Episode 26 - In Praise of Boredom

By request, some thoughts on the lost art of letting yourself get a little bit bored. 

Transcript

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Hey there, welcome to The Rough Draft. I'm Anthony Alvarado, and for today's show, a friend of mine who listens to the show asked me if I took requests for show topics. And I said, Yeah, sure. Hit me. And so he asked me to talk about boredom, which I thought was actually a pretty interesting idea. Um, yeah, my friend was saying how boredom might actually be good for you and something that we human beings need a certain amount of. And I totally agree with that, and it it's pretty in line with the ideas that I've been exploring on this show. So yeah, I've been doing a fair amount of cycling this spring, and a lot of times I might just go do a few laps around Savi Island. It's great for cycling, it's nice and flat, and there's pretty scenery everywhere. It's all cows and rivers and houseboats and mountains, and you can see St. Helens, Mount Hood, and Adams all at the same time. I hear on a really clear day you can see Rainier. I've yet to notice Rainier, but four mountains from one spot. That's pretty cool. But cycling for hours on end is it's great exercise. It's also it gets totally boring, and I mean that in a good way. I've come to think that when you're biking alone with your own thoughts for hours at a time, there's something really good about that. There's something good about the experience of boringness of it all. Like nothing much is happening, and your thoughts just kind of go by and it feels sort of nutritious for the mind, maybe even the soul, in a way that's sort of hard to explain. But you just it it feels good, it also feels boring. It's you know, I think we have this knee-jerk definition in our minds these days that boring's bad that we need to question and re-examine in light of where we are now with entertainment and with the way that our attention and awareness works. There's a lot of boring things that you can do that are great. I've always been uh well, lately I've been drawing and sketching a lot, and it's a very slow and kind of tedious and kind of boring and yet interesting, and it's really hard, and it just feels like a great alternative to looking at my phone. So that's just like another example of something that requires a certain amount of presence and attention and awareness. And of course, I only notice that it feels boring to let hours go by without being actively entertained or doing much of anything because now that's pretty rare. It's pretty rare to give yourself that space. It's really easy to pick up and pack every full minute, every spare minute of the day with something or other. You know, often, you know, we're all busy people and there's plenty to do, but then when you do have downtime and start to feel a bit bored, you can reach for your phone or tablet or whatever and catch up on some vertical video viewing or the news, or I don't know, you know, there's a lot out there. Yeah, a lot of research has been coming out lately that suggests that we humans really benefit from spending a decent amount of time out in nature. And I think that's probably pretty linked to the slightly bored aspect, like a couple hours a week, um, two to three actually is the recommended dose of nature time that you should be getting each week. And they say that it doesn't matter if you're getting that in like a weekly lump sum, going for one big long hike, or maybe getting to the park every afternoon for half an hour or so in smaller amounts, but uh yeah, a couple hours a week improves health, improves mood, improves just overall well-being. And if you've spent any serious time just hanging out in nature, you might have noticed it's a bit boring. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's beautiful and peaceful and all that, but it's also kind of boring too. Like not much happens, you know. The trees, the rocks, the ferns, the birds, they're all just there doing pretty much exactly what they've been doing for thousands of years, and it's boring in a good way. And I think we can think about boringness in a good way. We should reclaim that word. It's got such a bad rap. Boring's actually pleasant, boring is peaceful, and it's ironic that the more times people spend looking at their phones, the more they report feeling bored because they're looking at stuff on their phones in order to be entertained, right? Or like, I'm bored. Oh, I'll just look at my phone. Videos of cats, dance moves, influencers, people that you kind of used to know, advertisements disguised as advice from people you kind of used to know. And the algorithm rummages about in your mind and picks out the things that catch your attention and feeds you more and more of whatever those things are in an ever-quickening loop. Of course, we evolved to feel at home and run at the same speed as boring old Mother Nature, as in not much happening, chop wood, carry water, watch the grass grow, the seasons change, and keep up with the news and gossip of maybe the dozen people that you regularly break bread with. We didn't evolve for the infinite looping scroll of ever more entertaining, mind-melting stream of conscious 10-second videos training our attention to fragment into shorter and shorter loops. I knew a girl in high school who would chew cookie dough in her mouth for the flavor and then spit it out into the garbage disposal so that she wouldn't get the calories. And that's essentially what spending an hour scrolling on the infinite scroll app, uh, like Instagram or TikTok or whatever, feels like to me. I might chuckle or be enthralled by the increasingly, increasingly mesmerizing lights, but afterwards I can barely even remember what I just saw. It's like tasting food and not swallowing it. It's a question of metabolism. The junk food that it turns out can be very addictive: greasy fries, chicken nuggets, soda pop, smash burgers. If you eat that all the time, you're going to feel lousy. It's simply a matter of metabolism. The body doesn't know what to do with all of those calories, and you end up simply not being able to process it. And, you know, you feel sick and feel lousy and have health problems if that's all that you you eat, or if you are in the habit of consuming vast amounts of that, right? And all the digital entertainment is the same. It's just it's more entertainment than the human mind was meant to metabolize. As in by metabolize, I mean to take in and make use of, you know, to process, to store it somewhere. We should be able to watch a story or read a story and remember what it was that we saw, you know. It's all like the infinitely entertaining movie that David Foster Wallace predicted. An infinite jest, a perfect entertainment, so seductive, so attention grabbing, no one can look away. And in infinite jest, people entertain themselves literally to death. Spoiler alert. It's a book with no ending, is the spoiler. But just watching the perfect movie on repeat until you die. It's literal bed rot to death. And you know, he called that. I think he wrote that, gosh, late 90s, but here we are. And just like you can wean yourself off of junk food, I think that you can also train your attention and your awareness in much the same way. Like drinking Coca-Cola with every mill is something that you can do or not do. You just your palate adjusts, you can lean either way. I myself I used to drink soda with uh pretty much every mill, and eventually I gave it up. Now it tastes kind of disgusting. It tastes overly sweet to my palate. Your palate just adjusts. So we live in a world that's very different from the one that we evolved to exist in, the one that matches our basic setup of what is good for us. And it's continuing to change faster and faster in uh at a speed that doesn't really jive with our natural settings. And I just think that your awareness and your attention really benefit from slowing down, from letting yourself feel and experience boredom. And I don't know what that means for you. You know, there's there's a lot of ways to do that. Um, for you, that might be something different than than biking around Savior Island. But there's just a lot of boring, delightfully, wonderfully boring moments all around if you just let yourself find them and sink into them. You know, just hesitate a little bit before drawing off that phone, basically. And when you do, you may be you might notice that being a little bored is actually there's something pleasant and peaceful and nourishing about it. Being a bit bored is fun. That's my show for today. Thank you for listening. And be sure to subscribe to the Rough Draft Podcast wherever you get your podcasts, Apple Yada Yada, and thanks for listening on X Ray to all the X ray listeners out there. Until next time.