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