Do you remember when you were little and you were bored? When we were kids, boredom was just part of life. Long car ride? Stare out the window. Saturday afternoon with nothing planned? Wander around the house. Waiting for an adult to finish talking? You waited.
Heaven help you if you actually told your mom you were bored (most of us only made that mistake once), before we were sent off on a chore, or an errand, or back in the 70’s and 80’s just pushed out of the house. But eventually, left to our own devices, we came up with something. From the ashes of absolute apathy, we made things. We created castles and floated on imaginary clouds. We invented games and wandered outside. We daydreamed, rearranged a room, or called a friend. We stared at the ceiling until an idea arrived.
Boredom was actually this gift of imagination hidden in really ugly clothing that forced us to generate rather than consume.
As adults, we treat boredom like a condition to be cured as quickly as possible. The second we find ourselves without something to do, we reach for something to fill the gap. We check email in the grocery store line. We scroll Instagram while waiting for a friend. We listen to a podcast while walking the dog, fold laundry with a show playing in the background, and bring our phones into places where, not that long ago, we simply had to sit there.
I’m not making a case for staring at a wall for three hours or raw dogging an international flight. I like entertainment. I like podcasts. I have no objection to making a tedious task less tedious.
Lately I’ve been wondering what we lose when we eliminate nearly every opportunity to be bored. I’m beginning to think of boredom as less of a dead end than a doorway.
We live in a world where consumption is almost frictionless. The second our attention becomes unoccupied, we can fill it. We don’t have to sit in the strange in-between space where nothing is entertaining us and nothing is asking anything of us. We can escape before the boredom has a chance to become anything else and that’s the part that I think we’re missing.
Research on mind-wandering and creativity has found that when our attention loosens, our brains can make connections they don’t always make when we’re focused on a task. That tracks with something most of us already know from experience: ideas often arrive in the shower, while driving, walking, folding laundry, or doing something so ordinary that the mind is free to drift.
Inspiration rarely seems to respond well to being hunted.
I think this is part of why boredom has become so interesting to me. It is one of the few states where we are not actively trying to improve, accomplish, produce, consume, solve, or react. And we are not very good at that. In fact, we are TERRIBLE at that. Even rest has become something we optimize (damn you, Oura ring!)
There is a difference between choosing stimulation because we want it and reaching for stimulation because we cannot tolerate its absence. The distinction is important to me because when I stay in boredom for a little while, the first thing that happens is usually restlessness. I move from that to thinking, overthinking, cyclical thinking, all the thinking. And then when I make myself sit with the boredom, not as something to solve or avoid, something else often appears.
It could be a thought I hadn’t finished or a question I’ve been avoiding. Sometimes it’s an idea for something I want to write (“Thoughts on post-it notes are broken branches from a larger idea or notion I had at the time. I gather them up in my arms, determining if it is time to burn them or plant them”).
It could be a memory or a curiosity. Sometimes I notice what I actually feel like doing instead of automatically reaching for whatever is easiest.
And sometimes nothing happens at all. That counts too.
I don’t think boredom needs to become another wellness practice. We do not need a seven-step boredom protocol, a boredom tracker, or a challenge where we all sit in empty rooms for 20 minutes and post about it afterward. That would sort of defeat the point.
But I do think boredom deserves a little better PR.
Maybe the next time you find yourself with ten unclaimed minutes, you don’t have to fill them immediately. Maybe you wait. Maybe you look around. Maybe you let your mind wander somewhere it hasn’t been invited to go in a while.
You may feel bored. Stay there for a minute. Something interesting might be underneath it.