Bored to Tears

Against the backdrop of the cafe’s low intensity weekday bustle, I had one of those wonderful, soul affirming catch ups with an old and dear friend. She’s a teacher, and we talked about how technology is changing so many things for students (and therefore teachers) these days. One of the surprising things we discussed was the importance of boredom. In particular, the necessity of boredom for creativity, and also for social as well as cognitive development. 

Now that I’ve used a few big words in a row, I’ll try and explain what I mean like a normal person. Creativity only comes when we are backed into a corner and have nothing else to do except try to entertain ourselves. If you have a smart phone handy then you can easily use that to alleviate your boredom, but that means you don’t learn the skills to entertain yourself in any other way. You don’t invent games, ideas or coping mechanisms. The extension of this is that learning how to cope with boredom is great practise for higher stakes negative experiences, like anger or sadness. If you can cope with boredom then it will help you to cope with more negative emotions. And if you can't do that then you’re going o seriously struggle with life.

So if the answer is so simple, why do we find it so hard to act upon? It pains me a little to admit it, but I find it hard at times to ignore the siren song of my smart phone. Even though I know that when I do, I feel better about myself, enjoy my day more, and get way more done. The problem is that it’s so seductive, and ultimately so empty. 

Boredom is truly one of the great motivators - I got upset and frustrated the other day with my (seemingly perpetual) job search, and just felt like shit. I burst into tears. I told myself I was allowed to be miserable and full of self pity until 10am, at which time I had to get my act together and get back on the horse. As it turned out, I got bored with my misery at about 9.30 and went back to it just for something less boring to do. I banged out a super quick job application which managed to get me an interview. If I hadn’t been bored I might never had done that. It sounds like a really long hiring process so I am looking forward to being bored with it, and finding some other fun, creative ways to keep me occupied while I wait it out.

There is so much research and thinking about creativity and it fascinates me. I plan to explore it some more with this blog in coming weeks. Watch this space!