Boredom

An undervalued strategic need.

We’ve turned boredom into an endangered habitat.

This isn’t intended to be a rant on how people should live, or to be an attack on specific forms of entertainment. It’s a commentary on a key ingredient for strategic thinking, maybe for thinking in general, that most people aren’t cooking with anymore.

Boredom is the only waking moment, when you actually get to use your mind for something other than interpretation, analysis, and absorption.

When you’re reading, listening, watching or talking, you’re only doing a specific type of responsive thinking. Responsive thinking is great, it endows you with mental agility and can elevate a spark into a fire, but it’s not enough unto itself.

The other kind of thinking, the kind that I believe meaningful strategic ideas comes from, is more about generating novel ideas, unexpected comparisons. Not bridging two existing concepts, but deep synthesis, pulling meaning from so many places that it seems like it’s coming from nowhere. The best place for that is a blank page, either digitally, physically, or mentally.

The blank page hasn’t been readily available, lately.

Photo by Abbie Bernet on Unsplash

It’s not only that this is the most entertained the human race has ever been, with AI research telling me the average person is spending about 1000 hours a year watching video, about 900 hours a year on social media, around 500 hours a year on music, and about 400 hours a year gaming.

We’re also layering that entertainment; we’re on social media posting the concert we’re attending, listening to music while doing basically anything, and playing Balatro on our phones while our partner watches a reality show filled with well-dressed plastic surgery enthusiasts.

There’s no boredom allowed, anymore. We filled those spaces with a selection of glowing rectangles.

People used to get bored as a matter of course. Waiting in line, sitting on the toilet, etc. The reason 72% of us (according to a 2014 study) get our best creative ideas in the shower, is that it’s basically the only time you aren’t multiply occupying your brain.

We used to get our boredom for free. Now we need to fight for it.

There’s a cottage industry of apps and tools to help you get your attention back from your phone, but most of them push really hard for disconnection as the goal. Other trends, like “raw dogging boredom” by giving yourself timed blocks of digital abstinence, seeming peaked this year. But the key, to me, is recognizing that giving yourself space to think, to be bored, is a key part of actually sitting with the information or ideas you have.

Thinking time should be boring, until the moment when it’s very, very exciting and you have a new idea. Our current dominant model of inspiration is an infinite supply of stimulus, hoping that in the act of consumption, two ideas slam into each other like electrons, and something big happens.

A potentially more reliable model is to fill your mind with as much of the key information as it can hold… and then stop giving it things to do other than figure it out.

You can engineer boredom relatively easily. Every device that matters to you has airplane mode. Most apps can be easily deleted. You can buy earplugs at a reasonable price. Paper notebooks and physical pens are a great way to eliminate everything but you and your thoughts. But we tend to think of boredom as a punishment or a sign we’re not optimizing properly.

Instead I need you to think of boredom as a piece of equipment. You need it like you need data, like you need context, like you need a solid understanding of statistics, actual conversations with people, and a solid narrative.

Boredom is where great ideas start. Everything else is just riffing on something you just saw, which is *fine* and valuable in its own right. It’s just not the good stuff.