We should be bored

Our phones, and the Internet we access through them¹, are incredibly entertaining and stimulating, in no small part by design. Social media, short-form videos, mobiles games, and even things as seemingly innocuous as reading the news are insanely stimulating, and are very good at pulling us in and not letting us go.

We carry out phones with us almost everywhere we go. I, and surely many others, have developed the habit of taking out our phones and opening something, anything, on them, whenever we have as little as a few seconds to kill. Technology is so effective at killing boredom—due to how very stimulating it is—that I now find myself using it to do so to such a high extent that I am almost never bored. Now, this might seem good on the surface, great, even—why wouldn’t you want to not be bored? However, I’ve come to believe that it’s actually awful, and am now considering what could be done to fix this.

I’ve said it a few times before, but I’ll say it again—technology is very stimulating. It is not difficult for us to get used to the level of quick gratification and entertainment, which could easily lead to us not being to stand anything less. This can make it extremely hard to find the motivation to do things that we know will bring us more long-term fulfilment and gratification, but that are much less stimulating in the moment. When one is to choose between working on developing their passions or scrolling on their phone, the choice seems obvious; and yet some of us, myself included, still end up on our phones.

Growing accustomed to near-constant stimulation to the point where we’re no longer able to handle even the briefest moment of boredom can greatly hinder our ability to focus for prolonged periods of time. There is this idea, one I know much too little about, of flow, where one is deeply immersed in and focused on some activity, an activity which is for them difficult, but plausibly doable. Entering this state, which is very rewarding and enjoyable—both in the moment and in retrospect—requires one to be able to focus intensely, for an uninterrupted length of time. This becomes extremely difficult when we are virtually allergic to boredom; there will inevitably be moments in any activity when you find yourself slightly bored—perhaps because that particular part of what you are doing is not as interesting to you as the rest—but reaching for a quick and easy boredom-killer in that case would be destructive to the state of flow you might have had achieved.

Apart from all the negative impacts that constantly avoiding boredom has on our lives, boredom itself also has some positive effects, which we would be depriving ourselves of by preventing boredom obsessively. We, and our brain, can use the space that periods of boredom provide to healthily process out emotions (instead of repressing them), consider our plans, our sense of self, our aspirations, and, in general, center and realign ourselves. I think these moments where we can be alone with our thoughts are highly valuable and necessary, and getting rid of them by picking up a phone whenever we are slightly bored would be very unwise.

I do think that this issue could easily be solved by training ourselves to be okay with boredom. If we force ourselves to be bored a few times, I believe that, in time, boredom will start coming more naturally, and that we will no longer feel the strong compulsion to kill it immediately. Lately, I’ve been trying to do that by noticing whenever I have an impulse to kill boredom by using my phone (or something similar) and actively denying that impulse, opting to instead sit and do nothing. It is also possible to change our environment such that distracting ourselves in unhealthily ways, such as with a phone, is simply not possibly, or at least very difficult. One simple way to do this is to just put your phone in another room while you’re working.

On that note, I’ve been wondering to what extent it is acceptable to prevent boredom. For example, if you’re on a bus, it is okay to read an article on your phone? I’m not sure what the answer to that, and similar questions is; I believe it is something I’ll have to figure out over time. I do think that boredom can be a virtue in and of itself, and that being okay with boredom can be highly beneficial to our lives, so I think we should definitely be bored from time to time. However, I wouldn’t take things as far as to deny yourself a way to spend your time when the situation calls for it. That being said, I also think that ways of killing boredom which are fully wastes of time (in my opinion), like being on social media or playing mobile games, should be eliminated entirely (as hard as that is).

If you have any thoughts or comments please feel free to contact me.