Are you ever bored?

One summer day when I was nine, my mother took me along to a neighbor’s house. I was quickly dispatched to the son’s room to play with him, while the mothers started complaining of the summer holidays. I was least interested in playing with him, and my reasons were multifold. One, he was annoying. Two, he was two years younger which meant I found him kiddish and immature in the way nine year olds find seven year olds. Three, he was a boy. I don’t think he was too interested in playing with me either, but he dragged his toy basket, turned it upside down, and disinterestedly went through the motions of setting up Ludo on the mattress too rumply to hold the pawns. As I rolled the dice that kept falling flat, snippets of the mothers’ talk drifted across the hall to me. “He says he is bored!”, his mother exclaimed. “How kids this young can be bored I do not know! The kids of this generation are sure wired different!”, she complained in unfathomable confusion. I remember wondering back then, and I wonder even today - what does age have to do with boredom?

At nine, I would never have imagined that twenty years later, we would be living in a world where boredom was not allowed anymore. Tell me, when was the last time you were bored? How long were you bored for? And what did you do with it? Did you sit with your boredom or did you chase it away? Why did you chase it away, was it not yours?

We are never bored anymore. In queues, in cafés, waiting for a coffee, waiting for an appointment, waiting for an elevator and in the elevator, in trains and in train stations, before bed and after bed, we don’t let boredom linger anymore. We always have a phone, a screen to while away the time, to give our minds something to dunk into. Scroll scroll double tap scroll scroll. We fill the tiniest moments lest there be a moment empty too long.

This is not to say that the gaps in our day are only always filled with doomscrolling. A hustle culture that has been seeping in dictates that if you are not maximizing your time for productivity, you are losing out — that you must be constantly useful, you must build, learn, create. Small voids are filled with podcasts and audio books and bookmarked tweets, not letting a minute go in vain. Incessant hustle unpunctured by an idleness can cause a sharp burnout. On the other hand, endless boredom with a dearth of passion can make the world feel all grey.

Boredom must come with freedom. It is a state of mind that should ebb and flow. You drift into a still, calm space, and you ebb out rejuvenated. A state of prolonged boredom without a spark you eventually want to chase can be detrimental, dragging. It can pull you down, instead of letting you fly loose. In Rands in Repose, Michael Lopp brings this into the context of engineering teams, and notes that bored people quit workplaces. And the only way to “retain” the bored people and keep them “motivated”, is to give them the space to experiment.

Let them experiment. Let them obsess. Let them scratch that itch. If there is no project on their plate that you know is engaging them, create time for them to explore whatever they want to obsess about. I absolutely guarantee there is an investigation somehow related to their work that they are dying to tinker with. The business justification for this wild-ass effort is likely not obvious, so I’ll define it: the act of exploration is as valuable as the act of building. Exploration is hard to justify because it’s hard to measure. When exploration is complete, you often have nothing to hold up to your project manager to explain or justify the expenditure of time. Here’s what you tell them, “My job isn’t just building product; I also build people.”

The ideal state of boredom comes with no expectations, no structure, only a fluidity that makes no demands — a languid fluidity that lets you linger, float and drift where the mind wanders.

While we note this urge to itch boredom, to fill it up to the brim, we must not assume that this inability to sit with boredom is an ailment only of the modern century. Were our ancestors not bored? Or were they constantly bored? While the urge to brush away our boredom is immensely pronounced in today’s era, humans have had mechanisms and systems to deal with boredom for a long time now. Religion. Could it be that several religious motions exist simply to deny humans the lull of boredom? Or perhaps, to save them from the spell of boredom, to leave no space for anxiety, self doubt or existential curiosities. Perhaps even to shield them from wandering thoughts that might question the presence of an invisible divine. In Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood articulates this beautifully:

I wonder again if they think boredom is a sin. Do all religions include some form of this repetitive movement? It feels ancient, superstitious. Walking in circles, bowing and prostrating, kneeling and standing. What is its purpose? Eradication of the ego, in some way? Denying the human craving for newness, or escape, or surprise? Returning and returning and returning, a prescribed revisiting.

We forget, or perhaps have never acknowledged that boredom could be important. Why not let your mind do nothing? Why not let your mind wander and ponder over thoughts that you didn’t know could sneak in? Why not just sit with it? If you don’t leave a gaping void, could new musings ever rush in? People have great (or silly, who cares?) shower thoughts perhaps because it is the only time we are truly screen free. What does that tell you?

A mind that is free to wander is a mind that notices. Tiny wrens fluttering in the bushes. A small nest perched precariously up on a twig. Chirps and birdsong. Sunrises, sunset. The moon, in a round glory, in a cradling crescent. The baby in the elevator smiling at you, the man with a beard like a bee-hive, the old, hunched man with such soft wrinkles. A mind that notices is a mind that sees, a mind soaked in a grounded calmness. A mind free to explore, empathize, create art and live. Boredom really is a luxury. The ability to do nothing, to have mindspace the size of the universe. You could do anything! Or nothing.