bored out of our minds

I am plagued by possibilities. As a multi-passionate jack-of-all-trades, this is the albatross around my neck. Whenever something new and exciting drifts into my awareness, I immediately want it.

And let me tell you—there are a lot of things to want:

To roam the world on insane expeditions, to be a prolific author, to be a mountain athlete, to move to Portugal and tend to bees and an olive grove, to start a business, to be a coach, to travel to the mountains—no, the beach, to be Paris-chic—scratch that, New York-chic—NO! LA cool, to lock in and get really good at climbing, to start free diving, or maybe surfing…

There are so many things I could see myself doing, and they flash before me so fast it makes me dizzy, the centrifugal force of it all keeping my feet stuck firmly to the ground, unable to step into any of them.

We were never meant to be exposed to so many possibilities. Knowing that all of these possibilities even exist, let alone are options you can pursue, is a new phenomenon.

Before, things were fairly straightforward: you did what the family did or what you went to school to do. There weren’t that many paths to choose from.

But now, there are enough options to make someone’s head spin. It used to be thought that the more options someone had, the happier they’d be because they could choose the exact thing that they wanted. But it turns out, options exist on a bell curve—there’s a point of diminishing returns, where more options just breed more confusion, and we’re in it.

How, then, do we untangle the mess of options and tease out a path that feels meaningful, aligned, and exciting?

It turns out, we might just not be bored enough.

The purpose of boredom

And I mean, actually, properly bored. These days, moments of boredom are few and far between—one needn’t ever be bored when access to everything, ever, is in their pocket. And why would we? Being bored is uncomfortable, so the inclination to avoid it is only logical—that's what humans do, avoid things that don’t feel good. A very useful characteristic when uncomfortable things were actually threatening (and the barometer for discomfort was calibrated quite differently), but now…

We find boredom to be so uncomfortable that we’d rather endure physical pain than be bored; one study from 2014 found that 25% of women and 67% of men would rather self-administer a painful electric shock than sit alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes (and I can only imagine that number would be much higher if that study were replicated now).

But the problem is: it’s supposed to be uncomfortable. Boredom is an important human experience. It’s a feature, not a bug, and it’s uncomfortable by design. When we spare ourselves from this discomfort, we miss out on what it’s trying to tell us.

Because boredom isn’t just an unpleasant sensation, it’s a signal. It functions as both a warning and a push—like the siren of an ambulance telling you to move aside to let it pass. It tells us, “hey, something seems off, let’s move towards something else”.

Before the ubiquitous use of social media, we would turn to things like reading, playing games, doing crafts, or playing music when boredom struck. I feel lucky, because I remember what it was like to live in a time before social media. Yes, I had the internet, and I would certainly spend some time playing games, on AIM, or rearranging my Top 8 and covertly learning to code on Myspace. But these things had their limits—they weren’t engineered to keep us on them forever. I remember spending hours in high school making bracelets for my friends or teaching myself how to play the piano. In middle school, I would bust out my flute and annotate the melodies of my favorite film scores. In college, it was DIY projects.

Sure, on paper, these things don’t seem like much, especially in retrospect—I’m not a composer, I can no longer play the piano, I haven’t made a bracelet in over a decade, and I leave the house projects to my husband. But they weren’t a complete waste of time, either. Maybe they weren’t “productive” by today’s insane standards, but I did gain a lot from these activities: creativity, fine motor skills, problem solving—learning what kinds of things I naturally gravitate toward when I could gravitate towards anything.

When we let the brain wander for a second, we can end up in some interesting places.

But when we never allow boredom to strike—when we whip out our phones during any lull—we never end up anywhere other than staring at our hands to mask how we feel. Boredom is unpleasant, yes, but hidden in that moment of discomfort lie clues about who are are at our core, and an opportunity to draw closer to it. When we miss that trigger, we stay stuck.

And then, before we can even realize what’s happening, our thoughts, outlooks, personalities, and the very fabric of our reality are being shaped by algorithms.

In the absence of boredom…

suffocating the self

To literally no one’s surprise: it really is the damn phones. And what all of this distraction is doing is keeping us from experiencing our default mode network (DMN)—who we are in the absence of stimulus, when thoughts turn inward. We don’t always like what we find when thoughts turn inward: maybe we start thinking about how much we hate our job, how we’re in the wrong relationship, or about a particular shame or disappointment. These thoughts can feel inconvenient at best, painful at worst.

