about it? As, always, the question remains; what do we want to spend our time doing?
