Why Boredom Isn’t Boring

The hidden beauty of being bored

Image: womensbible.gr

Sometimes it feels as though the world is moving faster and faster, and that there’s less silence and space than ever.

Hard though it is for me to admit, it’s quite possible that I feel this way simply because I’m a millennial approaching middle age. The culture of generations Z and Alpha is similar to the one I grew up in, but not entirely my own, and as a result, the social world has a newfound dash of unfamiliarity to it.

However true that may be, I’m sure there’s a better explanation for the increasing speed with which the world is moving.

Objectively, the amount of information and entertainment we’re exposed to has increased exponentially in recent decades. Think of the development of the 24-hour news cycle, which has transformed the pace of political and social events. We could also mention the arrival of portable technologies, starting with the Walkman, which allowed us to take personally chosen entertainment with us wherever we went.

The decisive moment, though, was surely the mid- to late-2000s, with the arrival of smartphones, high-speed internet, and more sophisticated social media. Ever since then, the digital world has gotten faster, noisier, and more deeply intertwined with our everyday lives.

The consequences of this technological explosion are many and profound. One largely unnoticed one, however, is that it’s becoming harder and harder to be bored.

Vanishing boredom

Boredom was a fairly common feature of my (largely analogue) childhood. Hours could pass on rainy weekends as I looked for something to lose myself in. Later on, as an angsty teenager, boredom was an even greater presence in my life as I lost interest in most of my education.

Now, though, I find that I’m very rarely bored. The reason for this is not, alas, that I’m living a relentlessly adrenaline-infused existence, but simply because at any point throughout the day I have access to much of the world’s information and entertainment in my back pocket.

As a result, whenever I suddenly have nothing to immediately occupy my attention, I can reach for my phone, and any creeping sense of boredom is instantly banished.

I wonder, though: is this a good thing? It certainly seems to be, at face value. After all, who likes to be bored?

Precisely because boredom is harder to come by, however, it now reveals itself in a new light. As it recedes in our lives, it’s become something worth focusing on – and arguably even has a value that’s all the clearer.

Being oppressively unengaged

Even in our smartphone age, we all experience boredom from time to time. Perhaps when we’re listening to a tedious presentation in an irrelevant work meeting, or maybe when we’re on a very long journey, and just willing it to be over. Boredom still sets in, I find, when I’m confronted with something thoroughly unengaging, and for whatever reason can’t get up and leave or reach for my phone.

Whatever the occasion for it, when we’re bored, our relation to the world and ourselves takes on a curious form.

Ordinarily, when we’re involved in something enjoyable, we’re not particularly aware of our engagement with it: we’re just lost in the task at hand, the music we’re listening to, or the company we’re keeping. Put another way, in such situations, there is no self-conscious ‘I’ encountering a thing ‘out there’ in the world: there’s just an unreflective relation between us and the thing we’re interested in.

When we’re bored, however, things are very different. Although the thing that’s boring us consumes our attention, it does so despite being utterly dull: we are simultaneously engaged and yet uninterested in the thing at hand. This might be a long-winded colleague giving a tedious presentation, a teacher struggling to hold one’s attention, or it could just be the interior of my stuffy car that I’ve been confined to for the last six hours straight. The thing that’s boring me pervades my consciousness, however much I wish it were not so.

When this happens, we usually find that our sense of time changes, typically slowing to a crawl. While time ordinarily slips past with unnerving speed, as we’re wrapped up in the demands of living, when we’re bored, it stretches out like an elastic band, thinning to breaking point. We glance at the clock only to find that just a few minutes have passed since we last looked, and we’re painfully conscious of the elongated duration of the thing occasioning our boredom. This is something the German word for boredom, Langeweile, captures nicely, since it literally means ‘long while’.

The beauty of boredom

All of this is mildly unpleasant, of course. But boredom also affects our sense of self – and it’s here that I think its hidden importance lies.

Precisely because boredom occurs from a lack of interest in something in the external world, it throws us back on ourselves in search of stimulation. In other words, we have to turn to our inner selves to find something that might alleviate our boredom.

As a child, bored at home on a rainy afternoon, this might have been devising a new game of make-believe or doing a craft activity. As an adult stuck in an interminable meeting or stationary traffic, it might mean thinking about something deserving of sustained attention. We might think of a friend or relative that we need to speak to, or we might think about events in the wider world. In either case, we have to show mental initiative, rather than simply going with the flow of things presented to us.

This is the reason why boredom is so important for children and adolescents in particular, precisely those groups who are most easily seduced by screen-based activity. The less external stimuli we are exposed to, the more we have to develop our inner life: our powers of thinking, imagination, and concentration.

Relieving boredom

There’s an old saying that you might have heard from your mother or grandmother: Only boring people get bored. The idea, of course, is that people who’ve developed a rich inner life are never stuck for something to do.

While there might be some truth to this, I don’t think it fully captures the reality and importance of boredom.

Firstly, everyone gets bored from time to time, because we aren’t always at liberty to do whatever we want. Sometimes we have to sit through the meeting or put up with the long journey. Secondly, when this does happen, being bored reveals its importance: it can help us develop that inner life that means we’re better able to alleviate boredom, and also benefit us in life more broadly, by being more thoughtful and imaginative.

So it might be truer to say that only boring people stay bored for long, because those who’ve developed inner creativity and initiative will be able to find something worth engaging with, even if it’s just a train of thought. The use of these faculties whenever we feel boredom creeping in, rather than simply reaching for our smartphones, is surely a vital human skill, and one we ought to value.

This is why, I think, boredom isn’t boring – but instead pretty interesting.