Let's talk about one of the most feared phenomena of the 21st century.
I'm talking of course about boredom.
It feels silly or dumb to put it that way but people
literally spend their entire lives running from it filling every nook and cranny with
things to occupy our attention if we're going to such great lengths to avoid it. It must be bad
and obviously this is not as simple as it seems because we have
by far the most entertainment at our disposal of any humans from any point in history.
According to social historian and professor of English 'Joe Morin' who has written about this topic the words bore and
boredom arrived in the English language
only after around 1750. Which interestingly
corresponds almost exactly with the
beginning of the Industrial Revolution which brought us
into the world that we live in now. In many ways
you could call it the beginning of the modern world. With the rise of factories and office work
bureaucracy and our increasing obsession with productivity.
Warren also noted that by the 19th century
Charles Dickens was referring to it as if it were an illness like in his book Bleak House
So it seems like our ideas about this have developed and continued to develop as time goes on all synonyms of boredom suck
apathy tedium lassitude
This sounds like a really terrible thing to avoid at all costs, but I have a theory
Boredom can be so awful that it feels almost like it physically hurts sometimes right? Trust me. I totally get that
I feel like I need to stay occupied with creative projects
more or less all the time or else I feel like I start to go crazy
This is a personal struggle of mine because I know that just staying busy
Is yet another way to remain distracted and to fulfill this desire to be productive?
While not necessarily accomplishing anything at all. I've had the thought that maybe boredom is an evolutionary
Trait that is a part of all of us as a way to incite us to engage in our environments
You know to find things to do just to make stuff happen
And again, there's this really fine line between engaging intentionally in your life and just finding random shit to fill your time
but I've noticed an interesting thing happens when external stimuli is dramatically reduced and that itch that
Boredom starts to creep in. I think about my mind almost like an enormous hard drive with decades of imagery and sounds
And memories and thoughts and emotions and the occasional dank meme :). Had to throw it in there
And so when I'm bored in many ways like when I go to sleep, I feel like my mind goes to work
Sorting and connecting and imagining it feels like kids do this 24/7 right for a couple of reasons
I think partially kids just have less responsibilities and therefore a lot more space to do this kind of thing
But I also think that kids
haven't quite been as conditioned by society to follow the dictates of
What we think we should and we have to do but maybe boredom has something to offer all of us
maybe it's not such a bad idea to let your mind and naturally do its thing to wander and
To watch it with curiosity and maybe have a pen and paper
not so far away to report the things that stand out too many of the best ideas I've ever had like ever ever in my
Entire life have happened when I'm doing things that most of us would consider boring
But I'm just feeling bored in general when I'm washing the dishes, right?
when my body goes on autopilot and lets my mind zoom thousands of miles away to
countries and people and
Experiences that I had years ago, the fragments of reality that no longer exists outside the confines of my hippocampus or two
scenarios that
Will never exist beyond the confines of my imagination
in fact
I think the more space you give yourself to do this the more you open yourself up to creativity the more
Ideas start to pour in I strongly believe this is why I get so inspired when I spend time out in nature
You can't force
Creativity you can't force good ideas
I think you can just set up the right circumstances and the right environment and you just let it happen
And I do think boredom has its role to play space to think is a gift
It's not something we should all be running from the key
Of course is to put these ideas into action right like writing things down
There's an amazing first step. But like you're not gonna get very far if you just that's how you're doing
We all have that like uncle right or grandfather that had these amazing ideas
but never brought them in - you know never manifested them and
Always told you about them maybe in the hopes that you would be the one to make it happen
Don't be that uncle I have found that one of the most rewarding ways to spend time alone is in engaging
Deeply in creative projects when I bring these ideas to life
Everybody has a different way of doing this and there's a lot of names for this out there including flow and deep work
It doesn't matter. Okay, it doesn't matter what you call it
What matters is that? You make this a part of your life?
there's this incredible TED talk by Joseph Gordon-Levitt that I saw at some point last year where he puts into words an
Idea that perfectly complements the message that I'm trying to convey here
Attention is a very powerful thing and it works in two ways
You can get attention and you can pay attention but there's a very big difference between the two they are not the same thing
In his words: "if your creativity is driven by a desire to get attention, you are never going to be creatively fulfilled"
It is undeniably in my opinion better to focus on
giving attention
than to focus on getting it worrying
Never going to fill your cup. I say this fully aware that I have a long way to go in
Truly understanding that I still waste so much energy worrying about the perfect
thumbnail the perfect title or getting a big positive response and
You know being loved and it's weird when I start to focus too much on that and go down that rabbit hole
First of all, it makes me very imbalanced and then the negative side effects start to make themselves visible
those are the times when boredom and a lack of
feeling fulfilled
start to make me
maybe spend too much time on Instagram or do other kinds of
Destructive unhealthy behavior. This might take me a lifetime to learn it might take me more than that, but it's an amazing compass
It's better to pay attention than worry about getting it. And again, there's many ways to put this right
I've heard it be said don't worry about being interesting just focus on being interested. It's the same concept right there
let your creative projects consume you let them carry you away and
See where they take you this is really difficult for me as a teenager. I
think partially because I didn't think I was really good at anything, but fortunately I believe this is
almost like a muscle that you can build up and
Over time it can become a part of how you operate. Check this out. The great London plague went from 1665 to
1666 and forced a young Sir Isaac Newton to leave Cambridge and spend a period of roughly two years with his mom in
Lincolnshire pieces by Anthony story and Milo Keynes revealed that he was apparently
Incredibly mathematically creative in those years there is debate over the exact details of the story
But it is believed that it was an observation of an apple or apples
falling in his mother's garden that helped inspire him to
Develop his law of universal
gravitation
he himself recalled that all this was in the two plague years of
1665 and
1666 for in those days
I was in the prime of my age for invention and minded mathematics and philosophy more than at any time since
It's incredible what boredom time and space can do
Okay, so I think it might be helpful to take a moment and put everything together here because I throw out a lot of abstract
Ideas, and if I'm doing my job correctly
Hopefully I said something that you hadn't considered before it's funny to put it this way
But I think a lot of people myself included are afraid of boredom and what it represents. It's uncomfortable
but what I'm proposing here is that maybe it's built into us for a reason and not something to mindlessly run from that's
Where I think things can potentially become destructive
Mindlessly running from this is how you end up using your time and energy in a poor
Unintentional way and that usually looks like excessive distractions or entertainment
If anything that just feels like approaching life with zero strategy and doing whatever feels good in the short term
I feel like it's important to remind ourselves that life isn't the
constant highlight-reel that we see online and that we almost need boring moments and boring periods to have contrast and to have
mental space to spark ideas
And create new neural connections. Finally. I think the best way to beat boredom is through paying attention. That is to say
Focusing on creating things and on whatever task it is that you're doing instead of worrying about getting other people's attention
This is a really tricky one especially for me because it feels like much the internet now is built around grabbing people's attention
And so I would appreciate your thoughts on this in the comments and when it isn't possible to
Focus entirely on what you're creating or doing because we're not machines that are built to be productive every second of every day
I feel like you can even apply this to boredom itself and
Pay attention and be curious about what your mind is doing at the end of the day
I'm not saying boredom is good or bad and that's entirely subjective
But it does seem to me like it's an important piece in this puzzle
That's worth serious consideration
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