The Importance of Boredom
Introduction
Boredom often has negative connotations. We actively try to avoid it, and we go to great lengths to distract ourselves from this subtle and bland feeling. Despite us trying to avoid it there are a lot of good things to come from boredom, and sometimes it can benefit us to embrace it. This post will detail what boredom is, why we avoid it, and what happens if we allow ourselves to be bored for a little while.
Boredom is a very natural feeling and something that has existed throughout our history, however, the way we’ve dealt with it has been very different. Now, more than ever, we find ourselves more bored and we’ve not only become increasingly creative in avoiding it but also more lazy. We instinctually reach for our distractions at every waking moment and some even in their sleep. There’s barely a second of the day where we are not constantly bombarded with impressions - and for what? To keep the boredom away? Or is it to distract ourselves from something else?
We’ve become so accustomed to this comfort of distraction that the feeling of boredom has become a constant, a low and droning sound in the back of our heads. We increase the volume of our short-form content and try to drown it out, we put on white noise to lull ourselves to sleep, and we sleep our days away because there’s nothing to do. Yet we have the world at our fingertips and now more than ever we have to tools to explore the outer world as well as our inner world through creative means. Yet most of us find that we don’t do enough, we live boring lives but not so boring that we should change, and not so boring that it should feed into our creativity. The boring we live in is so lukewarm we do not jump out of the pot as it comes to a boil.
Understanding what leads to boredom and what makes us bored is the first step in understanding how to deal with it.
Why Are We Bored - Four Reasons For Boredom
“What is boredom? It is when there’s simultaneously too much and not enough.” - Jean-Paul Sartre
While Sartre wrote this many years ago, long before smartphones and the modern distractions we have today it still rings true. We find ourselves bored despite having a sea of choice in literature, music and culture. Our world is more connected than ever and most of us enjoy a level of liberty that was unimaginable for our ancestors, but this level of choice and freedom is debilitating and we are paralyzed by it. The sensation of boredom is that it captures us, and that time stands still. It’s a subtle and nagging feeling of frustration. The quote by Sartre highlights this paradoxical nature of the feeling. Namely, it’s not only the lack of stimulation but also overstimulation that can trigger it.
There are many causes and reasons behind boredom, out of all of these there are four we’ll be discussing closer here, each category has two tightly connected aspects of it, and each category is explored briefly. Understanding their connection to each other and how they affect us is key to engaging more meaningfully with boredom.
- Monotony & the Need for Novelty
Doing the same thing over and over breeds tedium. Boredom can be similar to mental fatigue and can be experienced similarly. This can be caused by repetition and monotonous work. Most experiences that are repetitive and predictable become boring, too much of the same and a lack of novelty leads to a feeling of being stuck. We’ve talked in a previous post about the importance of novelty, and how it affects our perception of time, it’s true for boredom as well and this can give us the feeling that time moves so slowly when we’re bored.
We are different as people and some people have a stronger need for novelty than others, but novelty has a profound effect on all of us. There is research that indicates that people who have a stronger need for novelty are more likely to experience boredom, and this is especially true for people who seek out stronger sensations like skydivers and other risk-takers. Boredom can be a reason for people to seek out new experiences, which can enrich their lives and help in their personal growth. By using our boredom as a motivation to break monotony and seek out new experiences, tedium can become a catalyst for change.
- The Abstraction of Work & Lack of Immersion
We often become bored with tasks if we can’t immerse ourselves in them, and this causes a lack of flow. The flow state is characterised by immersion in a task, and treading the fine line between challenging and matching one’s abilities. If we do things that are too easy or too difficult it’s easy to lose focus and lose this immersion, either by them being trivialised or by being anxiety-inducing and leading to us giving up on them completely. For a task or work to be rewarding it has to be engaging but it also has to provide some feedback.
