In Praise of Boredom
Boredom comes naturally to me. Time slows down (or my experience of time is brought into sharp relief), unhappiness builds up, and then I move away from the boredom-provoking situation and find something more interesting to do, preferably with larger and more frequent dopamine hits. And then I would get bored. And the cycle would restart.
If you’re like me, you hate (or at least strongly dislike) being bored. You’d go a long way to ensuring that you never get dissatisfied with your level of stimulation at any time. And that’s exactly what I did.
During the Great Strike of 2022¹, I came up with new, innovative ways to avoid the dull, tedious experience of boredom and keep a consistent stream of novelty. I started gaming partly to escape boredom, and I used to have a revolving door of finite games (built to run out of “lives”) but easily rechargeable. The cycle was the same. Eventually I’d delete the game because of the tedium and find a new flavor of the week.
It was the internet, though, that was the great destroyer of boredom. I could switch between Twitter, WhatsApp, mindlessly reading emails, Reddit, the news, and back again at will. The sheer scale of activity went a long way to keeping me engaged. But you can never truly run from boredom. In the end, I could only truly escape from boredom in my sleep. But as much as I want to (and believe me, I do want to), I am unable to sleep forever.
With time, I being to doubt my constant crusade against inactivity and the dullness that comes from it. This was partly because I was tired of sleeping for large parts of the day, but also because constant task switching for task switching’s sake was tiring, and I needed to engage in some Deep Work™. I disposed of the Deep Work™, but I stuck with my foolhardy quest to not return to my headless chicken days. Roughly six months later, I can say with all boldness that I’ve only learned two things:
- As a society, we place way too much emphasis on being busy.
- Boredom isn’t so bad after all.
Both “discoveries” are not new, but I think they’re worth restating.
Calendar Culture² Is Overrated
The Amish have a saying: “The Idle Hand is the Devil’s Workshop”. It’s so popular that I still don’t know the origin of this statement, even after I started studying for this piece. In essence, this adage cautions against the fallout of being inactive or unproductive. There’s a reason this saying is as timeless and cross-cultural as it currently is: it’s true. You are more likely to get into trouble or act badly when you have nothing to do. But this statement, on its own, isn’t an exhortation to be constantly “busy”. That side of the equation came from the Taylorist³ obsession with improving efficiency and the rational organization of time. The capitalist adage, “Time is Money”, is the perfect summarization of the principles of scientific management.
Combine both sides of the equation, spread it to a level of cultural significance (such that it’s not even questioned), and what do you have? A relentless focus on productivity, efficiency, and a deep, deep fear of wasting time, or being perceived as wasting time. This understanding of time as a commodity to be either wasted or optimized overemphasizes paid, measurable work, and looks on anything other than the hyper-efficient use of time as suboptimal.
It’s outside of the workplace, though, that this understanding of our relationship to time inflicts the most damage. When people say that even the experience of leisure makes them feel less valuable or “wasteful”, it can be traced to this underlying belief, that any time not spent doing “productive” work is time being wasted. It’s why there are countless productivity apps and courses, each promising a way to squeeze more efficiency out of the passage of time. It’s why, when someone is discovered to be pretty good at a hobby of theirs, the common first instinct is to discuss ways of squeezing money out of it. It’s why there has been an explosion of drugs and “tools” aimed at “hacking the body” to induce even higher levels of productivity. It’s why, among other things, short sleepers⁴ are praised, and often emulated, leading to worse health outcomes for people who simply aren’t built like that. It’s multi-tasking (efficient multi-tasking, mind you), it’s business books, it’s the endless meetings, it’s Candy Crush, and all those “brain teasers” on Google Play and the Apple App Store. And it sucks.
For people with “the bad kind” of attention disorders, like ADHD, it is a horrible experience. For creatives, women, and the old, this focus on being busy for busy’s sake is draining. For people experiencing burnout, it can send them into deeper vortexes of pure emotional numbness until they just can’t take it anymore. For everyone, it’s physically and psychologically draining, because we can’t stop. We can’t stop because we’ll fall behind, and so whatever happens to us, we have to keep moving. At all costs.
Boredom Is Underrated, Actually
If the current view we have of time (as a utility to be maximized) is suboptimal, what could replace it? There is no right answer to this question, as there is no single perfect view of time and our relation to it. However, one contrasting way of thinking about time is as something to fully experience. You could call it the experience-maximizing view of time, as opposed to the resource-maximizing view. This view of time prioritizes living in the moment⁵ and does not focus on being in control or on mastery, but instead aims to appreciate the conscious, sensory awareness of their present experience.
