We never said it. We knew better.
When the day got slow and you wanted nothing more than to be entertained, it just wasn’t happening.
“If you’re bored, you’re boring.”
My mom would lay those words down thick, and they would sting. They still do. It was playful, sure, but cutting.
And it worked. We never came calling with I’m bored because that would play right into her trap. I wasn’t boring, was I?
Even if I was, I’d never admit it to her.
You come up with things to do. Not boring things. Things to keep busy. Busy isn’t boring, busy makes the day go. And off you went, no particular direction, but you were going to fill that day and fill it good.
I’ll show her who’s not boring!
But it turns out that busy can be boring too.
Just ask the milkman.
Tell your buddy, the former sommelier turned skydive instructor who does part-time heliskiing, that you were super busy with your emails or your PowerPoint. Then you made mac & cheese for the kids. See how not boring that busy day sounds to him.
So, if busy isn’t solving boring. What is?
Meaning, satisfaction, creativity, those are a start. Boring is profoundly personal. Two people doing the same thing, reading, gardening, running, or just sitting. One is bored to tears and the other is blissful as a bluebird. Why? How? Because boredom is what we call a personal problem. It’s between your ear holes. It’s all you.
You might even be inclined to point fingers. The neighbor who enjoys gardening? You’ll say he is boring. But he is not bored at all, you are.
Jerry Colonna discusses hot and cold boredom.
Hot boredom is the pain you feel as a kid when your mom takes you to JCPenney to find a new sweater. You’d rather sprawl out on the dirty linoleum floor and cry yourself to sleep. It feels like a slow death.
Cold boredom is what we are after, it feels different. Cold boredom is the calm of meditation or a walk in the woods. The glazed-over mind, wandering through psychedelic daydreams that allow you to come up with and connect ideas.
We need cold boredom. We need to cultivate it. It’s the clarity of thought you get when showering or chopping veggies. When your subconscious gets a moment to make itself heard.
But only if you let it.
“To see through the water, eliminate the ripples.”
Paul Graham
Boredom can be uncomfortable, so we run from it. We run to social media, to a book, to music, and to games. When the boredom is hot, we run towards distraction.
We run towards work, exercise, and self-improvement.
Boredom is an inflection point, a fork in the road. You can choose to sink in or run away in search of relief.
Some think it’s the lack of excitement or something to work towards. Sam Harris says that “boredom is simply a failure to pay attention.”
I think it’s the inability to be with yourself, even for a moment.
When do we learn this? A baby has no problem being with themselves, they wake up in the morning cooing, exploring their surroundings.
As we get older, we seek out distractions. Something has got to be better than this feeling I have, this feeling of… ME.
Food, YouTube, acting out, anything but ME!
And the more you distract yourself from yourself, the more difficult being with yourself will be. You’ll wake up in the morning and start looking at stocks, and email, then reach for the earphones, a podcast has got to be better than being with ME! Then it’s off to make breakfast and wake the kids, and on and on you go throughout the day never having been with yourself alone for even one second.
Because that would be boring, that would be uncomfortable.
Constant movement through time and space from one thing to the next. A life of entertainment, busyness, and distraction. Wind it down with the family dinner, a cocktail, some Ozark, check the Twitter feed, the scores…M’s won, a bit of reading, and bed.
How was the day? Well, it certainly wasn’t boring. Or was it? Your friend, the sommelier, might disagree.
No time to be alone, to think, to write, to be. To stare at the clouds and the trees. Those things would be boring.
In a way, if you are bored you ARE boring. Mom was right. But the key is to be just that, to embrace that, and to feel that, rather than keeping busy with distractions.
If regret is displeasure with the past, and anxiety is displeasure with the future, is boredom displeasure with the current?
The ability to be bored is essential to a remarkable life. With boredom comes new ideas, when you give yourself the space you find your genius. You move away from the consumer lifestyle, the TV, the books, the thrills, and into the creator mode. You become a doer.
Monotony, boredom, an absolute lack of inputs, and you’ll create, excel, and master your craft.
Tiger Woods practices thousands of 5-foot putts. Boring!
Tony Hawk does the same trick thousands of times until he has it right. Snooze fest!
Naval Ravikant just sits for an hour. An hour! And recommends at least 60 days straight as a starting point. He calls it “the art of doing nothing.”
What could be simpler?
