- Now, basically, I have challenged myself
to do nothing for 24 hours.
(upbeat music)
It's just miserable.
Thank you to Morning Brew for sponsoring this video.
So as you may know,
I am an extremely online person.
I spend a lot of time on my phone,
on my computer,
just vibing and being online.
And during the pandemic,
I found that my general experience
has been waking up in the morning
and picking up my phone to watch a couple of videos.
And it's been four hours already.
I feel like I have this general experience
of pulling out my phone to kill time
and just be preoccupied in every moment of my life,
whether it's doing an errand
while I'm listening to a podcast,
or opening Twitter to question
whether or not freedom of speech was a good thing
because someone has just tweeted some wild (beep).
Anyway, I feel like I'm preoccupied 24/7,
and I'm never bored.
I even find myself falling asleep
to episodes of "New Girl" on Netflix.
My question is,
am I missing out?
Is there anything valuable about boredom?
So I've decided to start an experiment.
Basically, I've challenged myself
to do nothing for 24 hours
and see if I get any insights
on what it means to be bored,
what boredom is,
and basically see if there are any insights
that I can gain from being bored.
Maybe I'll discover some truth about humanity
or write the next great American novel,
which would be an achievement
given I'm not even American.
I started by sitting in my room and doing nothing.
And well, it was boring.
It wasn't very insightful or interesting.
It was just nothing.
I thought about what I needed to get done in the day
and generally about my own life.
But generally, it wasn't very interesting.
In the 24 hours,
I did have a few pre-approved activities
I was allowed to do.
This included the usual stuff like eating
and going to the bathroom.
But I was also allowed to read
the terms and conditions of any company that I wanted.
I could watch a loading screen
from a website Sabrina had set up for me.
thispagewillneverload.com
if you're interested.
I could watch water boil or watch paint dry.
Riveting stuff.
I don't know if I'm gonna put this in the video,
but I've decided to stop
because it's just miserable
and I don't wanna do it anymore.
And it's my video
so I can do what I like.
Who's gonna stop me?
Mark Zuckerberg?
Didn't think so.
He's not gonna do anything
because I'm sitting in my room
doing nothing.
Turns out, watching someone
become increasingly miserable over 24 hours
is not a fun video.
So I failed.
I did about six hours.
By about hour four,
I was completely miserable
and all I wanted to do was stop.
Given I was doing this for a video,
I forced myself for another couple of hours.
And by about hour six, I was completely crushed.
It was just so soul-sucking to just sit there
and do nothing that I just wanted to stop.
But I did actually learn something about humanity
and that's that we live in a society.
I learned nothing.
All I learned was being bored made me unhappy
and I didn't wanna be bored anymore.
However, I didn't even feel like I learned
what it means to be bored.
I definitely didn't find any value at boredom.
So I decided to talk to someone
who might know a little bit more than me.
I decided to talk to someone who studied boredom,
who understands it,
and will probably be able
to give you and me better answers than I could.
But before we talk to our expert on boredom,
I'd like to thank this video's sponsor, Morning Brew.
Morning Brew is a free daily newsletter
that gets you up to speed on business and tech news.
It's got memes.
It's got gifs.
And more importantly, it's well-written.
I think it does a great job
of bringing business and tech news
to me as a normal person
in a way that's interesting and relevant to me.
And it doesn't take me long
to read the newsletter every morning.
So I feel like a well adjusted adult human being
who understands what's going on in the world,
which is pretty nice
because I feel like I spend most of my time
just as a confused monkey trying to get through.
So I've actually been subscribed to Morning Brew
since January.
And one of the things that I've really appreciated about it
is how they've been able to contextualize COVID
and how business and technology is responding to it.
Personally, I felt a lot of uncertainty around COVID.
And understanding how the world is responding to it
has been really clarifying.
So if you're interested in tech, business or finance,
you can sign up for Morning Brew using the link
in our description below. Now, let's get on with the video.
- So boredom can be unconscious or very, very conscious
because boredom is the--
- [Narrator] This is Mariusz Finkielsztein,
an associate professor
at the Institute of Sociology in Warsaw.
His main focus of study is boredom.
How would you define boredom?
- I would define boredom, answering the question,
as a negatively perceived state of sense of meaninglessness
connected to disengagement from interaction
with our environment.
- [Narrator] In boredom studies,
boredom is a distinct emotion
that's not always associated with idleness
or just doing nothing.
It's defined as a negatively perceived
sense of meaninglessness
connected with a disengagement with one's environment.
It's the experience of wanting to engage
in a satisfying activity,
but being unable.
So in our modern society
with so much stuff to occupy our time
from our busy work lives
to the immense amount of entertainment at our fingertips,
are we less bored than ever before?
- No, I'm of different opinion
because all studies
and all researches that we have
and we can read,
prove otherwise
that boredom is more and more prevalent
since (the last) two, three centuries.
- [Narrator] It turns out if we understand boredom
as a state of meaninglessness,
research has found that the rise
of industrialization and urbanization
has led to less satisfying social and work lives.
And so feelings of disengagement and meaninglessness
have increased in the last few centuries.
So in many ways,
we as a society are more bored than ever before.