But we’re avoiding more than just bad thoughts—we’re also avoiding the good. Creativity, self-reflection, meaning-making, and perspective-taking are the fruits that can never come to bear if we don’t endure the fallow.

When we never let the DMN out to play, we never get the chance to process and integrate things we’ve experienced and what we’ve learned. If we never welcome boredom in—never let our minds idle—and we stay trapped in consumption loops, we never get the chance to process and filter what we’re consuming. As a result, we become emotionally and psychologically constipated. Our personal narrative and sense of self get fragmented, and we can struggle to sus out what is “me” and what the content you’re consuming, fed to you by an algorithm or private interests, is telling you you are or who you should be. Over time, it starts to feel like a unique and cruel form of torture—like the walls that form your reality are closing in on you until all that’s left is a cold, gray, 2x2 concrete room. No room to play, to express yourself, or take up space in your own life.

And walls without don’t just serve to keep you in; they press you down. That’s the architecture of depression—the absence of expression.

If you don’t allow space for boredom, you’ll never know who you really are. And if you don’t know who you are, the world will waste no time telling you what it wants you to be for its own selfish purposes.

weakening the mind

Boredom and attention are like this *crosses fingers*. And media developers know attention well—it’s literally their currency. Every time we pull out our phones in a moment of fleeting boredom, we’re training our brains. But unlike an athlete trains to get stronger, our phones are like a perverse gym that makes our brains weaker. The more we turn to dopaminergic stimuli to avoid boredom, the weaker the mind gets and the more resistant we become to that uncomfortable feeling of boredom.

And ultimately, it weakens our capacity to pay attention to anything, much like addiction to an opiate: you take the drug to numb the pain, and the more you take, the more sensitive to pain you become, so you take more drugs, and around and around you go in a vicious spiral.

When one-pointed attention (that is, focus) has to be triggered by a sensory experience (like a TikTok video), it’s game over for our attention. Getting your mind to focus automatically is easy; forcing it to focus is hard. So, we default to the thing that’s easy to focus on—now, we can’t control our attention because everything on social media is designed to be the most stimulating thing there is. Even former Facebook CEO Sean Parker admitted, PUBLICALLY, that the main objective during the development of Facebook was, “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”

Compared to social media, everything is boring—by design. Because it focuses your attention so easily and cheaply, you’ll always go back to it. Meanwhile, it’s stealing the very fabric of your life out from under your nose like a bad boyfriend.

Where attention goes, energy flows. Whatever you give your attention to, you give power. It’s like the Poor, Unfortunate Souls scene in The Little Mermaid—when we willingly hand our attention to a farce, it flourishes while we wither. Just like Ursula’s contract, the deal looks harmless at first: a click here, a like there, a scroll to pass the time. But slowly, piece by piece, you trade away your voice, your creativity, your spark. The more you give, the smaller you become, until all that’s left is a shrunken version of yourself.

crushing the spirit

Ultimately, boredom = mind wandering. When you stay focused on a single point, you’re mind isn’t allowed to wander. The more you get used to being focused on a single point, the more uncomfortable mind wandering feels—the discomfort of boredom suddenly becomes intolerable. Because what the brain loves is consistency and predictability, and that includes consistency of how we feel. But when we flatten our feelings to avoid discomfort, it inhibits our capacity to feel fully. And trust me when I say this, because I speak from experience: it’s better to feel uncomfortable—bad, even, than feel nothing at all.

And when we don’t allow ourselves to feel, we can’t access our intuition. And without access to our intuition, we begin wandering without a map, mistaking other people’s paths for our own. Intuition gets traded for “inspiration”. We don’t know what to do, so we start scrolling all the live-long day in search of something that will give us the answer to what to create, who to be, and what to do with our lives.

But these aren’t us. No. We’re merely imitating whoever managed to package their lifestyle best into a 30-second clip. We’re being sold 1,000 lifestyles a day. With every swipe of the thumb, a new, enticing pitch. And if you never allow for stillness, silence, and, yes, boredom, then you will confuse every pitch for absolute truth.

And this goes double for those of us trying to live creative lives, because if you always consume, you can never create. Like a damned river that floods everything upstream, meanwhile, everything downstream dries up. We mistake consumption for action. And fair enough, if we can get the dopamine without actually having to do anything—without having to be a beginner, without having to fail or deal with creative blocks—then great! It certainly conserves time and energy. But watching other people live doesn’t make a life worth living. It’s safe, sure, but, as the saying goes: a ship in the harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.

