Boredom
I feel like we’ve always viewed boredom as a bad thing. Of course, being bored doesn’t feel good at all. When there’s nothing interesting happening, our instinct is usually to find something that will get us out of being bored. But I think that, in our constant effort to avoid boredom, sometimes we might actually be doing ourselves more harm than good.
Growing up, my parents did something that I appreciate more and more as I get older: we never had a television. They did not take it away from me and my brother. There simply wasn’t one in our house to begin with, from the moment I was born. When we were in elementary and middle school, our friends would be surprised when they found out. They would ask, “What do you even do at home?”. And honestly, we would wonder the opposite, “When do you have the time to watch TV?”.
For us, it was completely normal. Looking back, I appreciate that choice my parents made. It taught us, without ever explicitly saying so, to create rather than consume. When we had nothing to do, we figured something out. We painted. We drew. We wrote stories. We sang. We danced. We played games, some of which we created. We read books. All of which required us to engage with our imagination in a way that simply watching something on a screen doesn’t necessarily demand. We learned to come up with things to do.
There was no endless stream of entertainment waiting for us, and if we were bored, we had to do something about it ourselves. And I think that is an incredibly useful skill to have in life in general.
All of us are the captain of our own ship. We have to learn how to steer our life, and a big part of that is knowing how to spend our time well.
But this has become much harder today. Fifteen or twenty years ago, television was one of the biggest distractions we had. Now we have Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and an endless number of other ways to occupy every spare second of our lives.
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There is always something to watch. And these platforms are designed to keep our attention. That is how the business model works. The more time we spend looking at the screen, the more valuable our attention becomes. I think it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stay away from these stimuli, even for people who grew up without them. I know it takes conscious effort for me to stay away from social media and video content. These platforms are incredibly good at making us want to give them our attention.
What concerns me is what happens when we become so accustomed to constant stimulation that even a few seconds of boredom feel unbearable. I see it in small moments all the time.
Recently, I was out with a group of friends. In the middle of a conversation, there was a moment of silence. Nothing unusual, just one of those natural pauses that happens when people are together. Almost immediately, people reached for their phones. And reels started playing. I remember thinking if we have forgotten to be able to sit in silence for a few seconds, to sit still with our thoughts, to look around and notice what’s happening around us?
There is so much to observe when we aren’t constantly looking at a screen. We can notice the people around us, the environment we’re in, the little things that we would usually miss. But instead, we instinctively reach for our phones. And I think that’s where we’re going wrong with the way we think about boredom.
Boredom isn’t necessarily the problem. Constant stimulation is. When we are bored, our brain starts looking for something to do. When we allow ourselves to be bored in general, we might start drawing, we might pick up a book, we might go outside, we might call someone or we might start a project that we had been putting off.
And remember we don’t always have to escape boredom. Sometimes, we can just learn to sit with it. We can make boredom our friend, and use that quiet time to think. And give our attention to ourselves instead of immediately giving it to something else. To let our mind wander and observe what’s around us. That is when we might come up with an idea. Some of the most creative ideas can come from simply having nothing to do. We are so used to filling every empty space that we rarely allow ourselves to experience stillness anymore. And perhaps we need those moments where nothing is demanding our attention.
We don’t need to be afraid of boredom. Everyone knows it doesn’t feel good. But we don’t need to immediately replace it with another video, another distraction. Because constantly giving your attention away may be far more harmful than being bored ever could be.
So, will you give boredom a chance? It might be uncomfortable. But it might also be where something great begins.
