Essays

by Scribe Leaf Library · 1 min read · 0 views

We have engineered boredom almost entirely out of modern life, and I think we should be more worried about that than we are. Every idle minute now has a device pointed at it — the queue, the waiting room, the walk to the car — each one filled instantly with something optimized to be more interesting than our own unoccupied mind. The result is a generation, mine included, that has nearly forgotten what happens on the far side of boredom, because we rarely stay in it long enough to find out. What happens, if you let it run its course, is not nothing. Boredom is the mind with no assigned task, and a mind with no assigned task goes looking for one, usually inward. Some of the best ideas I've had arrived not at a desk but in a queue at the post office, precisely because nothing else was competing for the room. Boredom, in that sense, isn't empty time. It's unscheduled time, and unscheduled time is where a person actually gets to think their own thoughts instead of someone else's. I'm not arguing for deprivation as discipline. I'm arguing that a life with zero boredom in it is a life that never asks its own mind an open question, and open questions are where most things worth having come from. Let a queue be a queue sometimes. See what shows up.