The importance of boredom

Who doesn’t have a day like this?

Wake up, check phone, answer messages

Go to kitchen, make coffee while reading Google News

Take a shower while listening to Spotify “Good morning” list

Sit down at the desk, work while Spotify in the background

Go to the bathroom, play Candy Crush while on the toilet

Grab bike, go for a ride while listening to a podcast

Watch Netflix

Go to bed, play Spotify sleep playlist

Our entire day is focused on NOT getting bored. All the time. And I think that’s causing fundamental problems in our society. We need to be bored again.

The attention economy

It has been written about extensively, but I’ll say it again here. Your phone is optimized to keep you engaged as long and as often as possible. Notifications are 90% sent to get you to open the app. Most notifications are complete garbage, functionality wise.

Social media algorithms are optimized to show you enough good content so you stay engaged, while also showing you bad content so you get another dopamin hit, when good content comes around.

Our attention spans keep dropping and dropping. TikTok and the reels copycats in pretty much every social media app are often the “longest form” content we consume over the day.

And I feel like a lot of us - including me - like to be engaged all day every day. But what’s the reason behind that? Why are we just REFUSING to be bored for a single second of our day?

Trapped in a dopamin cycle

In the modern economy and world, we all have isues we are mulling over in bed, at 3am in the morning. How will climate change impact my life? Can I ever retire? I am very unhappy in my job, but I feel trapped and can’t “run away” from the responsibility. And so on and so forth.

Oh what did you say, I can forget about all of this through keeping my head engaged all day? That sounds awesome!

We’re getting trapped in a dopamin cycle, so we don’t ask ourselves the important questions. Questions about our future, the future of our kids or the future of humanity. We don’t consider leaving our job and becoming a famous opera singer when we play Candy Crush to suffocate those thoughts.

Creativity killed by busy work

I always catch myself being very busy with my day to day work, doing chores in the evening, doing distracting stuff on the weekends, but never quite coming to a “relaxed” state. I often feel quite uncreative in those times, can’t think about new business ideas, can’t put time into my creative writing or play guitar.

Then, when I’m on vacation, where the work part of all the busyness vanishes, you get pockets of boredom. You get minutes and hours in the day, where you’re not 100% busy. Of course you can refill all of those with social media, distracting hobbies etc. But what we should do, in my opinion, is keep those pockets of boredom.

Allow boredom

Mayo Clinic has written a great article on how boredom actually helps your brain with creative endeavors. What’s important though is this:

You have to allow your body and mind to be bored when you feel boredom coming up

You might feel restless and your brain immediately tries to fill the void with more busywork, hobbies, social media, anything so it doesn’t stay still. But instead, you should prolong those pockets of boredom, because within them, you can find new creativity, new fresh ideas, new projects to work on that’ll shape who you are and will be.

It might also help you coming up with a solution for problems that are stuck in your brain for years. Maybe it is time to finally become an opera singer? A wood worker? A goldsmith? We can only act on those life changing decisions when we’ve had time to mull over them.

Start small

You don’t have to immediately rush to uninstalling all Social Media, deactivate all notifications, take 3 hour walks without your smartphone present.

Start small. Switch off notifications for that one app that keeps pulling you in. Delete Reddit off your phone. Take a 30min walk without listening to your favorite podcast.

Create more pockets of boredom, step by step.

You’ll see that the creative side of your brain becomes more active.

For me, this approach has always led to great thoughts, new ideas that I didn’t come up with before and some clearity on the big questions in my life, positive and negative.

Okay, now go out and be bored!