Why having nothing to do might have been surprisingly good for us and why there are benefits of boredom.
I Used to Be Bored
I remember being bored. Properly bored. Not “there’s nothing interesting on Netflix” bored, while holding a device containing almost the entirety of human knowledge, entertainment, and argument in one hand. I mean nothing to do bored.
Waiting for a bus. Sitting in the back of a car on a long journey. Standing in a queue. Waiting for someone who was late. Sitting in a doctor’s waiting room with a three-year-old copy of Country Life. Being on the toilet and discovering there was nothing within reach to read except the back of a shampoo bottle. There were these little gaps in the day when nothing happened and, because nothing happened, you had to find something to do with your own brain.
I’m beginning to wonder whether we accidentally got rid of something useful.
We Fixed Boredom
We have become extraordinarily good at eliminating those gaps. There is almost no situation now in which I need to be alone with my thoughts. Bus late? Phone. Queue? Phone. Someone goes to the toilet in the pub? Phone. Lift taking eleven seconds to arrive? Apparently eleven seconds is now an intolerable amount of time to spend simply existing, so: phone.
And I don’t say this from a position of superiority. I do it too. My phone is a remarkably effective anti-boredom machine and, as I’ve written before, the internet itself has become remarkably good at deciding what I should look at next. It contains books, music, podcasts, games, messages, photographs, news, and an effectively infinite quantity of people being wrong about things. The slightest hint of an unoccupied moment appears and I can kill it instantly.
Which sounds like progress. Except I’m increasingly suspicious of what else we’re killing.
The Strange Things Boredom Made Us Do
Boredom used to make me do things, although not necessarily useful things. I would take things apart, read things I wouldn’t otherwise have read, stare at maps, look through cupboards, pick up books because they happened to be there, notice odd details about places, and follow trains of thought that didn’t have any obvious destination.
I even remember being so bored once that I started reading the dictionary. Not looking something up, actually reading it. Probably explains my love of words!
I’ve already established that I have something of a weakness for learning things I’ll probably never need, although apparently this started earlier than I realised.
I personally remember a time when, as a bored 12-year-old, I decided to take apart some of my electrical and electronic devices to “see how they worked”. Erm, yeah. Very soon afterwards, “see how they worked” became “see why they no longer work!”
And I’m not just talking about small things. I’m talking about taking apart an old and dilapidated CRT television. I mean, these things were dangerous, and I really didn’t know enough about electronics to know any better. But I did it anyway.
My parents were furious, naturally, but afterwards I was enrolled in the school electronics club. At least now I could take things apart AND put them back together again afterwards.
Would I have developed my interest in electronics if I hadn’t been bored that day? Quite possibly. But the boredom certainly accelerated things.
Some of those things went nowhere. But some of my longest-running interests probably began precisely because nobody had yet invented an algorithm capable of noticing I was bored and immediately showing me a thirty-second video. Boredom wasn’t necessarily an absence of stimulation. Sometimes it was the point at which I had to start generating my own.
The Asimov Story I Keep Thinking About
There is an Isaac Asimov short story called Writing Time, part of his Azazel stories. Azazel is a tiny demon, about two centimetres tall, whom a character called George can summon and persuade to grant favours to people. Like most stories involving wishes, the favour tends to work perfectly while producing a result the recipient hadn’t quite anticipated.
In Writing Time, the recipient is a writer called Mordecai Sims. Sims is infuriated by how much of his life he wastes waiting. Waiting for buses, waiting for taxis, waiting to be served, waiting for people. All that wasted time when he could be writing. So Azazel fixes it. Sims no longer has to wait. The bus arrives when he does, taxis appear, service is immediate, and all those annoying little delays disappear. He gets exactly what he wanted: more time to write.
And then he can’t write.
It turns out that all those periods when Sims thought he was wasting time weren’t really wasted at all. That was his writing time. Not the time when his fingers were putting words onto paper, but the time when his brain was quietly assembling the things that would eventually become words.
I read that story years ago, and it has stuck with me. Asimov wrote it long before we started carrying devices specifically designed to fill every spare moment, but I can’t help thinking about it now.
We’ve all summoned Azazel, but now he’s in the disguise of a smartphone.
When I’m Doing Nothing, My Brain Isn’t
I’ve noticed this with my own ideas. Ideas don’t generally arrive when I sit down and command myself to have one. Right. It is 10:00. I have allocated the next 45 minutes to creative thought. Begin.
