Essays

by Scribes Stories · 6 min read · 3 views

What We Learn From Boredom My niece, aged nine, recently informed me, with the particular gravity children reserve for genuine catastrophe, that she was bored, a state she described as though reporting a serious injury rather than simply the ordinary, temporary absence of external stimulation. I found myself, responding to her considerable distress, offering the same reflexive suggestions most adults offer children in this situation, a list of activities designed to promptly resolve the crisis and restore her to a properly entertained state as quickly as possible. It was only after she'd wandered off, having rejected my entire suggested list in favor of simply lying on the living room floor staring at the ceiling, that I began wondering whether my reflexive rush to resolve her boredom actually served her interests, or whether I was simply modeling, however unconsciously, a cultural discomfort with boredom that I suspect serves almost nobody's genuine interests particularly well. Boredom has become, in recent decades, something closer to a diagnosable problem requiring immediate intervention rather than an ordinary, temporary state that human beings have presumably experienced, and presumably benefited from in various ways, throughout the entire history of human consciousness. We have developed, collectively, an enormous technological infrastructure specifically designed to ensure that boredom, whenever it threatens to arise, can be immediately and thoroughly banished through some readily available form of stimulation, a phone, a screen, an endless supply of content specifically engineered to prevent even the briefest experience of genuinely unstructured, unstimulated time. I want to make the case, having spent considerable time examining my own reflexive discomfort with my niece's ordinary boredom, that this infrastructure, whatever genuine benefits it also provides, has quietly deprived us of something considerably more valuable than we typically recognize, precisely because the deprivation itself has become so thoroughly normalized that most of us no longer even notice we're experiencing it. Consider what actually happens, cognitively, during genuine boredom, the specific unstructured mental state that arises when external stimulation has been genuinely removed rather than merely temporarily paused between one source of stimulation and the next. Research on what neuroscientists sometimes call the brain's default mode network suggests that this unstructured state, far from representing merely wasted, unproductive time, actually facilitates a particular kind of cognitive processing that focused, externally directed attention tends to actively suppress. Memory consolidation. Creative recombination of previously unconnected ideas. The kind of loose, associative thinking that often produces genuine insight precisely because it isn't constrained by the narrow, task specific focus that directed attention typically requires. My niece, lying on that living room floor, staring at the ceiling, rejecting every structured activity I had reflexively suggested, was not, I have come to believe, wasting her time in the way my own reflexive discomfort initially assumed. She was likely engaged in exactly the kind of unstructured cognitive processing that her considerably more structured school day, and her considerably more stimulated hours of screen time, rarely allow sufficient room for. I think back, with some genuine fondness, on my own childhood boredom, a considerably more common experience during a childhood that predated smartphones and predated the constant stimulation now so readily available to prevent it. I remember specific afternoons of genuine, unstructured boredom, lying in my own childhood bedroom with genuinely nothing particular to do, and I remember, though I did not properly appreciate it at the time, that these boring afternoons frequently produced some of my most genuinely creative childhood play, elaborate imaginary worlds constructed from nothing but boredom's own particular pressure to eventually generate some form of internal entertainment, since no external entertainment happened to be readily available. This is not, I want to be careful to note, an argument for depriving children, or adults, of all stimulation, or for treating every available form of entertainment as somehow morally suspect. I don't believe boredom is inherently superior to engagement, and I certainly don't believe we should manufacture artificial boredom purely for its own sake. What I am arguing is considerably more modest. I am arguing that our current cultural reflex, treating every moment of boredom as an emergency requiring immediate resolution, likely deprives us of a genuinely valuable cognitive state that previous generations experienced considerably more regularly, simply because the technology to instantly banish it did not yet exist. I have begun, since that afternoon watching my niece reject my well intentioned but perhaps misguided suggestions, deliberately protecting small pockets of my own life from the reflexive stimulation I had previously, unconsciously applied to every available moment. I no longer reach immediately for my phone during the brief wait at a red light, or the few minutes standing in a grocery checkout line, moments that had previously become automatic occasions for a quick scroll through whatever notifications happened to be waiting. I let these small pockets of time remain genuinely unstimulated, genuinely boring, and I have found, somewhat to my own surprise, that they frequently produce exactly the kind of loose, associative thinking that focused, task specific attention rarely manages to generate on its own. Some of my more useful recent ideas, for both personal and professional projects, have arrived during precisely these small, deliberately protected pockets of boredom, arriving with a quality of unexpected, sideways insight that feels considerably different from the more effortful, directed thinking I typically associate with active problem solving. I do not think this is coincidental. I think it reflects exactly the cognitive process the research on default mode network activity would predict, genuine insight arising most readily precisely when directed, externally focused attention has been given sufficient permission to properly rest. I still, admittedly, struggle with my own reflexive discomfort around boredom, decades of accumulated habit not easily undone by a single afternoon's reconsideration. But I have gotten somewhat better, with deliberate practice, at tolerating the initial discomfort long enough to discover what actually rises up to fill the space once genuine boredom is finally permitted to properly develop, rather than being immediately, reflexively banished the moment it first threatens to arise. My niece, for what it's worth, eventually wandered back from her extended period of ceiling staring with an elaborate, entirely self generated plan for building what she described as a secret headquarters out of the living room furniture, a considerably more creative and considerably more engaged activity than any of the structured suggestions I had originally, reflexively offered her. I have come to suspect that her boredom, rather than representing the crisis her initial distress suggested, was actually doing exactly the useful cognitive work boredom has presumably always done for children fortunate enough to be occasionally, genuinely permitted to experience it, undisturbed by some well meaning adult's reflexive rush to resolve it.