You need to be bored. You will have less meaning and you will be more depressed if you never are bored. I mean, it couldn’t be clearer. Let me give you the good side of boredom in general. Boredom is a tendency for us to not be occupied otherwise cognitively, which switches over our thinking system to use a part of our brain that’s called the default mode network. That sounds fancy. It’s really not. The default mode network is a bunch of structures in your brain that switch on when you don’t have anything else to think about. So you forgot your phone and you’re sitting at a light, for example. That’s when your default mode network goes on.
Why is boredom so bad? Well, because the default mode network makes us think about things that might be kind of uncomfortable. When you think about nothing while your mind wanders and thinks about, for example, big questions of meaning in your life. What does my life mean? You go to uncomfortable existential questions when you’re bored. That turns out to be incredibly important, incredibly good. One of the reasons we have such an explosion of depression and anxiety in our society today is because people actually don’t know the meaning of their lives, much less so in previous generations.
We figured out a way to eliminate boredom. We’ve been able, almost completely, to shut off the default mode network in our brains. How? By mobile phones.
And that’s the recipe for depression and anxiety and a sense of hollowness, which, by the way, are all through the roof. I get it. You don’t want to be bored. You need to be bored. Be bored more.Tomorrow, when you go to the gym in the morning after you wake up, don’t take your phone. Can you handle it? Not listening to a podcast while you’re working out. Just being in your head. I promise you, you’ll have your most interesting ideas while you’re working out without devices. It’s probably been a long time since you’ve done that. Commute with nothing, not even the radio. Can you do that? Start getting better at periods that are 15 minutes and longer of boredom, and watch your life change. Number one, you’ll be less bored with ordinary things in your life. If you get better at the skill of boredom, you’ll be less bored with your job. You’ll be less bored with your relationships. 1