WHAT THE ABSENCE OF BOREDOM COSTS US

I’ve got two posts coming on how to work with boredom. This is the first one, and is simply an example of how I’m working with boredom from a phenomenological place — when I experience the phenomena of boredom in my life, what do I do?

The second post is how I’m working with boredom from an ontological place — what is going on for me when I am in the experience of being bored, and what do I do with that?

On the surface, my relationship with boredom is very simple: I don’t like it.

I don’t like it because there’s nothing going on, I experience myself as under-stimulated, and so on.

From this relationship with boredom, I have a well-honed reactive tendency towards it.

When bored starts to strike, I do something to stimulate myself.

Put more succinctly, when I find myself bored, I’m very quick to do something — anything — that alleviates that boredom.

I can spend many hours playing a video game I’ve long ago lost interest in because it means that I don’t sit around feeling bored.

The internal, undistinguished dialog for me would be something along the lines of “Having 10% fun is better than wasting my precious spare time and having no fun at all”.

I can’t sit in boredom long enough to allow whatever’s next to come forward, instead, I end my day off having half-heartedly played a video game, or driving to a coffee shop to work on something I don’t feel inspired by.

Sometimes I’ll intentionally choose to abstain from things like video games, and then I unconsciously create productivity as the new way out. I spent two hours Sunday evening, absent-mindedly trying to move some work forward.

Here’s the first way I’m working with boredom:

This is a sheet I keep in my Zettelkasten that serves as a quick check-in whenever I’m bored.

My first impulse out of boredom is going to be immediately reaching for something stimulating, and so this sheet serves like a fire escape plan. I’m unreliable, to create altitude on my own. I need structure to support the altitude I want.

In the next post, I’ll be shifting the focus away from “Here’s what I’m doing with boredom” to “Here’s my relationship to boredom and what becomes available when I shift that relationship”.

If this stirred anything for you, I’m curious what boredom steers you towards.