There’s a great study that illustrates the relationship between boredom and creativity, where researchers deliberately bored participants before asking them to complete a creative task. Participants were divided into three groups: In the first group, participants had to copy numbers out of a phone book by hand for 15 minutes. The second group was asked to just read the phone book (even more dull than writing the numbers down), and the third was the control group.

All groups were asked to come up with as many creative uses as possible for a styrofoam cup.

The bored groups came up with more creative answers than the control group, with the reading group (the most passive, mind-wandering kind of boredom) coming up with the most creative of all.

Basically, the duller the task, the more your brain wanders, and the more inventive you get once you have space to generate ideas.

Even if you don’t necessarily identify as a “creative” (which, you should, but that’s a conversation for another day), creative and flexible thinking is a requirement for a big, fat, juicy life. To be able to see possibilities where others see walls, adapt when life throws curveballs, and craft your own, authentic path instead of following someone else’s map—if that sounds like something you want, then YOU NEED TO LET YOURSELF BE BORED.

How to be bored again

I don’t know if it’s just my algorithm (the irony isn’t lost on me), but it feels like there’s a mass exodus from social media happening. Sects of Gen Z and Millennials are turning their backs on digital distractions in favor of a more analogue life. Devices like the Light Phone and Daylight Computer are gaining steam. We’re reviving our old iPods from the bottom of our sock drawers. The library is trending. Vinyl album sales have increased by 300% over the last decade.

We’ve realized, by being so engrossed in the digital world, that we’ve been leasing our attention—and our lives—to corporations for profit, and now we have the ick. We might have accepted the terms and conditions, but we didn’t consent to the hijacking of our very reality, and now many of us are choosing to opt out. To spend more time in the real world, with real people. To do one thing at a time and savor it.

What we’re craving is idle time—chunks of time where the mind can stretch its legs and take a breather. Things are finally coming to a head, and we’ve realized that we are being choked out by stimulation, and idle time is the antidote. It doesn’t even have to be a lot of idle time: 30 seconds at a red light, 3 minutes waiting in line at a coffee shop—these little chunks of time can really add up. When we smother every idle moment with stimulation, the mind becomes mush. Letting it wander during lulls gives it shape again.

And beyond these little moments, how often are we scrolling when we could be doing… literally anything else? It doesn’t even have to be productive. In fact, it usually shouldn’t be productive (productivity can be just another way we distract ourselves).

Boredom isn’t from a lack of things to do; it’s from a lack of appealing options. So when you don’t like the options, + you don’t like your life, you distract yourself with the lowest hanging fruit you have at your disposal.

So, create better options. Have something you go to other than scrolling on your phone—something better and more gratifying in the long term. If you’re a person who really reaches for your phone compulsively, then something like a dopamine menu or having some go-to, low-lift hobby—something you WANT to do—can work wonders. You have to intentionally build options you don’t want to distract yourself from.

At the same time, you have to make your phone unappealing. I’m really diving into this personally right now and have a whole, standalone article about this very thing coming soon, so I’m not going to go into too much detail. But—put your phone out of reach/out of sight. Put it on silent. Turn off notifications—I know you think you need them, but trust me, you really don’t. Go on a walk, leave your phone behind. Create no phone zones and times. Set time limits on apps. Really babysit yourself about it. It feels silly, but phone addiction is real, and there’s no shame in doing something about it. I’d argue that it’s more acceptable now than ever.

Finally, the other side of this coin is getting yourself used to doing difficult things. As I’ve said pretty much this whole time: we reach for stimulation because we hate the discomfort of boredom. But we can train ourselves to tolerate difficult things so that the discomfort associated with boredom is a walk in the park. Go for a run. Lift some weights. Get in a sauna or cold plunge. Sign up for a HYROX and train for it with friends. Meditate—look up Trataka or Gaṇanā meditation. Learn a new skill, let yourself suck at it. Challenge yourself to talk to a stranger. Whatever is uncomfortable for you, lean into it because it will start to translate to you being able to tolerate your own wandering mind.

In all of the noise online, we can lose ourselves without even realizing it. But being bored is the only way to figure out what YOU want out of life. In a sea of endless options, it’s the thing that can keep you from drowning.

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cover photo via pinterest