Falling In Love With Boredom
“…I let the distraction become boredom. And when the distraction shifts into boredom, that’s the seed of something creative. On the face of it, it doesn’t make any sense. Boredom seems like the least creative feeling. But it’s actually a way of clearing space for a new idea to spring back up.”
-Questlove, Creative Quest
I took a break from social media at the beginning of 2018. I was considering getting off indefinitely. Luckily, my friends convinced me to try it just for a few weeks. The results were a lot like the quote I just shared–I fell in love with boredom.
Previously, whenever I got bored, I pulled out my phone to scroll social media. I was managing social accounts at the time, so staying up to date with trends was in my job description. It became way too easy to justify hours upon hours on social media. But before I took my social media break, I remembered a time when great ideas struck me like lightning on an almost daily basis. That wasn’t happening anymore. So I took a break.
Almost instantly, the ideas came back to me.
Here’s my theory about boredom. Our brains are allergic to it. When we spend enough time in a state of boredom, our brains will start ideating, imagining anything to relieve ourselves of it. As creative people, this is where our best ideas come from. This is also why, when we were kids, ideas and imaginations flowed through us constantly.
The trouble is, with social media, we never let our brains dip below the boredom line for long enough to have a great idea. There’s a reason great ideas come to you in the shower–it’s one of the few times you aren’t reading, watching, writing or saying something. On social media, we maintain the minimum viable amount of interest to avoid boredom, while rarely encountering true interest or inspiration.
Social Media Brain - Fig. 1
Inspired Brain - Fig. 2
In Fig.1 you can see my illustrations of a brain on social media. While it never dips below the boredom line, and it experiences momentary interest spikes, sustained inspiration is almost never achieved.
In Fig 2. you can see my illustration of a bored brain. For a few minutes, it dips below the boredom line, becoming officially bored. But then, after a few minutes in boredom, inspiration strikes the brain, and great ideas are born.
There was a time, before you had a smart phone, before you had a lot of work to do, when you used to lie on your back on the carpet, staring at the ceiling, being bored. And ideas flowed. It’s why you became a creative. But social media steals that state from us. So we must make boredom a practice.
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