The Importance of Being Bored

 

    In order to write this, I knew I would have to:

• Plan to do it at the start of my day (when the willpower meter is full)
• Get my non-negotiables done first (feeding the cats and making coffee), so that I can minimize distractions
• Resist the urge to turn on a YouTube video in the background (even if it's just music, because the process of finding something will already start depleting said willpower)
• Constantly catch my drifting attention and gently (but firmly) prod it back to writing this
  

    In simpler terms, I knew I would have to make myself bored. And then consciously maintain that level of boredom until I feel like I've said what I came here to say. Now, I haven't talked to People Who Write about this process and if it looks anything like their own — if anything comes to mind about what their process might look like, the last thing I'd imagine is that they are writing from a place of boredom. I've known some of these people, and I know they would turn down plans with friends in order to conserve time for writi— hey, wait. That sounds pretty boring actually...

    I'm joking, I'm joking. Not that it's doesn't sound a bit boring, but just I aspire to that level of willpower and passion for pursuing my own interests, as I'm sure many of us do. However, it's important to talk about what I mean here, because boredom is at an all-time-low these days, and I'm starting to worry about the consequences of allowing it to carry such negative connotations.

    Before that, it's even more important to touch on the discourse surrounding boredom that already exists and to acknowledge that it is often something spoken about from places of great privilege and, often, self-righteousness (read the Boredom Wikipedia article, in particular the entry on Philosophy for the highlights; the article as a whole is great follow-up reading if you want to do your own boredom deep-dive). While I am speaking from a place of relative privilege (did you see my Sunday morning non-negotiables?), if I end up speaking from a place of self-righteousness, I have failed; keep me honest.

    Last but not least, I want to also acknowledge that neurodivergence creates another layer of complexity on top of this discussion. As a neurodivergent individual, I hope that my perspective is useful to anyone reading this; though my experience might be different from another neurodivergent experience or a more neurotypical experience, we all struggle with the sensation of boredom and should feel empowered to overcome it in the ways that feel the most effective and productive for our own brains.

    Now, here's what I mean when I say we gotta get more bored:

We need to have deliberate, intentional moments of choosing the less-appealing, more-effortful option, in order to minimize our despair and maximize our fulfillment.

    I'll wait for you to read that poorly constructed sentence again. Once you've done that, let me try to break it down in my own words (but I encourage you to do the same first):

• This is a non-negotiable for our brains. We simply are not wired for constant engagement and nor should we aspire to be! Here's a little blurb on that concept for anyone interested in learning more.
  
  
• If we do not do this deliberately and intentionally, we're not really doing it right. I'm not trying to gatekeep boredom, I promise — this is about mindfulness and exercising our autonomy. Another thing our brains love to do is cut down on "unneccessary" processes, which sounds great until you realize that anything you do repeatedly will inevitably require less and less thought (wait, that still sounds great — let's talk about this one some more later).
  
  
• "moments of choosing" — I really like this wording (I'm allowed to say that about something I wrote) — one thing this very much is not is a constant or consistent practice. The previous bullet mentions what happens when our brains do things repeatedly and for now, just take my word for it that we want to emphasise the intermittent nature of this practice.
  
  
• Being bored generally means the lack of interesting or exciting stimuli. What's the first thing you do when you feel boredom creeping up on you? I'm going to assume it's pick up your phone. The most dangerous thing about our phones is that they provide a ridiculously easy out from boredom. The important takeaway here is that this is a battle of autonomy vs. effort and, while autonomy doesn't have to win every battle, it's a worthwhile endeavor to aim for a 50/50 win-loss ratio (this is also tied to the second bullet point that I'll follow-up on next).
  
  
• And most important of all, we need to have our why: "in order to minimize our despair and maximize our fulfillment". I don't know about you, but that's plenty of why for me.

    Having broken that down, I hope you feel that you can start to appreciate the importance of being bored and are starting to think of some ways to foster a healthy level of boredom in your own life.

    Lastly, I want to touch on the reason why I'm stressing the need for intentionality and autonomy in our reactions to boredom. Our brain cells are capable of this thing called Long-Term Potentiation (LTP for the cool kids). It's often discussed as a useful proponent of learning and memory, and if you associate with nerds, you might also have heard someone at some point say "neurons that fire together wire together" — that's LTP. This is one of the mechanisms by which our brains are able to process information more efficiently, saving us a lot of energy (our brains use up about 20% of our daily energy requirements, which is a lot relative to it's size). My takeaway? An awareness of this mechanism allows us to take necessary precautions to choose for ourselves which things we want our brains to handle automatically and thus make easier, and which things we want to maintain a more conscious awareness of, trading efficiency for intentionality (more reading on how that works here).

    We are living in a world that is increasingly designed to steal our attention from us — an insult to our incredible capacity for autonomy, I'd say. Understanding how our own brains work is more important than ever, because there are corporations and governments at work who are armed with that understanding and actively trying to keep that information from us, in order to take advantage of the fact that our brains are innocently trying to help us reduce our mental load in an age of overwhelming information. Mindfulness, education, and intentionality are the mechanisms by which we can care for our brains, all of which can be accessed only if we are willing to open the door to boredom and sit with it for long enough.