This Is Why You Should Be More Boring

Add a bit more boredom to your life

Being in quarantine was exciting at first.

Not having to go to work. Sleeping in. Being able to snack and watch stuff all day with little accountability.

But soon enough the lack of face-to-face contact with other humans caught up with me. I also felt like I’d watched everything half decent on Netflix. And even though I was as busy as ever, I was starting to feel…bored.

There seemed to be no ‘color’ in my day-to-day activities. Nothing to get excited about. No variation in the monotony of my routine. Walking to the grocery store, waiting in line for 30 mins to get in, finding no stock for half my shopping list, and waiting in line another 20 mins to pay for my 4 items, was usually the highlight of my week.

Almost everyone else I talked to also seemed to be feeling the same. Slowly the dream of working and chilling at home every day started losing its novelty and our weeks morphed into sad and flavorless lumps of boredom.

But maybe that’s a good thing.

Boredom tends to have negative connotations of being unoccupied or lacking interest in one’s current activities.

But what if boredom is a secret superpower we could all make use of?

The necessity of boredom

“Boredom is the conviction that you can’t change … the shriek of unused capacities.” ― Saul Bellow

It’s quite an abstract concept. Boredom tends to be a subtle kind of pain that, at its core, comes from knowing that we are in that moment, not making the most of our time and capabilities.

Author of Homo Deus, Yuval Harari says that as a society ‘the inability to deal with boredom is one of our greatest weaknesses’.

He argues that in almost any meaningful journey we need to go through boredom. Even our conversations need to go through a bit of boredom for them to go anywhere.

I find this quite interesting and counter-intuitive as it feels like the more bored we are, the more time and energy we waste when we could otherwise potentially be productive.

In the context of conversations, however, I see his point. When talking to each other, especially in consultation with people that we want to impress or entertain, we tend to feel that every second needs to count and thus be filled with some sort of quality content, or else the conversation will slowly die.

We value time so much and are so easily distracted, that when the conversation is reaching a bit of a lull, we are forced into saying the most interesting and important things we can think of. These tend to be the things we’ve said millions of times before. The things that we are comfortable with and know to be effective. If we continue to exchange these unoriginal thoughts the discussion goes nowhere and is devoid of any fresh or unique perspectives.

Allowing time for boredom in not only our conversations but other activities that allude to learning, growth, and creativity, allows our mind to think laterally. To be creative and come up with new, brilliant thoughts.

Escaping boredom

“He who fortifies himself completely against boredom fortifies himself against himself too. He will never drink the most powerful elixir from his own innermost spring.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

I hear a lot of youth and adults saying kids these days don’t know how to be bored.

I get what they mean. Boredom is a large aspect of our childhood. ‘Dealing’ with it is part of life. And these days kids seem to have it good with all the games, YouTube, and other entertainment that we never had. They aren’t as used to boredom as we were, so when they do have moments of inactivity in their day, they tend to make a bigger deal of it.

To be fair though, we seem to be just as incapable of dealing with boredom as they are, if not more. Not only do we feel the need to fill our days up with excitement and activity, but we also find it extremely difficult to cope with the inevitable boredom that visits us now and again.

Dr. Sandi Mann, author of The Upside of Downtime: Why Boredom is Good, shares in his book that: “The more entertained we are, the more entertainment we need to feel satisfied. The more we fill our world with fast-moving, high-intensity, ever-changing stimulation, the more we get used to that and the less tolerant we become of lower levels.”

Escaping boredom may not be a good idea. The constant chasing of stimulation and distraction may give us the temporary illusion of fulfillment, but not only does it prevent us from having space and energy to think creatively and discover new things, but also tends to hamper our self-reflection and inner development.

Reflecting and meditating to discover your inner mysteries can, for the most part, be quite boring. Traveling inward to learn about yourself isn’t the exciting and enlightening journey it’s sometimes made out to be. It can be uncomfortable and may require discipline to get through the desert of boredom that precedes it. But understanding and even welcoming this process can lead to moments of true brilliance and self-actualization.

Boredom as a way of life

True loss is for him whose days have been spent in utter ignorance of his self. — Baha’u’llah

Regardless of our goals and aspirations, realizing our full potential and building our various capacities is an inherent desire for every human being.

To do this we may at times need to consciously put ourselves in positions of boredom. Constantly preventing our lateral mind from producing unique thoughts and always creating situations for our logical brain to take over, robs us of the ability to generate anything new.

In searching for our purpose in life, welcoming or even creating moments of boredom in our day may lead to more breakthroughs.

Unlike the more ‘heroic’ pain of tireless work and non-stop hustle that we may enjoy on our road to success, boredom is a different kind of discomfort that feels less enriching and for the most part, useless.

But tolerance of boredom is a skill that takes practice. It feels awful at times but gets easier the more you embrace it and try to put it to use.

Too much of it, of course, will likely not be productive. But finding the right balance between euphoric stimulation, everyday activity, and inconvenient boredom, may lead us closer and closer to the hidden mysteries latent within us.