Fighting boredom and gloom

The title might be misleading. Should we fight, accept, or embrace boredom? Can we support a high quality of life while being bored? How? More reading here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Lost age of boredom

We seek entertainment, enjoy the interesting engagement and love to play. This is great, but we evolved in a relatively boring environment. Walking a couple of days through the jungle and then seating several more days in ambush is not exactly entertaining. Then life got even more boring. In 18th century most people observer the rear side of their horse the majority of their wakefulness.

Even when I was a child, most of my wakeful hours I was bored. Internet and video games existed even then, but they were not so abundant as they are now. At some point in our social and technological development, internet companies convinced us to give up privacy and boredom.

The loss of privacy is a subject for a separate article. Here I want to focus on the boredom.

To be or not to be bored

Formally nobody is forcing us to be entertained, just like nobody forces us to eat sugar. We evolved in the environment where food and information were scarce. Honestly, we do not have mechanisms to regulate our consumption. In some ways, pigs are very similar to humans, and they can eat until they die. Mice can have sex until they die of exhaustion provided new sexual partners are available. We are somewhat superior in terms of frontal lobes and willpower, but this advantage is limited.

Suppose we choose boredom and diet over the culinary and intellectual delights. How exactly are we supposed to ignore the marketing and temptation wherever we look? We can run into the natural wilderness or create a private hermitage for a short period, but then we need to return to our jobs and families. Fasting and meditation is the closest thing to deprivation out of choice we can get.

Meditate and fast

We can realistically afford intermittent fasting and several meditation sessions per week. I personally used to practice both before I became a father. It was not easy, and I am not sure it served the same purposes and being bored.

In meditation, there are many different states of consciousness. Some of them are very intensive with very quick brain rhythms, yet others are similar to the first stage of sleep. At the same time, the body is too busy maintaining the pose or stretching to ask for substance. The more I meditated, the easier it was not to eat, The less I ate, the easier it was to meditate.

At some point, I did not eat for a week. During that week, I was writing on my PhD thesis, which was a boring activity, but I was not bored because I did not have excessive energy. Today something like that would be called dopamine fast.  The feeling is rewarding, as I could shed all of the unnecessary burdens of modern life and focus on my core activities.

During meditation and fasting, the brain waves are different than in regular activities. This was an interesting experiment, but it was very far from normative life.

Normative boredom

Why do we need to be bored? When we are bored, we become more creative. Various ideas in our brains are constantly fighting for attention and drown in noise. When we are bored, they get to shine. This means more creativity both in terms of quantity and quality. All we have to do is basically do nothing.

Theoretically, we can be bored while driving, but there is a huge chance of daydreaming and losing focus. Doctors recommend boring low-intensity physical activities for at least two-three hours per week. Maybe we should not use earbuds or visualize, but instead, allow ourselves to be bored? Our hatred for being bored is so extreme that in some cases, people would rather get ourselves a mild electric shock. Quite possibly people do not exercise more because they do not want to be bored.

Street awareness

We can learn from street photographers how to be more aware of the environment while doing nothing much. Street photographers are bored in a very different way than most of us: they are constantly searching for the right subject and perspective.

The first thing the street photographers try to find is something interesting, something that appears out of context. Then they try to get close from different angles. They do not escape homeless and street performers but seek them. While it is easy to focus on a single subject, that would make a boring photo, so they are aware of the background. Next, they try to get the best composition. They take a couple of images, and walk away. I think street photographers can walk for hours because they are in the search mode.

Without a camera, we can do the same street photography operations, only as a visualization exercise. If something catches our eye we should ask: what are you trying to tell in this image? And maybe something will surface in the brain.

Focus on an object

An alternative procedure we can take from photographers: focus on a single object. This allows us to get comfortably bored in our office during Pomodoro breaks.  Take an object and look at it from various angles. Try to focus on the object disregarding the background. Look for new interesting perspectives. Consider adding another object for a composition. Make it look unusual, by considering its reflections from the screens.

We can also doodle: create an image of an object by almost mindless drawing. Conference rooms are some of the last fortresses of boredom, and we should capitalize on that boredom.

Maintain the focus

One of the reasons boredom is so good: it enables long focus on one subject. Typically we switch subjects every seven seconds or so. Our children have higher intellectual flexibility and multitasking, and they move their focus faster. Great people like Einstein could focus on a single mental experiment for a very long time. Of cause, his office was quite boring.

We can do the task backward. Visualize whatever you want to consider, close your eyes and try to keep the subject in focus as long as you can. If you have enough experience in meditation, you probably understand the role of the pose and breathing in the process. But even if you can be focused for only 7 seconds, make these seconds count.

Then try to focus on nothing in particular, specifically on images that come out spontaneously. Do not simply acknowledge the thoughts, but try to interact with them and investigate them. This is more like lucid dreaming and less like meditation. If we stop interacting with our subject a new subject will appear, and we lose a potentially interesting idea.

The first ideas that surface are usually simple and boring. The better usually ideas surface slowly, and after the simple ideas are exhausted.

Meaningless boredom

I quote:

“Arthur Schopenhauer argued that, if life were intrinsically meaningful or fulfilling, there could be no such thing as boredom. Boredom, then, is evidence of the meaninglessness of life, opening the shutters on some very uncomfortable feelings which we normally block out with a flurry of activity or with the opposite feelings. 

Boredom can be our way of telling ourselves that we are not spending our time as well as we could, that we should be doing something more enjoyable, more useful, or more fulfilling. In that much, boredom is an agent of change and progress, a driver of ambition, shepherding us out into larger, greener pastures.”

OK, so we can get bored even when we do not mean to.  Not because we do not get enough stimuli, but because these stimuli are meaningless for us. Quite often there is an expectation of unmet arousal within. If we visualize simulations of different situations, we can understand what it is.

When I feel bored, and no visualization can make me happy, I understand that the dopamine receptors in my brain are overstimulated. This means I need to rest. The fallacy here is very simple: the harder we try to fight against boredom, the stronger the excitation we need to get interested.

The visualizations we create while bored might be distracting us from deeper realizations, making their surfacing even harder.

A Zen student went to a temple and asked how long it would take him to gain enlightenment if he joined the temple.

“Ten years”, said the Zen master.

“Well, how about if I work really hard and double my effort?

“Twenty years.” 

Bored children

Dealing with our own boredom is bad enough, but bored children can be unbearable. Maybe because they label so many different feelings as boredom. I will suggest a simple protocol here:

• Ask what happened before boredom.  If the child was playing this could be overexcitation. When the boredom is a result of learning this could be misplaced frustration. Pure boredom is the situation when the day goes by and nothing happens.
• Try to accept boredom. Maybe it is OK to be relaxed right now? When I was a child I was very anxious. I could not get into the state of relaxation, and instead I was permanently bored.
• What would make you excited or interested? Consider various projects and activities. Use perspectives and unexpected propositions. Allow the creative juices to flow.
• Play together. Loneliness is very common nowadays, and it is also mislabeled as boredom.
• Deal with criticism. Maybe the boredom is actually avoidance? If there is something meaningful to be done and we try to run away, our brain punishes us with boredom. The most common reasons for avoidance are low confidence and criticism.
• Create a safe place to get bored. If nothing else helps, make sure the bored person does not destroy property or start a fight with other family members. It is OK to be bored from time to time.

Find a new life purpose

If a grown-up is bored for a long time,  and by long I mean months, it can be an existential crisis. In this case, it makes sense to create new projects and maybe find new ways to enjoy life.