The Importance of Boredom

Matilda | Year 12 Student

We live in an age where boredom is becoming extinct. The moment a spare second opens in our day, whether it be the moment we leave school, on the train, or walking around, we instinctively reach for our phones to kill the silence.

Silence is what we fear. Because in these moments, it invites us to sit with the gravity of our thoughts, confront the deep questions that plague our subconscious, and attribute meaning to our lives.

We have been conditioned as a society to view boredom as a waste of time, yet in our rush to eliminate every empty moment, we inadvertently starve ourselves of the very things that make us feel alive and give us meaning.

Before I expand on what I mean, I would like to clarify what I do not mean by boredom. I am not referring to the overused social idea that boredom is a creeping paralysis stopping you from waking up in the morning. Boredom is defined as an emotion characterized by performing a monotonous task caused by a lack of distractions or occupations, which switches our brains into the default mode network.

The default mode network is basically a collection of structures in our brains that switch on when we have nothing to think about. These moments, when our brains are not being stimulated, are when our deepest ‘light bulb’ moments occur and when we start trying to find meaning within our lives.

At Harvard, Dan Gilbert performed an experiment on a group of 15 students by placing them in a room for a period of time and placing a buzzer in front of them. Left alone with their thoughts and no stimulation, students were left with an option. Hit the buzzer or think about nothing. If they hit the buzzer, this delivered an electric shock, yet a large majority of the students would rather hit the buzzer than sit there.

This experiment told us something important. That what we fear most is the unknown. The unknown of sitting there in silence and letting your mind wander. But why is it that boredom scares us so much? Well, we start thinking about the big questions that govern our lives. When we get bored, our brain defaults to uncomfortable questions. What is the meaning to our existence? What is my purpose?

According to Arthur Brooks, an acclaimed Harvard professor, one of the main reasons why anxiety and depression are so clinically high is that people don’t know the meaning of their lives. It sounds counterintuitive, really, given that we attribute meaning to our lives in the everyday actions we take that lead us to a goal. Yet, he states that the higher use of

technology in our generation, as opposed to previous generations, leads to us experiencing hollowness and not having the ability to be bored. There are plenty of diagnosable reasons as to what causes intrinsic anxiety and depression. Chemical imbalances, brain chemistry, and hormonal changes, of course, all contribute to these conditions, yet they continue to plague our generation because we refuse to confront the reality. That boredom is not the superfluous emotion we thought it was.

In our society, we experience this phenomenon called “hustle culture,” the ideology and societal norm that a desirable lifestyle is one of continuous work, long hours, and relentless ambition. This culture fundamentally comes down to the idea that our worth is tied to a constant stream of output. It encourages quantity over quality, pushing your body past the point of its optimal performance and forcing it to pump out work simply to fill a void. To most of us, we only see a binary existing, we are either proud of ourselves when we produce lots of work or disappointed when we don’t. When and why did we stop celebrating the quality of what we do?

As a Year 12 student currently undertaking the VCE, I understand all too well this competing dialogue in my head. One bad grade, and I suddenly feel like the world is ending, but a good score makes me feel worthy again. Amidst the business of my life, I always find myself preoccupied with something, whether it be a meeting, practicing my instrument, exercising, or studying. When I had a break or a quieter day, I always found myself gravitating to filling the empty time by checking my phone. I didn’t give myself time to sit in boredom.

One night before a SAC, I opened YouTube and played a Smiling Minds episode, a mindfulness channel that I had vivid memories of listening to in my younger years of schooling. As the episode commenced, my mind began to wander. What if I blank tomorrow? Had I prepared well enough? Should I have spent today studying for my two SACs next week? And of course, those were all extremely uncomfortable questions. My palms grew clammy, my heart rate increased, and I had an irresistible urge to turn off the video and reach for my phone.

But I resisted. Telling myself that I could not afford to unravel on the night of the SAC, I sat there with my thoughts. In that uncomfortable silence, I came to a realization. The more I chased perfection, filling every spare moment with any task, the more I became consumed with stress and overwhelm. In trying so hard to be productive, I had accidentally done the opposite.

Fundamentally, the paradox of productivity is that in order to be productive, you must first be bored. When you reset your dopamine levels, regulate your brain activity, and take a

break from constantly overstimulating your nervous system, that’s when you begin to see growth. Productivity, then, is not born from perpetual motion but from deliberate stillness.

Boredom, rather than diminishing our experiences, gives meaning to our moments of happiness. Without these periods of monotony, we risk our lives becoming emotionally uniform. At a K-12 school in Washington, D.C., researchers found an overwhelming positive correlation between a student’s happiness, measured through a Cantril Ladder test, and their GPA.

Productivity, happiness, and comfort in our own skin all circle back to a deep sense of meaning in who we are and our purpose.

So, find your purpose by allowing yourself to experience boredom.

We fear boredom because it confronts us with ourselves, yet perhaps that is exactly why it is so necessary.