A lot of the work we do today is heavily abstracted and we don’t see it having any immediate effect on us or our environment. Our goals are abstracted and this lack of transparency leads to boredom and a lack of immersion. By doing tasks that match our level of skill and challenge us a bit, as well as giving clear goals and providing us with immediate feedback we are a lot less prone to being bored. Creativity and handiwork are very rewarding and natural to us because of this, we set out to do something specific and we get the end product immediately. Most modern jobs however have us be a chain in a long link of an end product or goal and so we lose sight of it, our work becomes an abstraction and we become drained and bored. Boredom is an indicator that we’re not immersed and perhaps not reaping what we sow. Then it should motivate us to do something in which we can immerse ourselves and do something which provides us with clear goals and rewards.
- Emotional Awareness & Interactive Imagination
That which bores us never engages fully with our attention, and instead, our focus is elsewhere. If we lack self-awareness and self-understanding it may be difficult to pinpoint the feelings we are feeling. If we don’t understand the emotion of boredom we can easily mistake it for something else and try to treat it as such. It’s important to be able to distinguish boredom from other emotions, and this can be difficult. Both depression and boredom share a lot of similarities and they are both indicators of something being wrong, but if we try to distract ourselves because we think we’re bored we don’t deal properly with those depressive feelings. It’s fine to want to do something because you’re bored, but it’s also important to sit with and engage actively with negative feelings. This leads to greater emotional and self-awareness. With this active awareness, we can also engage with boredom more productively and this is one of the keys to getting the most out of boredom.
By being aware we’re bored we can begin to read it as an indicator of things wrong in our lives and we can begin to reflect on our day-to-day, but we can also more actively engage with creativity and our inner worlds through interactive imagination. If we only rely on external simulation we neglect our own abilities to entertain and engage with our minds. These abilities are key to creativity and to achieving great things in life. Everything starts as an idea, and the better we get and the deeper we can engage with imagination the less prone we will be to boredom. This self-reliance is also important because ultimately the external world will inevitably fail to satisfy us, the world only offers so much excitement and novelty, but the inner imaginative work of your mind is limitless, and its riches are yours for the taking.
Developing self-awareness and emotional awareness leads to greater self-insight and autonomy, allowing us to actively choose what and how we engage with thoughts and feelings. Boredom is a great indicator and a message, and by learning how to read it we also can develop our ability to write and express ourselves, enriching our own lives and also magnifying the colours of the world at large.
- Modern Society & Absence of Autonomy
The truth is that in many ways boredom is a modern luxury. It’s something we’ve become accustomed to living in a post-enlightenment civilisation where we can enjoy the comforts of the industrial revolution. In times when our ancestors had to spend most of their days working for shelter and food, boredom presumably wasn’t as common. While modern society brings a lot of comforts and a lot of distractions for us to deal with our boredom it can also bring about negatives. We experience a lack of autonomy that a lot of our ancestors didn’t experience and while we might not have to spend hours hunting or foraging we sell a lot of our daily hours and do a lot of monotonous and abstract work.
The sensation of entrapment is commonly attributed to boredom and this feeling of being stuck and constrained is also associated with a lack of control. You might find your work boring because you find yourself chained to a desk for 8 hours a day, and while your ancestors would have enjoyed a variety of activities and some autonomy over their day-to-day you find yourself unable to exercise your willpower. Perhaps stereotypically adolescence is associated with boredom as well, we have an image of teenagers complaining to their parents about being bored, and this is also a period of individuation and breaking free from our parents' control. Teenagers desire more self-control and are often constrained by their parents, leading to boredom.
Using boredom as an impetus towards self-realisation and personal achievement can provide an opportunity for thought, meaning and reflection. By taking back our self-control and correctly responding to boredom we have a lot to gain.
Fight or Flight - A Boring Response
Boredom can be a sign that a task is a waste of time, or that we feel unfilled with what we’re currently doing, as we just discussed there are a lot of different reasons we feel bored but we have two choices when it comes to dealing with boredom and that choice is to fight it or to flee from it. To get the most out of boredom we have to fight it and face it head on. Knowing this, however, doesn’t make the idea of flight any less appealing.