So where does social media and smartphone usage
fit into all of this?
- So on a shallow level,
yeah, the smart devices somehow arrange,
manage our boredom,
but on the more deep level,
they only push it away for a time
and these boredom accumulate.
And then we start to feel a kind of chronic boredom.
And I suppose that we can be bored
without knowing that we are bored.
So we know that something is missing,
that something is wrong with the situation,
that we are not satisfied,
but we don't always use this label boredom.
- [Narrator] In his book,
Peter Toohey writes about the distinction
between situational micro boredoms
and more chronic existential boredoms.
Micro boredoms are the type of boredom
that come from a clear cause,
maybe a class or a meeting you're setting in
is really boring.
But once you're out of that situation,
the boredom is gone.
However, existential boredom manifests
as a generalized feeling of meaninglessness
or lack of purpose that isn't directly connected
with an easily identifiable cause.
In this way,
smartphone games and social media can act as a bandage
in alleviating our situation or micro boredoms.
But over time,
these escapes from boredom can become an easy way
to avoid addressing chronic forms of boredom.
- I would say that this is similar
to the health issues.
If you have a minor health issue
that you should deal with this,
go to the doctor,
have an appointment.
But if you merely push away your health problems,
they will accumulate.
You may realize after some time
that you have a bigger problem.
And the same thing is with boredom
because all these stuff in social media,
in our smartphones like games,
these very simple games in our smartphones,
we are not fully involved.
This is not the place
that we can experience the opposite of boredom like flow
- [Narrator] Flow or the flow state,
a term popularized by a psychologist--
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- [Narrator] And Jeanne Nakamura describes
a state of energized focus
in which a person is completely immersed in an activity
that is both challenging and rewarding.
This state is sometimes described as the zone
and is a state of mind that many musicians,
athletes and students experience
when performing at their best.
This state is also known to alleviate stress and anxiety,
and gives people a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction.
That's the opposite to the disengagement and dissatisfaction
that boredom describes,
with boredom being the opposite
of meaningful and satisfying activities.
Is there any value in boredom?
- Yes, of course.
We can say many negative things
about the mere experience of boredom,
but boredom is not a villain.
The way we deal with our boredom
can be a problem.
Boredom is a valuable signal
that something should be changed,
that we should reflect over our life,
our experience,
our involvement in this situation
and change something,
move on.
So this is a valuable signal for change.
This is a regulatory state.
- Okay, so it turns out that I was doing boredom wrong.
Who knew you could even do that?
Or at least I was thinking about boredom wrong
because forcing myself to do
all of these meaningless activities
was making me miserable.
And that was a regulatory signal
for me to basically go out and change my environment
and do something else.
It was literally me telling myself
to stop doing what I was doing.
And all I was telling myself
was continue doing these meaningless tasks
that make you miserable.
And that's exactly the opposite of the value of boredom.
The value of boredom in that situation
is the ability to recognize that this isn't meaningful
and to go out and find something that isn't boring
and is meaningful.
I should have stopped reading the terms and conditions
when I got bored
or stopped staring at a website that just loads forever.
But I think the really interesting thing
that I learned from the conversation that we had
was that social media and simple smartphone games
and other things that we can do on our smart phones
have a way of preoccupying our time
without it being meaningful.
And that's a form of boredom
that we don't really recognize as boredom,
and it can make us feel unhappy over time.
And that's the state of boredom
that I think is the most scary
because it's boring and it's meaningless,
but it doesn't feel that way.
It doesn't feel unpleasant.
And it can leave us in a state of wasting
a lot of time doing nothing.
And that's kind of scary.
I recognize that in myself.
I spend too many hours doing things
that are basically meaningless,
but occupy my time in a way
that's mildly interesting or entertaining
that I continue to do.
So I don't wanna come across as the guy
who's just like,
"Social media bad.
"We live in a society.
"Kids these days."
Because I don't believe that.
I don't believe that social media is inherently boring.
And I don't believe that our smartphones are meaningless.
I know the value of social media.
I know the value of our smartphones
and digital technology.
It helps us communicate with people that we love
and make meaningful connections with them.
It helps us keep up with people who live really far away
or in different time zones.
It helps us learn about the world
or different perspectives.
And it's also just a great place
to consume really meaningful
and interesting entertainment.
For example, this video.
Like this video.
Share, comment, subscribe.
Do all the stuff.
But I think what I've learned
is that there is a difference
between passively scrolling
and having a meaningful interaction with your smartphone.
I think it's about recognizing passively scrolling
as a type of boredom
that we might not intuitively notice
and try and seek more meaningful connection,
whether that's on your smartphone or in real life.
I know that I've laughed the hardest
I've ever done in my life at some of the videos
that I've watched online.
And I've had the most meaningful conversations
with people online.
But I also know that I spend a lot of time
just passively scrolling
disengaged from what's in front of me.
And I think I need to get better at recognizing
when I'm doing the latter.
Hello, thank you for watching the video.
I hope you enjoyed it.
It's been a while since I've been on the channel.
So please be nice to me.
I've been a bit nervous about coming back.
If you like what we do here on the channel,
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Anyway, I hope you found this video interesting
and peace.
(vibey music)