The Surprising Power of Boredom: It Lets You Confront Big Questions & Give Life Meaning

The twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry so far may seem light on major tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs, at least when com­pared to the twen­ti­eth. An arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence boom (per­haps a bub­ble, per­haps not) has been tak­ing place over the past few years, which at least gives us some­thing to talk about. Before that, most of us would have named the smart­phone, for bet­ter or for worse, as the defin­ing devel­op­ment of our time. Relat­ed­ly, we could also zoom out and declare that humankind has elim­i­nat­ed bore­dom. But unlike, say, get­ting rid of small­pox, that achieve­ment has yield­ed mixed bless­ings at best. The rea­son is that, as Har­vard Busi­ness School pro­fes­sor Arthur C. Brooks puts it in the Har­vard Busi­ness Review video above, you need to be bored.

“Bore­dom is a ten­den­cy for us not to be occu­pied oth­er­wise, cog­ni­tive­ly, which switch­es over our think­ing sys­tem to use a part of our brain that’s called the default mode net­work,” Brooks says. In that mode, which kicks in absent any oth­er stim­u­la­tion, we must face “big ques­tions of mean­ing” — by their very nature, uncom­fort­able ones — in our lives. “One of the rea­sons we have such an explo­sion of depres­sion and anx­i­ety in our soci­ety today is because peo­ple actu­al­ly don’t know the mean­ing of their lives, much less so than in pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions.” What has insu­lat­ed us so com­plete­ly from the need even to con­sid­er it? Why, “that thing in your pock­et with the screen, which you take out even when you’re stand­ing on the street cor­ner, wait­ing for the light to change.”

“We all have pock­et-sized com­put­ers now,” wrote the jour­nal­ist Kaleb Hor­ton, who died last month, in a blog post from ear­li­er this year addressed to his own father in the nine­teen-eight­ies. “You can look up ency­clo­pe­dia arti­cles and stuff but you’ll most­ly use it for check­ing the stock mar­ket and play­ing a game called Can­dy Crush. It’s real­ly just some­thing to do with your hands, like cig­a­rettes.” To those suf­fer­ing the kind of strange malaise he sens­es beset­ting so many of us here in the hyper-con­nect­ed twen­ty-twen­ties, he offers rec­om­men­da­tions includ­ing the fol­low­ing: “Log off as hard as you can. Go out­side, talk to peo­ple in real life where it’s actu­al­ly kind of rude to talk about the news, try to actu­al­ly see the friends you usu­al­ly just text mes­sage. Go for a long dri­ve and turn the phone off while you do it. Get back into your hob­bies or pick one and learn it for a while.”

In oth­er words, get offline and “try out some of those nor­mal things you hear about and if you get bored that’s won­der­ful because we’re not sup­posed to get bored any­more. It turns out bore­dom is the Cadil­lac of feel­ings.” With­out it, we’re liable to find our­selves on the way to the junk­yard: “If every time you’re slight­ly bored, you pull out your phone,” Brooks says, “it’s going to get hard­er and hard­er for you to find mean­ing, and that’s the recipe for depres­sion and anx­i­ety and a sense of hol­low­ness, which, by the way, are all through the roof.” If you delib­er­ate­ly and reg­u­lar­ly go with­out check­ing your phone, or indeed expos­ing your­self to any oth­er source of elec­tron­ic stim­u­la­tion, you’ll build “the skill of bore­dom,” which will enable you not only to con­front life’s grand ques­tions, but also to be less bored with ordi­nary life — some­thing we should all learn to savor while we still can.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Ben­e­fits of Bore­dom: How to Stop Dis­tract­ing Your­self and Get Cre­ative Ideas Again

Lyn­da Bar­ry on How the Smart­phone Is Endan­ger­ing Three Ingre­di­ents of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Lone­li­ness, Uncer­tain­ty & Bore­dom

How to Take Advan­tage of Bore­dom, the Secret Ingre­di­ent of Cre­ativ­i­ty

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Boosts Our Cre­ativ­i­ty (Plus Free Resources to Help You Start Med­i­tat­ing)

Bored at Work? Here’s What Your Brain Is Try­ing to Tell You

Med­i­ta­tion for Begin­ners: Bud­dhist Monks & Teach­ers Explain the Basics

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.