Confessing to boredom is confessing to a character-flaw.
Popular culture is littered with advice on how to shake it off: find
like-minded people, take up a hobby, find a cause and work for it, take up an
instrument, read a book, clean your house And certainly don’t let your kids be
bored: enroll them in swimming, soccer, dance, church groups – anything to keep
them from assuaging their boredom by gravitating toward sex and drugs. To do
otherwise is to admit that we’re not engaging with the world around us. Or that
your cellphone has died.
But boredom is not tragic. Properly understood, boredom
helps us understand time, and ourselves. Unlike fun or work, boredom is not
about anything; it is our encounter with pure time as form and content. With
ads and screens and handheld devices ubiquitous, we don’t get to have that
experience that much anymore. We should teach the young people to feel
comfortable with time.
I live and teach in small-town Pennsylvania, and some of my
students from bigger cities tell me that they always go home on Fridays because
they are bored here.
You know the best antidote to boredom, I asked them? They
looked at me expectantly, smartphones dangling from their hands. Think, I told
them. Thinking is the best antidote to boredom. I am not kidding, kids.
Thinking is the best antidote to boredom. Tell yourself, I am bored. Think
about that. Isn’t that interesting? They looked at me incredulously. Thinking
is not how they were brought up to handle boredom.
When you’re bored, time moves slowly. The German word for
“boredom” expresses this: langeweile, a compound made of “lange,” which means
“long,” and “weile” meaning “a while”. And slow-moving time can feel torturous
for people who can’t feel peaceful alone with their minds. Learning to do so is
why learning to be bored is so crucial. It is a great privilege if you can do
this without going to the psychiatrist.
So lean in to boredom, into that intense experience of time
untouched by beauty, pleasure, comfort and all other temporal salubrious
sensations. Observe it, how your mind responds to boredom, what you feel and
think when you get bored. This form of metathinking can help you overcome your
boredom, and learn about yourself and the world in the process. If meditating
on nothing is too hard at the outset, at the very least you can imitate William
Wordsworth and let that host of golden daffodils flash upon your inward eye:
emotions recollected in tranquility – that is, reflection – can fill empty
hours while teaching you, slowly, how to sit and just be in the present.
Don’t replace boredom with work or fun or habits. Don’t pull
out a screen at every idle moment. Boredom is the last privilege of a free
mind. The currency with which you barter with folks who will sell you their
“habit,” “fun” or “work” is your clear right to practice judgment, discernment
and taste. In other words, always trust when boredom speaks to you. Instead of
avoiding it, heed its messages, because they’ll keep you true to yourself.
It might be beneficial to think through why something bores
you. You will get a whole new angle on things. Hold on to your boredom; you
won’t notice how quickly time goes by once you start thinking about the things
that bore you
