Whatever Happened to Just Being Bored?

I can’t remember the last time I was truly bored.

Not waiting-for-something-to-load bored.

Not sitting-in-a-doctor’s-office-and-immediately-reaching-for-my-phone bored.

Not standing-in-line-at-the-grocery-store-and-checking-email bored.

I mean old-fashioned bored.

The kind where there was absolutely nothing happening, nobody was entertaining you, and nobody considered this a problem requiring immediate intervention.

Remember that?

When I was growing up, boredom was largely your own responsibility.

If you announced to your mother that you were bored, you did so at considerable personal risk because she was very likely to find something for you to do.

And it probably involved cleaning.

So we learned not to announce it.

Instead, we wandered around.

We stared at things.

We sat outside.

We called a friend.

We rode our bikes.

We picked something up and started messing with it.

We daydreamed.

Sometimes we did absolutely nothing.

And somehow, we survived.

Then We Invented a Cure for Boredom

Today, almost none of us ever has to be bored.

We carry a small rectangular device capable of filling every unoccupied second of our lives.

Standing in line?

Phone.

Commercial comes on?

Phone.

Waiting for someone to meet us?

Phone.

Can’t sleep?

Phone.

Sitting on the porch for five minutes?

Well, obviously we should check Facebook.

There are texts, emails, podcasts, videos, games, breaking-news alerts, recipes, photographs, streaming television, audiobooks and social media feeds that literally never end.

Think about that last part.

They never end.

We used to finish things.

You finished the newspaper.

You finished the magazine.

The television program ended.

The store closed.

The person you were calling wasn’t home.

There were natural stopping places built into life.

Now there is always one more thing.

One more story.

One more video.

One more post.

One more notification.

One more outrage.

One more thing somebody somewhere thinks we urgently need to know.

And I’m beginning to wonder whether all this entertainment has actually made us better at being alive.

I Am Not Giving Up My Phone

Before anybody gets the wrong idea, let me be clear.

This is not going to end with me suggesting we all throw our phones into a lake.

I love technology.

I use it constantly.

I write with it. I create with it. I learn with it. I plan trips with it. I communicate with people I love through it.

And at 73, I am still regularly learning some new piece of technology—which occasionally involves muttering things at my computer that I’m glad my mother can’t hear.

Technology has opened doors for me that would have been unimaginable when I was younger.

I don’t want to go backward.

But I do wonder whether we need to become a little more deliberate about when we let all this technology come forward.

Because somewhere along the way, we stopped tolerating empty space.

And empty space may have been doing more for us than we realized.

Your Brain Wanders When You Let It

Some of my best thoughts don’t arrive when I’m sitting at my desk trying to have a good thought.

They arrive when I’m walking.

Or looking at the roses outside my office window.

Or doing something completely unrelated to whatever problem I’ve been trying to solve.

A thought bumps into another thought.

A memory appears.

An idea forms.

A question occurs to me.

There’s no agenda.

My brain is simply wandering around unsupervised.

And maybe that’s the point.

We’ve become so accustomed to consuming information that we sometimes forget our minds are capable of generating it.

Every spare minute doesn’t need to be filled with somebody else’s voice.

Sometimes we need enough quiet to hear our own.

We’ve Even Made Relaxation Productive

This one makes me laugh.

Somehow we’ve managed to turn relaxing into another thing we’re supposed to be good at.

We track our sleep.

Count our steps.

Measure our heart rates.

Schedule meditation.

Listen to podcasts about being present.

Download apps to help us disconnect from our other apps.

Apparently, we now need technology to remind us to stop using technology.

Human beings really are magnificent creatures.

But maybe occasionally we could just…

sit there.

No objective.

No self-improvement.

No optimization.

No evidence afterward that we accomplished anything.

What a radical idea.

I Think We Need a Little Boredom Back

Not endless boredom.

Not loneliness.

Not isolation.

I’m talking about small pockets of unclaimed time.

Five minutes sitting outside without picking up the phone.

A walk without listening to anything.

Standing in line and simply observing the people around us.

Looking out the car window on a long drive instead of immediately finding something to occupy ourselves.

Waiting.

Thinking.

Noticing.

Daydreaming.

Maybe even being slightly bored.

Because here’s what I’ve begun to suspect:

Boredom isn’t always an absence of something.

Sometimes it’s an opening.

When nothing is demanding our attention, our attention gets to choose where it goes.

And that’s where curiosity can sneak in.

It’s where memories surface.

It’s where ideas start forming.

It’s where we notice the light changing outside or hear a bird we would otherwise have missed.

It’s where a thought we’ve been chasing suddenly finds us.

Maybe We Don’t Need to Fill Every Minute

I don’t want to return to some imaginary golden age when life was supposedly simpler and everybody sat happily on the front porch.

Life wasn’t necessarily better then.

It was just different.

And technology has made many parts of my life immeasurably richer.

But perhaps progress doesn’t require us to surrender every quiet moment.

Maybe we can keep all the extraordinary things technology gives us while occasionally remembering that our own minds are pretty extraordinary, too.

So sometime this week, I’m going to try something.

I’m going to deliberately do nothing for a little while.

No phone.

No podcast.

No television.

No book.

No project.

No attempt to make those minutes useful.

I’m just going to let myself be bored.

I have absolutely no idea what will happen.

Which, now that I think about it, is probably the whole point.

Maybe boredom wasn’t an empty space after all.

Maybe it was the space where something else had room to arrive.

Thank you, as always, for spending a few minutes with me here at Julie’s Journal. In a world competing relentlessly for our attention, I’m especially grateful that you choose to share some of yours with me.

If this made you think about your own relationship with boredom—or made you remember a time when “there’s nothing to do” was a perfectly normal part of life—please share it with someone who might enjoy it.

And if someone shared this with you and you’d like to receive Julie’s Journal, I’d be delighted to have you join us.

Have a wonderful week.

And sometime today, maybe put the phone down for five minutes.

Don’t do anything.

You might be surprised by what shows up.

Julie Bolejack, MBA

The Mindful Activist

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