Flight is easy, this means we immediately distract ourselves from the sensation of being bored. There are a lot of escapes we can choose from, especially today. We are surrounded by cheap and easy dopamine and entertainment. It’s easy to seek an escape from boredom by engaging in unhealthy habits like indulging in food, drugs and easily available entertainment. Some of these mindless activities allow us to just turn off our brains for a little bit and often give us a false sense of relaxation and provide us with an easy, quick and cheap solution for our boredom. However, as Sartre stated boredom is not just a lack of things, but having too much of the good can also lead to boredom and eventually we scroll for an hour on Netflix trying to find something to watch, with burnt-out dopamine receptors we chain-smoke, empty bottles of alcohol and with crumbs making our satin chairs uncomfortable, we eventually end up dissatisfied and bored. Instead of running away from the feeling we also have the option to fight it.
Resisting the temptation to go to an easy escape we can instead use boredom as a creative catalyst and use it to propel ourselves towards our goals, and this will leave us satisfied and satisfied for much longer than any cheap kick. After you’ve chased the dragon for so long you will eventually stand face to face with it, and in a baptism of fire you’ll either be forged anew and claim its treasures or you will succumb to the flames. This is a real test of the metal you’re made of. It’s not easy, in fact, it’s very hard, but it gets easier, little by little and the rewards are much more lasting and valuable than any you could hope to find by running away your whole life. To fight boredom means to engage with it, to sit in it and see what comes out of it.
It’s about observing where your thoughts go, it’s about giving yourself creative expression and immersing yourself in that process completely. Free from distractions and losing oneself in that moment is a one-of-a-kind experience, and that state of flow is something which requires a void, a void which boredom allows us to tap into. A blank canvas is boring - it does nothing and says nothing, but your boredom speaks loudly. Listen to it, feel what’s really going on. That blank canvas won’t remain boring for so long and when your heart begins to sing you will soon find that that blank canvas was hiding colours you could only have imagined. It reveals poetry recited by the silence, and stories emerge from out of thin air. Observing it you also realise you’re in control of it and your boredom is the key to opening this gate towards an infinite and magical realm hidden in your own mind. It’s boring to have to write 5 pages, but when you write 5 pages out of boredom it’s engaging and enjoyable. Boredom can make any trivial task so much fun if you just let it and if you’re observant and diligent enough you will understand how important and fun boredom can be.
Getting the Most out of Boredom
There are a lot of different reasons for boredom. We’ve looked at some of them and how we can use boredom as an indicator of these things to change and improve our lives. We’ve discussed how boredom is largely a modern problem and how the schedules of our day-to-day lives affect our relationship to boredom. We know monotony and repetitive tasks can lead to boredom and that abstract work also contributes to this. If we expand our own awareness and reflect on how we live our lives we can make the necessary changes to live more fulfilling lives. There’s a lot of good things to come out of boredom and we always have a choice to engage with it or to run away from it.
There are a lot of easy distractions and habits we can fall back to, but if we put in the effort to change and have the courage to face tedium head we can grow a lot from it. There are a lot of benefits, and boredom is a natural part of life as all feelings are. If we decide to fight against it we can use it as a meaningful indicator of things to change about our lives. We can use it to regain our autonomy and we can use it as a creative force.
This requires being bored, and being bored is unpleasant, that’s why we constantly run away from it and go to great lengths to avoid the feeling. However, if we can sit in that discomfort for a while we will soon find that there is so much hiding under the surface of it. We will get to know ourselves better, we will engage more meaningfully with the world around us and we will be more immersed in the tasks we do. It’s easy to want to be lazy and just turn our minds off, but the mind is also a muscle and if we instead of letting it rot away by a screen choose to engage with our imagination and creativity we can train it to become stronger.
This strength makes us more resilient to being bored and it allows us to develop and engage more meaningfully with ideas and projects. It allows us to achieve tangible results and to have the strength to actually create something. This takes boredom, and if we can sit in it and just allow ourselves to be bored we will find out that boredom really isn’t that boring. There’s a lot of fun to be had with it and it’s only ever as boring as we make it out to be. Boredom creates the silence necessary for our souls to really speak up, and if we can provide the space for ourselves we can fill it with all kinds of wonderful things.
Boredom isn’t a bad thing, it’s a wonderful and amazing thing really. It seems off-putting and bad at first glance but the more you engage with it you will find that it’s invaluable to your creative efforts and it’s a necessity for your mind to fully exist. Face the discomfort voluntarily and you will understand it’s importance.
