How Boredom Can Breed Brilliance: The Case for Being Bored
Help me! I can't stop scrolling! I can't stop consuming content! I'm a chronically online 21st-century person, and I must have my content! Nom, nom, nom. 15-second video. Nom, nom, nom. 10-second video. I need to look at my phone every second of my day! I can't be content with doing nothing!
Oh but you can and you should. It's for your own good. To save myself from the risk of being that dude (the boomer type who thinks he's all that because he hates social media or the guy who goes to parties and goes, "Dear god! Put your phones down! Enjoy this moment! Carpe Diem!"), I want to preface this by saying that I'm just another Gen Zer trying to make sense of this post-modern world—a too-fast-for-its-own-good world where we come to hate and penalize boredom. Amidst all the novelty in the way-too-much information age, we don't get bored enough. We often forget that boredom can be a great ally for productive thought, creativity, and action, if executed properly.
Even better if we rawdog it, really. However, that's just not what we do. We bury boredom down and find some remedy, treating it like some terrible disease. We don't have to look any further though. That so-called cure is quite literally in our very hands all the time.
The most common antidote to boredom in this age is, unsurprisingly, social media. It has made it increasingly difficult to be bored because, from our mothers and our sons down to our bosses, our dates, and our very personalities, we need it. We are taught to avoid our bored state instead of harnessing it. Such a pity. When did the world get in such a big goddamn hurry? Well, we all know when.
"That's where the addiction to this damn system comes in. That's how it perpetuates this itchy annoying blah. A blah that just makes us even more bored. A blah that effectively kills the brilliance in boredom."
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When Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram came along, they made us want to play along. We wanted the nice pictures, the long posts, the cute feeds, the coolness factor. The validation. Social media overlords rely on our addiction to make the world go round, after all. TikTok then came not too long after and jailbroke the system. Every app is trying to be TikTok now, giving users pieces of bite-sized content to cancel out any form of boredom. Suddenly, having to scroll through 100 clips in 10 minutes became the norm. Video after video explaining the explainer to the other explainer. Years' worth of learning is now consolidated into five blocks of text. Everything is a spliced worse version of another thing. Our attention spans have suffered the most. Now, they are as short as they have ever been, and that can't be a good thing.
It reflects in the data. “In 2004, we measured the average attention on a screen to be two-and-a-half minutes,” Dr. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine who studies the effects of digital media, said in an interview with CNN. “Some years later, we found attention spans to be about 75 seconds. Now we find people can only pay attention to one screen for an average of 47 seconds.” Yikes.
Social media is one hell of a drug that way. It is designed to keep us looking. We need to be sold something. We need to be told something. We need to give away our personal data. We need to participate. We must encourage others to participate, as well. We need to compare and be compared. We need engagement. In return, we are given breadcrumbs of stinky fresh content and more of that validation. There always should be something to perceive. All these nonsensical somethings to entertain us, but to no avail. And it just ends up giving us this itchy annoying blah in our lives. That's a manifestation of addiction, really. That's how this itchy annoying blah can grow to depress us. A blah that just makes us more bored in our quest to not be bored. A blah that effectively kills the brilliance in boredom.
But then again, there is a way overstimulation can help us cope with boredom better. This is the point author Sandi Mann wants to make as we navigate the information age. It's time we revisit and nourish our bored states, she says. Mann, a senior psychology lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire in the U.K. published the book The Upside of Downtime: Why Boredom Is Good in 2017. Here, Mann discusses how boredom can be a catalyst for humor, fun, reflection, creativity, and inspiration. The book also shows us that, with a healthy dose of boredom, we can enrich our lives.
In an interview with TIME, the lecturer explained further the correlation between social media, boredom, and our unquenchable thirst for those pesky feel-good chemicals in our brains.
“We’re trying to swipe and scroll the boredom away, but in doing that, we’re actually making ourselves more prone to boredom, because every time we get our phone out we’re not allowing our mind to wander and to solve our own boredom problems," she said. "Our tolerance for boredom just changes completely, and we need more and more to stop being bored.”