Let your thoughts render down like a pig over hot coals, melting off the layers of fat until all that is left are the tasty morsels of truth. To call it thinking is close, but it’s more than that. Meditation is not just following your breath or repeating a mantra, after all, those can be distractions as well. It’s also the practice of thinking about something, noodling on it, wandering off and thinking on it some more, and eventually arriving at peace. A quiet mind.
Some might call that boredom. The secret is that being bored is a good thing. A beautiful thing.
“A certain power of enduring boredom is therefore essential to a happy life, and is one of the things that ought to be taught to the young.”
Bertrand Russell
Boredom is a state you’ll pass through quickly once you get the hang of it. Either actively solving for it with busy hands, or passively embracing it by turning clouds into dragons, but it will pass. If endured, boredom can be just as beneficial as pushing those burning legs before you catch your second wind. On the other side of boredom is change. Either someone is changing you or you are changing the world.
It’s not just whistling while you work, that’s fine too but it’s distracting.
A creator, a person who leans back into boredom like a trust fall, knowing what good will come, can walk into any building, and brighten the room.
The life of a comic, a writer, someone who forced themselves into the agony of boredom to see just what absurdities their mind can drum up.
Jerry Seinfeld, sitting at the table, coffee, pad, and pen, until something comes out. No busyness in sight. He gets bored so that others can live through his thoughts and ideas. They laugh, look at their wife, and say, “So true! Why didn’t I think of that?” I’ll tell you why. They are unwilling to endure that painful moment when you stop moving long enough to think and feel and reach for something that has not already been said.
Neil Gaiman just sits there too. He sits and doesn’t allow himself to do any activities, except to write.
“I would go down to my lovely little gazebo at the bottom of the garden, sit down, and I’m absolutely allowed not to do anything. I’m allowed to sit at my desk, I’m allowed to stare out at the world, I’m allowed to do anything I like, as long as it isn’t anything. Not allowed to do a crossword, not allowed to read a book, not allowed to phone a friend, not allowed to make a clay model of something. All I’m allowed to do is absolutely nothing, or write.”
Neil Gaiman via Tim Ferris Show
Most people will attempt to solve boredom through novelty. Refresh the feed.
It’s unsustainable.
Tommy Boy was my favorite movie until it wasn’t. I knew the punch lines, and it was no longer pushing any boundaries or catching me by surprise. I got bored. I’m not alone and because of this, we see the continuous ratcheting up of the entertainment industry. The constant attempt to turn it up to eleven.
The wall of sound, the lights, the drugs, all so we can enjoy the music that needed only a radio a few years before.
New music, new books, new restaurants. Novelty. They will become boring too. When you move from one thing to the next as a consumer, you are bringing yourself with you. The search for change, the search for new, is unending.
Boredom is a state we fall into when things are stagnant, and we can use that feeling, hold it, and try to understand it. Or we can get drunk, watch a show, and rely on others to liven the place up a bit.
We have so many distractions these days you may never get bored, but most will reach it eventually, the end of the internet when the doom scrolling just doesn’t pack the punch it once did.
“If you’re bored, you’re boring” is close, but it misses the point. Busy people are boring, boring people are anything but, they are the builders and creators.
Jocko Willink says his life is boring. “I work out, read, surf, play guitar. Or work out, read, surf, and prepare for the podcast. It’s boring. I’m a pretty boring guy.”
People are captivated by him.
Alex Honnold spends a good chunk of his life living in a van, hiking, and climbing. That’s it. He says his “creative processing comes on rest days when I’m lying around… just thinking about climbing.”
Boring, but so different than our lives, we can’t get enough.
Ryan Holiday pumps out a book every 12 months and would urge you to live an interesting life, he’d also tell you Stillness Is the Key.
Chop wood, carry water.
The people and lifestyles we admire most would get a resounding booorrring if discussed on the family road trip. I should know, I get it all the time.
So maybe we are looking at this all wrong.
Maybe boredom is misunderstood.
It’s a tag that people put on their idle time when they feel discomfort. It’s the in-between. It’s when you could do something extraordinary, or just take a nap.
We would never admit it to Mom, but we’d still feel it. That fall on the ground, kicking and moaning, get me the hell out of this JCPenney before I tear the whole place down on top of myself pain of boredom.
No doubt that it’s real.
Boredom is misunderstood though, it’s perceived as a negative. Really, it’s a signal that you are headed the right way, if you push through, something profound can happen.
If you’re bored, you’re boring.
What that saying misses is how necessary boredom is to a good life, a productive life. A life with less distraction and more meaning.
