In our current social climate, boredom gets a bad reputation. We have entire industries (such as gaming, streaming, publishing and so on) dedicated to the utter elimination of boredom. However, eliminating boredom from your life is not only a fool’s errand, it is actively detrimental to your health and well-being, as well as limits creativity.
First off, we all need to acknowledge that boredom is essentially a luxury. If you are sitting in a developed first world nation, with ample food to eat, enough money to cover basic necessities, and have surplus downtime to appreciate all of this, then make sure to inventory all of your good fortune. We can even go a step further and say that most people under those conditions have a choice (yes, a choice) of entertainment options instantly available to them, yet they still find themselves momentarily yearning for something to do. Talk about a fantastic life! Those in the developing world do not have it so easy, many parts of the world still sadly lack proper irrigation and hence people still need to walk several miles for water. People in these parts of the world do not have time to complain about an empty To Do list (that’s essentially what boredom is). In fact, there are many here in the United States that don’t have the luxury of being bored; think of the college student in a STEM field, the start-up founder working 100-hour weeks, or the single mom. If you are truly bored, then you are truly lucky.
The universal elimination of boredom may seem like a wish come true for the momentarily unoccupied, however a better thought experiment is to think of what would fill the void of boredom? Would you really want your life to be an action movie? This may seem cool at first, until you realize that would be completely unsustainable. After all, the human body can only take so much cortisol. Therefore, having an empty time block on your schedule is ideal from time to time. Boredom isn’t an evil thing to be eliminated, it is a vital part of the human condition.
As a youth, if I would complain about boredom, my father would quickly find a task (typically an unpleasant one) to assign. This, predictably, led to the immediate cessation of whining about having nothing to do. I have carried this with to me to the present day, where I’ll start doing chores or other tasks that I’ve been putting off in moments where I scrape the bottom of my To Do list. Besides, it’s time better spent than speed-running Metal Gear Solid 3 for the umpteenth time. I have found that during the mundane tasks, my brain shifts to autopilot; folding laundry is a task that I mastered in my youth, so it requires no conscious thought. The lack of mental effort needed to perform the task at hand is an absolute requirement, since the dullness of the activity allows my mind to wander free. This free-wandering has allowed my mind to veer into some unexpected, though interesting, territory. I’m glad I had a yellow legal pad handy to capture my train of thought at the time! In a way, boredom is absolutely a gateway, a gateway to ending procrastination and a spurring along creativity, thus it is crucial to embrace boredom!
One such example occurred during my college days. My friends and I had organized our own film-making group and had a few projects under our belts at that point. We wanted money to upgrade our editing software and to buy better equipment, so we applied for a non-profit grant. We were given the money on the condition that we make a film that positively portrays the city where the granting organization was based in. Being a bunch of broke twenty-somethings, we accepted their deal only to realize one crucial detail; none of us had a plan on pulling this off. A few days later, I was sitting in Microbiology class, a course that I could’ve slept through and still passed (I bet every microbiologist reading this must hate me right now). I was not paying attention to the professor’s lecture because of this and my mind drifted. Eventually, I mentally stumbled into a plan for the movie! I used my microbiology notebook and started to frantically write down the plot of the move, my hand moving furiously across the page. My wrist was hardly able to keep up with my racing mind, though I had somehow captured everything on my notebook. My unaware professor stopped mid-lecture to publicly gave me kudos for what appeared to be my furious note-taking. My wandering mind found creativity, and hence the solution to my problem.
Of course, this wasn’t the only time this happened either. Roughly 18 months ago, I was sitting at my desk during a slow night of work during a down week. My mind wandered as I lamented the incessant flow of filth known as internet memes that our day shift had plastered all over the instant-messaging chat from that day. My roaming brain stumbled into the realization that I could fill a book about everything that was toxic about the meme community. Alas, The Case Against Memes was born! I started frantically writing everything down; what topics would be chapters, what I would cover, different angles to attack the low-IQ communication medium from, all of it. All due to boredom and having a pen-and-paper handy!
Several of my articles have also been the brainchildren of boredom and yellow legal pads. Boredom is not a time to complain, in fact it is a time to find a mundane task to do. Just keep a yellow legal pad handy, for you’ll never truly know when boredom will strike next.
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