🍍We are forgetting how to be bored
Wait, isn't it good?
Look, nowadays it’s so easy to be entertained that we’re actually forgetting how to be in a state of a real boredom.
This may sound like a great thing (who the heck wants to be bored?), but it comes with some consequences.
Imo the most powerful of these is that by filling in every minute with some kind of an activity or content, we leave very little room for our subconscious to work and figure things out.
You may well be familiar with coming up with novel ideas in the places and contexts that most people find not so inspiring: while sitting on the toilet, taking a shower, doing the dishes, just waiting for something, and so on.
The problem is that we have less and less of these circumstances – we scroll through the feeds on the toilet, we listen to some podcast while walking or waiting for the bus, etc.
But it seems very important to have these times of boredom. And given today’s reality, the ability to be bored is turning into a skill that should be learned, practiced, and taken care of to maintain.
I can’t tell you how to do it, because I’m also a victim of filling my life to the brim with activities and content (and that’s the main reason I’m writing this). But it seems like the first step is to acknowledge the importance of boredom and start taking at least tiny steps to reclaim it (like not taking the phone to the bathroom).
What do you think?
And here are my older posts that others have enjoyed the most:
Many times the greatest solutions to ongoing problems come to me while doing otherwise unrelated mundane activities.