Nothing.
The useful thought arrives in the shower, or while I’m walking somewhere, driving, lying in bed, or staring out of a train window. The common factor seems to be that I’m doing something which occupies just enough of my brain to stop me consciously trying to think, while leaving enough of it unoccupied to wander around unsupervised.
This very article was, in fact, inspired by a recent period of boredom. I awoke at silly o’clock, ridiculously early, and my wife was still asleep. So I got up, went downstairs, and had to occupy myself until I was tired enough to return to bed, but also without disturbing her slumber.
I picked up my phone, put it down, picked up my Kindle, put it down, perused the contents of the fridge, sat down, picked up my phone again, returned to the fridge, decided I still wasn’t hungry, and put my phone away again. I remember thinking, “God, I’m bored and I’ve nothing to do!”
Which, in turn, reminded me of the times when I was bored and FOUND things to do.
The seed of this essay took root that morning.
That wandering is where quite a lot seems to happen. One thought bumps into another. Something I read three weeks ago collides with something somebody said yesterday. An old memory wanders past. Two completely unrelated ideas turn out to have something in common, or at least enough in common for me to spend the next twenty minutes wondering whether they do.
Somewhere in that mess, occasionally, there’s an idea.
The problem is that I’ve become very good at preventing this state from occurring. If there is a spare minute, I fill it. If I’m walking, I can listen to a podcast. If I’m on a train, I can read the news. If I’m waiting for someone, there will be something on my phone demanding attention. None of this feels particularly significant while I’m doing it. I’m just filling time.
But that was Sims’s mistake too. He thought he was just filling time.
Consuming Instead of Generating
If I take my phone out while waiting for a bus, my brain doesn’t have to produce anything because something else immediately supplies the thoughts. A news story, a message, a video, someone’s opinion, someone else’s response to someone’s opinion, another video, another message. There is always something available and, increasingly, something specifically selected because a machine has calculated that I am quite likely to look at it.
None of these things is inherently bad. I like reading things. I like hearing what other people think. I have spent an unreasonable amount of my life actively seeking out information and have no intention of stopping now. The problem is simply that there is never a gap.
There is a difference between having nothing to think about and having nothing given to you to think about. I’m not sure we make that distinction often enough.
Boredom Wasn’t Always Good
I don’t want to get too nostalgic about this because boredom was, by definition, boring. Long car journeys were tedious. Waiting forty minutes for a bus in the rain wasn’t secretly a mindfulness retreat. Sitting in a waiting room didn’t automatically turn you into Isaac Newton.
Smartphones have made those moments immeasurably better in lots of ways. I can read a book, learn something, talk to somebody on the other side of the world, listen to music, or find out where the bloody bus actually is. I’m not suggesting we throw our phones into the sea and return to an idyllic age of staring at wallpaper.
I just wonder whether eliminating every moment of boredom was an accidental overcorrection.
I Might Need to Be More Bored
I’m not planning a digital detox. I know myself well enough to suspect that any grand declaration about dramatically changing my relationship with technology would last until roughly lunchtime.
I could leave the phone in my pocket occasionally, though. Walk somewhere without listening to anything. Wait for the kettle without checking something. Sit on a train and look out of the window. Allow a queue simply to be a queue. Give my brain a few minutes in which nobody else gets to decide what enters it.
I suspect I’ll find this surprisingly difficult, because boredom now feels uncomfortable remarkably quickly. There is an almost automatic movement towards the pocket as soon as nothing is happening. I don’t even consciously decide I’m bored. My hand apparently notices before I do.
It might be interesting to resist it occasionally, if only to find out what my brain does when I stop giving it things to do.
Nothing Happened
There used to be parts of the day when nothing happened. At the time, I thought those moments were empty. Looking back, I’m not so sure they were. They were when things I’d read resurfaced, when ridiculous questions occurred to me, when I’d notice something outside the window, or when one idea had enough time to bump accidentally into another one.
Mordecai Sims thought waiting was stealing time from his writing, then discovered it was part of the writing. I think that’s why the story has stayed with me for so long. I recognised the irritation with waiting when I first read it. These days, I recognise Sims’s mistake as well.
I wonder how much time I’ve managed to save myself in the last fifteen or so smartphone enabled years.
And what I used to do with it.