"It's also pretty easy to associate boredom with a negative state in the information age. This is why I want us to really think about what it means to be bored or why we want to escape it; boredom is one of the most misunderstood and underappreciated emotions out there."
We must learn to access truly "meaningful" boredom.
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Mann sees the constant dopamine our new and novel content provides us as the main source of our social media addiction. Because of this, we incessantly have to check our little screens for useless watered-down information. We just can't stop and smell the flowers anymore. We can't have a decent conversation anymore. We can't just sit and reflect. Thinking for ourselves became a chore. Fulfillment became an impossible dream. Thus, leading us toward cheaper versions of wellness and emptier selves.
But we never learn, do we? It wasn't too long ago when we collectively agreed that too much social media was detrimental to our health. Various studies have also long concluded the link between heavy social media usage and an increased risk for depression, anxiety, loneliness, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts. Some statistics estimate that the number of social media addicts worldwide ranges anywhere between 120 million and 210 million people. At one point in time, surely we've been one of them. Younger people are also much more susceptible to this vice. And that includes me.
As someone who grew up in the aftermath of traditional media, I might just be clinging to old-world biases here. But I've always doubted our cultural attachment to social media. Lift the veil and we can see that it has tricked us all into thinking that being constantly stimulated with information will fill the void in our hearts; or that the silence in our minds must be occupied by worthless forgerttable junk. Sure, social media still honors its overarching goal of democratizing information. But it has done so at the expense of our self-worth, our work-life balance, our relationships, our democracies (!), and, yeah, our sweet boredom. The distorted views of which, just stifle the quality of our existence.
"In the end, there should be a theoretical motivation for thinking about boredom. It can motivate us to engage differently with certain things, and lead us to more atypical ideas or unpredictable responses to tasks."
The information age has desensitized us to a point where we are too entertained to actually be entertained.
It's also pretty easy to associate boredom with a negative state in the information age. This is why I want us to really think about what it means to be bored or why we want to escape it; boredom is one of the most misunderstood and underappreciated emotions out there. We think we have to defeat and conquer boredom. On the contrary, we have to tame and nurture it. We learn to cope with it just like any other emotion. By doing so, we can derive some benefit from it. One study published in the journal Academy of Management Discoveries, for instance, sheds light on boredom's fascinating positive effects.
Based on its findings, boredom can, in fact, spark productivity and creativity. What the researchers did to test the theory out was to put participants through a boredom-inducing task. In this case, it was sorting a bowl of beans by color, piece by piece. Upon completion of the activity, they were asked to come up with the best excuses for being late for work (the good kind that shows your boss some courtesy). The ones who were bored outdid the artists in idea quantity and quality. It's a small sample size but it does tell us something, apart from learning about new excuses to call in sick.
It's not like we have to jump through all these imaginary hoops or anything to nourish boredom. It's inherently within us. We can get into a completely bored state by doing a relatively normal activity: going on a walk at a familiar street; simply lying on our beds with our eyes closed; or, the most practical, sitting and staring at a wall. The trick here is to let the mind wander and coast to make it worth your while. These aren't things we can do with the constant presence of content we fixate on. Awareness about the information age paradox (how we are desensitized to a point where we are too entertained to actually be entertained) can go a long way.
See, our addiction to social media will never truly facilitate any meaningful growth in our lives, no matter how many hours we keep on scrolling. In the end, there should be a theoretical motivation for thinking about boredom. It can motivate us to engage differently with certain things, and can even lead us to more atypical ideas or unpredictable responses to tasks or wildly better selves. This is good. Boredom is good for the brain and for our moods. Hell, we might even find ourselves with an improved performance at work. All these, just as long as the bored state is done with grace, patience, control, and intention. We can frame our bored state as a way to escape this cookie-cutter media matrix—the one that puts comfort over innovation, content over quiet, avoidance over resolution, and stimulation over stillness. In other words, I guess we need to be bored... to not be boring.
