Being Bored: Why Boredom is Good


Boredom is a motivator. It drives people to think up something new to alleviate the feeling of aimlessness and restlessness that characterizes boredom.

Time vs Biological Cues

Humans today use time to gauge when tasks should be worked on or completed. Time decides where one should switch tasks. Time is standardized, and everyone knows what a minute, second, hour, day is. However, what did people use to govern their lives before the construct of time was invented? I think people used to rely on nature, external and internal cues to decide when to switch tasks; decide when to eat, sleep, spend time with friends and family, or hunt. Hunger decides when an ancient man must eat; tiredness, when he sleeps. Those are some examples of natural internal cues that drive human actions before the concept of time was known.

Time vs Nature

Natural external cues include seasons and weather. The sun decides when one must sleep because humans never evolved night vision. Seasons decide if it’s time to harvest summer fruit like berries or plants. The rain decides when children can play in the sun and when adults can sun-bathe.

What if?

Unlike animals, humans have the ability to think and contemplate. While an animal might be satisfied with survival and the oportunity to multiply, humans have the capacity to think: “What if?” Humans can envision “what if things were different?”, “what if I tried hunting using another technique that no one else uses?”. Dreaming of a future different from the present gives rise to boredom. Imagine, if one didn’t have the capacity to reflect on past actions and awareness of different possible consequences of different courses of action, one couldn’t experience boredom: one would wake up each morning and the act of brushing one’s teeth would be so novel that it would be the highlight of the day everyday. Boredom is the state of exhaustion from the repetition of the same task (or no task at all), leading to a hunger for any novelty.

Future vs Present

Boredom stems from awareness of the future which requires experiencing time linearly. One that is timeless (or experiences the past, present, future all at the same time) can only experience the present. Only the present will exist to him. Similar to how a body of water exists at one end of a river to another and oceans span from coast to coast [1], a being that is only aware of the present fills its consciousness with only sensations that belong to the present: namely, input from the five basic senses, pain, and pleasure. Boredom is an emotion that belongs to the future because one that is inflicted with boredom is internally conscious that he could be doing something else more stimulating.

Schedules are Boring

Boredom isn’t a bad emotion; it serves as a signal to change gears and try something else before continuing on the task on hand with the same approach. If one ignores his feelings of boredom, he will become tired and burnt out. I think that’s what letting time and strict schedules has led us to experience. We are prohibited from listening to internal cues that indicate tiredness and the desire of novelty in favor of regimented schedules that are designed to make people more machine-like and less human. Using boredom as a cue for task switching rather than setting a time for each activity is much more satisfying. One can explore many interest or stick with a captivating project that one is enthusiastic about.

Footnotes:

[1] Idea is from Herman Hesse’s Siddartha

Byung-Chul Han, Burnout Society


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