As soon as you get home after a long day of work, your first instinct is to sit down and scroll on your phone.
There’s nothing wrong with this but are you allowing yourself the time to think or process your day?
As someone who grew up in the age of smartphones, my mind rejects any form of mental relaxation. I wake up and immediately play a video on my phone for background noise. After school, I play on my PlayStation 4 for a few hours. When I get ready for bed, I use my phone.
It’s a constant cycle of stimulation and gratification.
I retreat to the comfort of my (de)vices instead of facing issues with my family or struggles in school, and as my troubles get harder, I fall deeper into my cycle.
We live in a time where “doom-scrolling” — the impulsive habit of scrolling on social media for hours at a time — is inseparable from the zeitgeist and it has been completely normalized. Even in my active efforts to delete YouTube, Instagram and TikTok off my phone, I still retreat to my phone for some easy-to-get stimulation.
There’s no way this is good for anybody but we’re so conditioned that it makes it hard for us to stop.
A term I’d used to describe this phenomenon is “ubiquitous assimilation,” coming from one of my favorite films of all-time, “Detachment,” starring Adrien Brody as Henry Barthes. The concept is described by Barthes as always absorbing everything around us, all the time, referring to the way we constantly intake media, trends and messages without conscious permission. He uses it in conjunction with the concept of doublethinking from Orwell’s “1984” to say, even if we have multiple conflicting ideas from what we consume, we still equally and wholeheartedly believe them to be fact.
Barthes uses this as a way to advocate for reading, instead, I’d like to use this to advocate for boredom.
I feel like it’s common for us anytime we say or think the phrase “I’m bored,” our immediate instinct is to grab a device for the nearest, quickest form of stimulation. However, recently I’ve begun to try to “embrace my downtime,” and while I’m still not perfect, it has made a massive positive difference.
A study from the University of Central Lancashire revealed that people engaging in “boring” activities become more creative afterwards. Eighty participants were divided into two groups: one cluster took part in boring activities with a creative task afterwards, while another did not do a boring activity but still carried out the creative task. The scientists found that preceding the creative task with a boring one increased the participants’ level of creativity. While these repetitive tasks are usually seen as chores, they are vital to enhancing our existence.
German philosopher Martin Heidegger explores boredom as a fundamental mood in his book “Being and Time.” He described boredom to be one of the most important and profound moods to be in as he urges to awaken our “boredom” up. He states that we run from boredom quickly because it scares us as it empties us to nothing. It removes the illusion and meaning from life , ultimately revealing nothingness. By removing this illusion, we now begin to experience a profound vision — we are able to gain access to time and the meaning of being.
Heidegger is extremely metaphysical, but I think the point to take away from him is boredom grants us attunement to ourselves.
There is something so peaceful about depriving myself of the constant stimulation so I can give myself time to think. Sometimes I pause and do something repetitive before I open my pad to write poems. It’s then that a wave of creativity washes over me, a wave so tall it trumps all the buildings in sight.
We live in the age of stimulation. Our generation grew up in it. Every year, a cousin is getting an iPad earlier and earlier in age. I constantly scream at myself “Go, go, go!”
But my discovery of the beauty of boredom is one that has done nothing but benefit me.
You may be having a hard day or looking to relax, and while it’s so easy to grab your phone and scroll on TikTok, challenge yourself by doing nothing or something boring because the results may shock you.
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