An Ode to Boredom

Stillness as a Luxury Good

There was a point in my adolescence when I genuinely could not imagine how people had survived before smartphones.

This probably sounds absurd to anyone older than thirty-five, but I mean it sincerely. I remember lying awake at sixteen, illuminated by the pale blue light of my iPhone screen, wondering what on earth teenagers had done with themselves before they could carry the entirety of human knowledge—and, more importantly, the entirety of their social lives—in their pockets.

In fairness to my teenage self, my circumstances were somewhat unusual.

I was an only child. My parents were extraordinarily strict. School constituted the vast majority of my social life. I was, by most measures, a strange child: intensely enthusiastic about my interests, somewhat immature for my age, and entirely too eager to discuss whichever book, historical period, or niche fascination currently possessed me.

Outside of school, opportunities for socialization were limited.

I had, for a brief and unauthorized period, a MySpace profile. When my parents discovered it, I was punished rather severely, which only further reduced the amount of time I spent with peers outside of school. By the time Facebook became popular, my mother had her own account and could monitor my activities with relative ease. The internet was permitted, but never entirely private.

We had one family computer—a MacBook that lived in my bedroom because that was where the phone jack happened to be. Ours was not a particularly technologically inclined household. We had only recently graduated from dial-up to Wi-Fi. Yet that small technological advancement changed my life.

During summer breaks, spring breaks, and long winter holidays, I spent much of the day home alone. Occasionally I would dutifully work through my assigned summer reading, but inevitably I found myself back online. Social media allowed me to participate, however distantly, in the social world I often felt excluded from. It gave me the comforting illusion that I was keeping pace with my peers.

Whether it made me happier is another question entirely.

By junior year, I had acquired an iPhone and with it the ability to remain connected at all hours. I took full advantage. Looking back at photographs from that period, I am struck by how profoundly sleep-deprived I appear. I was routinely surviving on three or four hours of sleep a night.

When the rest of the house had gone quiet, when everyone else had gone to bed, I would retreat into my phone. In those hours, I felt as though I was somehow figuring out who I was. The risk of being caught awake was worth it.

And yet, as an adult, I find myself increasingly suspicious of my younger conviction that constant stimulation is inherently preferable to boredom.

Early hominids likely never were able to conceptualize boredom. Their lives, short as they were, were spent walking constantly, foraging, hunting, and sleeping with somebody keeping watch through the night.

And yet, as our brains developed further and further, oral storytelling traditions began. So, too, did art and pottery.

Pottery is one that interests me infinitely, because pottery is a tool. It is, at its core, a practical object. And yet, those early humans decided to make something beautiful out of it.

I cannot help but question if, in these moments when stories, cave paintings, and elaborate vases came to be, our ancestors were experiencing something akin to boredom. Perhaps, with improved tools and rudimentary agriculture, life had gotten just a bit easier. Perhaps there was suddenly more time to dedicate to endeavors beyond simply surviving.

With the advent of agriculture, people still had to work, of course, but we were no longer in constant motion in search of food. We could settle down. We could create villages and towns. We could, perhaps for the first time in our history, have moments of stillness.

And in this stillness, further human creativity developed. Cultures began to form. Music, dance, costuming, ritual—all of it sprang to life because we now had the time to do it.

All around the globe, folklore formed, and folklore was a critical part of human development. Greek and Roman mythology, after all, are folklore. And from Greek classical thought came much of the political philosophy that would later influence the Enlightenment.

That, too, could not have been possible without the resurgence of art and literature during the Renaissance. Humanity now had time to think, and it was going to use that time well.

Nor was Europe alone in experiencing this expansion of humanity. If we look at the marvels of mathematics and astronomy in pre-Columbian South America, all of that came because humans had developed systems that made labor more efficient. They had time to sit, wonder, and observe.

The nineteenth century, too, saw a boom in what we might call the naturalist movement. People dedicated copious amounts of time to sitting and observing. It was not unusual to have a conservatory in one’s home where one could sit among plants, looking at them intimately and perhaps understanding them a little better. Ornithology gained popularity, and in watching birds, we came to understand a great deal more about the world at large.

Arguably, literature became more expansive during this period as well. Here in the United States, we finally began to find our literary voice as a nation. Literature became a tool through which we asked ourselves difficult questions. Who were we as a people? Were we truly upholding the values we claimed to hold? There was much to satirize in our young nation, as there always will be, and we poured that satire into literature. We can thank Samuel Clemens for much of that tradition.

People in the nineteenth century were also profoundly concerned with the fragility of life. The memento mori was a critical part of human existence: the knowledge that none of this was forever and that it was therefore important to hold the people and things we loved close to the heart. It was not strange to pour one’s heart into a letter because time was limited, and if you were not going to say what needed saying now, then when would you?

Then came the Gilded Age. While the wealth disparities of that era were egregious, I remain fascinated by how many people of that time moved humanity forward simply through their dedication to thought. Aviation was born. Maritime exploration became a global phenomenon. And while industrialization churned away in the background, domestic design increasingly dedicated itself to incorporating flourishes from nature. We might think of Tiffany lamps or the floral motifs so common in the Art Nouveau style.

This appreciation for the natural world, along with the willingness to pursue seemingly ludicrous ideas—such as whether humans might someday fly—was possible because people had the time to follow thoughts through to their conclusions.

And now here you and I sit, a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century. You and I are connecting right now, most likely through those tiny computers we carry around in our pockets.

And it is not all bad.

I am grateful that I have the opportunity to share these thoughts that have been rattling around in my head with you through this medium. However, I could only arrive at these musings because I allowed myself time to be bored. And in that boredom, I found something to do. I sat with my thoughts. I mapped them out. I churned out something that is, hopefully, somewhat engaging.

Agriculture, I am told, simplified the life of the hunter-gatherer and gave him time to sit with his thoughts. Industrialization took that a step further, mechanizing much of daily life. Technology has advanced to the point that many of us are now connected constantly.

Many people do not feel that they have the ability to opt out of this constant connectedness, but I believe we do. We can dedicate certain times of the day to technology and to being connected to one another. At other times, we are allowed to make quiet. We are allowed to sit in the luxury of boredom.

Because ultimately, these little tools that we carry around in our bags and pockets have streamlined our lives in countless ways. But our lives do not need to be optimized every second of every day.

Your hobbies need not be commodified. You need not concern yourself with whatever product people online are currently insisting is the only thing you will ever need—particularly when, in three months’ time, they will almost certainly be recommending something else.

In a period of human history in which so much is devoted to optimization, consumption, and productivity, perhaps we would all benefit from considering boredom and thought to be luxury goods.

Invest in them, and you may be surprised by how that investment grows.

If I could offer one small piece of advice, it would be this: dedicate thirty minutes to an hour each day for the next month to something that requires stillness.

Pick up a book. Pick up yarn work. Pick up carpentry. Pick up cooking. Pick up mixology. Pick up writing.

Pick up anything your heart desires, so long as your hands are free of a phone.