Are you bored enough?
If you’re reading this essay, you just might be. But I stand that our days remain over-structured and our Google Calendars over-scheduled, with our phones over-satiating any remaining free time. It feels damn near impossible to be bored at Wesleyan, and I think that’s dangerous.
Study after study has concluded that rest is the spigot of creativity.
“Downtime replenishes the brain’s stores of attention and motivation, encourages productivity, and is essential to achieve our highest levels of performance and simply form stable memories in everyday life,” a recent Scientific American article reported.
Yet downtime and boredom are different states of being. Boredom occurs when the brain struggles to fill time, the Mayo Clinic reports. This restlessness and lack of interest in ones surroundings can occur during downtime, but Wesleyan students are more likely to find boredom during an anemic lecture or while struggling through a dense reading.
And still, I find that my languishing classmates often don’t know what to do with that state. The phone’s persuasion is never far, and why be restless when you could TikTok?
“The less people experience boredom, the less equipped the brain is to deal with it,” the Mayo Center continued. As we become increasingly busy, reachable, and satiated, we have little opportunity for boredom.
I think this is a huge deal. It scares me that no one seems to have noticed.
“A poor life this if, full of care/ We have no time to stand and stare,” W.H. Davies wrote in “Leisure.” The artist Prince coined the term “normalady” to refer to the maladies of everyday busyness. How can we bring snippets of boredom back into our daily lives?
To be clear, I’m not proposing a numbingly bored life spent staring at blank walls, but when I recently learned that my friend falls asleep listening to television, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of deep unease about our current discomfort with internal silence.
Infamously, a 2014 University of Virginia study found that given the option between sitting in an empty room for 15 minutes and self-administering a small electric shock, almost half the study’s participants became so uncomfortable with boredom they chose to zap themselves.
That can’t be good.
Have we become “addicted to distraction,” as Forbes writer Naz Beheshti posits? If so, what dangers await us if even our shower thoughts become inundated with podcasts or music?
In “The Busy Trap,” reporter Tim Kreider argues, “Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.”
“I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder…,” he continues. “But I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy.”
Can we be busy and bored? Because in college, being busy sometimes does mean scheduling that meal with Chris or talk with Megan, putting a meeting in your Google Calendar to laugh with Boyd. The fleeting nature of life requires becoming scheduled—we wouldn’t see anyone otherwise.
Okay so we’re scheduled! And maybe that’s fine. But let’s reclaim our unscheduled time and embrace boredom. I’m hosting a phone-reduction competition. If you want in, email me, or, better yet, go online and fill out the linked form. It’s an everybody-wins-cut-down-your-screentime-athon, but yes, there will be prizes.
Recently, I’ve rediscovered the joy of unscheduled dinners: wandering between Loud and Quiet, connecting spontaneously with two, three, four groups of friends over the length of the evening. Of course, showing up uninvited and unattached to the dining hall might lead to a dinner alone, where, sitting in the corner, gazing uninterestedly around, one might find their mind wandering over the events of the day or the schemes of tomorrow, not quite planning and not quite satiated. One might think with renewed vigor—one might even become bored.
Thomas Lyons is a member of the class of 2026 and can be reached at trlyons@wesleyan.edu.