The Benefits Of Being Bored

We live in fast-paced times, every aspect of our lives is constantly being redesigned to be quicker, almost instant. Life is evolving in a way where most people run away from being bored so fucking fast that there is almost no time left to solely be alone with one’s thoughts.

Can’t we all agree that this is horrible? Destructive? A true assassination of some of the most amazing skills we possess as human beings?

Most of society believes youth has a low attention span (and even though this is true for a scary amount of cases), the sad reality is that this is now common and the “new normal” amongst a sadly higher proportion of the world’s population.

It is estimated that a grand total of 9 years of the average human is spent on their phone. Which corresponds to roughly 11% of an average 79-year long life.

Take a moment to let that sink in.

Nine years, that comes to a total of:

3 287.17979 days

This led me to conclude, that most of us don’t use the powerful weapon that boredom can be.

Sitting with your thoughts, being present, using only your brain to entertain yourself, those times of solitude, that’s when ideas emerge.

Those times of monotony are a great environment for creativity and a great place to feed your creative soul.

Being a strict consumer drains all your energy and attention and leaves you feeling empty, lost, and sucks you into an endless hole. It’s only once you regain consciousness, even if just for a few seconds, that you think “WTF was I doing?”.

It’s sad to the point where you don’t even remember the last TikTok, Reel, or Short that you watched (and you’ve been there for hours).

Challenge yourself to be alone with your thoughts for 5 minutes because I’m sure you’ll be bombarded with random thoughts that challenge your brain, maybe even get to the point where you have some great ideas.

Focus on a topic or an idea, or simply allow your brain to fluctuate through the beauty that can be our intellect. Perhaps you’ll end up realizing that your creative self emerges from the place where mindless scrolling buries it.

We all get lost in this hole at some point, we may even find ourselves being pulled more often than desirable, so we must make the conscious choice to get the fuck out of it.

It’s bad to the point where you go to the bathroom with your phone, you scroll infinitely and after you regain consciousness you can’t even remember if you took a shit or not.

This is alarming. Being strictly consumers in the world we live in deprives us of so many great aspects related to our curiosity, creativity, and so many other parts of our brain that strive after a bit of boredom.

Kids are experts on this. If you leave a kid in a boring situation at first they might cry, and throw a tantrum but after a while using the most powerful tool they have (their imagination) they allow themselves to break free and create interesting scenarios without needing to pull out a phone.

And even kids nowadays are being brought into this dangerous exaggeration that is social media consumption and device usage. (But this is a full article by itself.)

Concluding being bored allows you to:

• Boost your creativity, curiosity, and even productivity.
• Explore thoughts and ideas you wouldn’t otherwise.
• Help you regain consciousness, overall making you more present.
• Reevaluate your life.

Among many others, so please introspect.