Be So Bored You Can Hardly Stand It
If you have small children, you know that they sometimes have difficulty entertaining themselves.
“What can I do next?”
“I’m bored.”
We have somehow created a world where being bored is presumed to be anaethema to fully living, as if boredom is a terrible and harmful negative state.
In my experience, the opposite is true. Experience the feelings of boredom. Let them pass over you. What does it really mean that you can’t sit still, without thoughts of to-do lists, or work situations, or without reaching for your phone for the 312th time that day.
Being truly, perfectly, bored is a life skill. Experience it, don’t weight it, and don’t assign positive or negative value to it. Be. Be in that bored moment.
This is getting harder as we are getting more and more wired for dopamine, for action, for that little ping or banner on the screen which we come to crave. This is getting harder as our brains are rewired for digital.
Boredom is an analog state of being.
It is perhaps central to being human, and speaks to some existential need to be doing…something. Perhaps our ancestors didn’t have the luxury of being bored. I suspect, however, that they did know about it. Maybe they stared at the stars or at trees. Somewhere, somehow, human consciousness bloomed, along with all the things already living, on this planet.
A state of boredom is a fertile creative state. It is a letting go, a pausing, and a giving of time for the brain to rest, synthesize. It is a time for the brain to do its work, basically.
If I could only convince my children of the truth of this, however.