Well, how does this relate to boredom? It’s helpful to think of boredom as a signal. A bored person is hyperaware of the passage of time, and hyperaware of their own internal discontent at the current outlet of their energies. When I’m in a boring, under-stimulating lecture, I’m constantly checking my watch in the hopes that my horrid experience comes to an end. Crucially, being bored means that I am aware of my lack of control over certain parts of my life. Even if I want to be in that lecture hall, I can’t control what I do and do not enjoy. I can’t force myself to enjoy it. It’s simply impossible.
This hyperawareness can lend itself to reflection⁶. Continuing the analogy of the tedious lecture, if I chose the course because I thought I was interested in the subject being considered, but the actual experience of the discussed subject is dull, then it’s possible I don’t know what I actually enjoy. In this case, my boredom is actually an opportunity to understand my own thoughts, motivations, and desires in very sharp relief.
The best part of boredom is the act of alleviating it. Boredom, as a signal, is a motivator towards change. It provides a creative spark, pushing people to seek novel, exciting sources of stimulation. I remember when I used to be bored as a child (it happened very often, as the opening paragraph might suggest). I had only one solution to reducing my boredom: reading. I read anything and everything I could get my hands on, just to get the dissatisfaction behind me. I mostly read long books as a child because the high turnover of short reads like comics meant that I would simply run out of comics to read, at which point I return to square one. It wasn’t just books. I could simply leave the boring environment and find something else to do, something interesting. Some of my best memories are as a result of being bored alone (or with friends) and deciding to do something about it. Boredom makes the mind come alive.
There’s one more benefit of boredom that is especially pertinent in today’s “information age”. Much of our time is spent behind screens, and the range of affordances digital technologies provide us with means that it’s possible to spend an entire day behind a screen. Endless scrolling, or infinite scroll, allows the individual to be semi-engaged for a large majority of the time without devoting massive cognitive capacity. The increased accessibility of social media apps like Twitter and Instagram, which take advantage of something called the unit bias⁷ (the tendency for individuals to complete a given item or task) makes it easy for us to get distracted and occupied by this low-effort, low-intensity way of processing information. The problem is that it leads to stress. Being plugged in for so long can lead to information overload, which “is linked to quicker, emotional, and less reflective thinking”. ⁸ Researchers also state that “higher levels of perceived cyber-based overload significantly predicted self-reports of greater stress, poorer health, and less time devoted to contemplative activities, controlling for age, gender, ethnicity, and baseline measures of stress and health status”. ⁹ There’s even a name that refers to the act of spending an excessive amount of time reading negative news online: doomscrolling¹⁰. In this light, stepping away from screens due to boredom is actually a stress reliever.
Final Notes: Boredom is Necessary
To use an already overworn analogy, let’s return to the boring lecture. The experience of a boring lecture is hellish, and the monotony of boredom is even more hellish. But the dullness acted as a catalyst for more creative endeavours. It’s not the boredom per se, it’s what we do with it. But unless you’re actually bored in the first place, the opportunity to creatively fashion excitement for oneself isn’t there, and we never learn how. People should be bored more often.
References
¹ A reference to the eight months (Feb — Oct 2022) Nigerian university students spent out of school during industrial action by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).
² The phrase “calendar culture” is not mine, and I first heard of it from Anne Helen Petersen’s great piece on her Substack (called “Culture Study”) on “The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture”.
³ The principles or practice of scientific management and work efficiency as espoused by Fred Taylor. Wikipedia. Encyclopedia Brittanica.
⁴ Short sleeper syndrome (SSS) is a sleep condition characterized by sleeping for fewer than six hours each night.
⁵ Not living for the moment. They are two very different concepts and lend themselves to somewhat different modes of being. Living for the moment prioritizes thrills and high points, while living in the moment places emphasis on conscious awareness, attention, and crucially (for the purposes of this article), sensory experience.
⁶ Reflection is just one of many possible paths a bored person can take. Distraction (think of mindless scrolling) and fully embracing numbness are just two other possibilities for a bored person.
⁷ Explanatory article here and here. Closely related in this context is the logical fallacy known as the sunk cost fallacy, which refers to “a greater tendency to continue an endeavour once an investment in money, effort or time has been made.”
⁸ Shalini Misra, Patrick Roberts, Matthew Rhodes (2020). Information Overload, Stress, and Emergency Managerial Thinking, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Volume 51, 101762, ISSN 2212–4209, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2020.101762.
⁹ Misra, S., & Stokols, D. (2012). Psychological and Health Outcomes of Perceived Information Overload. Environment and Behavior, 44(6), 737–759. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916511404408
