The Theory and Practice of Boredom

"Mum, I'm bored!" How many times did  I utter those words as a child? How many times during the long summer holidays, or on Sunday afternoons when the weather prevented me from having a kick-about in the garden, and there was nothing on TV worth watching? I have no idea, but it was often.  That sort of generalised boredom - as opposed to specific boredom, which we'll come to shortly - ought to be far less common today, both among adults and children. In my youth there were fewer diversions, today, what with a multitude of TV channels, streaming services, video games, and social media, there are far fewer reasons to be bored; frankly, one ought to always be able to find something to do (and I'm discounting household chores and the like).

Specific boredom is another thing altogether. Being bored by one's job is something that has to be endured; being bored by a particular TV programme, or by some hobby or another can be dealt with by switching to some more engaging activity. Work - boring or not - has to be tolerated. Many times in my working life I had to do tedious, repetitive jobs, the sorts that are alright for the first few hours - the whole morning sometimes - but become stupefying after a while. I spent a long time checking payments - comparing written instructions with what had been input into the computer system - which was a task that after a while became so mind-numbing, that as the day progressed, trips to the coffee machine became increasingly regular, just as a means of getting away from the desk.

Boredom at work can be detrimental to performance; mistakes start creeping in. I recall vividly spending hours checking payments and at some point having no recollection of the last few items I had checked. Clearly, then was a good time to take a break. That was at least one reason why I always enjoyed jobs with plenty of variety, less opportunity to lose concentration and make an error. Sometimes, of course, a repetitive task, performed over and over again, can enable the mind to wander without any unfortunate consequence.

Generalised boredom - which, as I've said is something we all probably experience less these days - need not actually be a bad thing, although perhaps it is better to characterise this form of boredom as something else, by which I mean freeing the mind to simply wander, to daydream. We all lead increasingly busy lives, whether it is work or running a house, keeping up with our social lives - in real life or online - being busy, being engaged, we seem to be constantly on the go, our minds ever active.

The poet W H Davies, wrote:

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

This poem is an encouragement to do nothing, to let the mind wander, to think not of something specific, but simply to pause and reflect. Doing so will often allow me to reach insights, solve problems, and be creative, without actively realising it. One thing I love to do is go for walks, preferably somewhere away from the hustle and bustle of the city, but even there walking frees my mind to take flights of fancy. One thing that eliminating boredom does is similarly reduce our capacity to daydream; walking allows me to do just that, and apart from the benefit of the physical exercise, allows my mind to order my thoughts and make decisions, or solve problems, even if I am not conscious of my doing so.

Most of us will have experienced the frustration of not being able to solve that last clue in the crossword, or of desperately trying to remember someone's name, only to find that the harder we think about it, the more elusive the answer becomes. Yet, by switching off that part of the brain, letting the mind wander, the answer will pop into one's head unbidden.  Many times during my years at work I would be faced with a problem that needed solving, and many times the harder I thought about that problem, the more difficult it became to pin down an answer, yet the solution to many of those problems came to me when I was not actively thinking about them, when I was walking to work from the station, or waiting for a train. The solutions came to me when I simply stood and stared.

To counter the stress we all encounter in our daily lives, many people are turning to mindfulness and meditation, which are not necessarily the same thing as submitting to the sort of generalised boredom that I have described, however generalised boredom, or allowing oneself the freedom to simply stand and stare works for me. A danger of this, and a trap that I find myself falling into is overthinking, but that stems from my actively thinking about something rather than engaging in the sort of freewheeling daydreaming that characterises what, for want of a better term, I'm going to continue calling generalised boredom. And overthinking is only one step removed from full-scale worrying, and we don't want to go there!

As a child, I hated being bored (I'm sure my Mum hated it too), but now I enjoy it and I embrace it; I have some of my best ideas when I'm bored. Taking the time to relish being bored enables one to daydream, to imagine, to be creative. Without boredom, our lives are poorer.