Stop yawning… a little boredom is good for you
After years of 24/7 on-demand living, the Great Pause has left us with empty diaries. But there are some surprising benefits to being bored, finds
it was, we read constantly, ‘a tale of two lockdowns’. But while the first stage of lockdown divided us – into those with an absence of time, and those furloughed and facing a yawning surfeit of the stuff – the second stage united us. Bloated, stir-crazy, the Monopoly money long stained with red wine, we all began to feel inescapably, stultifyingly, earth-shatteringly bored.
At first, there was a novelty to being expected precisely nowhere. FOMO fell clean off the bone, like meat from a slowcooked beef joint. No need to get dressed! Or apologise for being late! But in its place bloomed an unfamiliar sensation. One that we thought in our on-demand, modern world of 24/7 entertainment – with its next-day deliveries, boxsets and instant gratification – we’d all but erased. That of boredom.
The pandemic’s flavour of boredom was specific. It was, as Grazia columnist Emma Jane Unsworth put it recently in this very magazine, a busy-boredom. Busy, because everything becomes infinitely more complicated when done remotely, especially when you have to factor in 48 hours a week to hunter-gather your groceries. Bored, because life became relentless and repetitive; the weeks melding into one.
As the custodian of two small infants, I am no stranger to busy-boredom. You are undeniably busy when looking after children – playing with stickle bricks, or changing volcanic nappies – but those activities are not, I think it’s fair to say, always riveting. But where busy-boredom was once confined to parenting and other unpaid care work, or your job, or the life admin that comes with being an adult, it was rarely the sum total of our existence. We were able to seek respite and physical distance from its sludgy epicentre – at the pub, or in the cinema, or in an art gallery.
Being unable to escape boredom (or, indeed, ourselves) sounds completely hideous – and for many it was. But amid the irritability and exhaustion came flashes of what felt like freedom. Don’t garrote me with your face mask, but what if a little bit of boredom is actually... good for us?
Now, I’m not suggesting a total rebrand of boredom; just a little renose. Boredom gets an unfairly bad rap. The word is almost onomatopoeic, with its soporific and droney elongated ‘o’. As the smug adage goes, ‘Only boring people get bored!’
That is nonsense, of course, but I don’t think that this new type of boredom is entirely irrelevant. In their new book, Out Of My Skull: The Psychology Of Boredom, the cognitive neuroscientist James Danckert and clinical psychologist John D Eastwood write that boredom is neither positive nor negative (though, if left untended, it can lead to depression), but a necessary part of the human experience. Trying to swipe it away via the infinite resources of our smartphone is a temporary fix; a distraction, rather than a solution. We can fill that space with technology or – and forgive me for going all Silicon Valley-speak here – we can lean in to the occasional bouts of boredom. To understand that it is an essential part of having your regular lives curtailed; and that, perhaps, we can learn something about the value of our lives, and ourselves, through these moments of unvaried repose.
I started pondering the virtues of boredom long before the pandemic. In recent years, my waking hours have begun to feel precarious, as if stacked up like a Jenga game: children, work, a sliver of a social life and the omnipresence of technological correspondence woven throughout. One over-zealous finger and the whole lot could come tumbling down. I felt constantly jittery about my lack of ‘thinking time’. Time to just be.
I began to yearn for the boredom of my childhood – which was fostered from an early age. It was not so much that my mother encouraged boredom, so much as she refused to cater to my every whim. She used to own a small green fishing boat and, when I was little, she would inveigle me into long days of trout fishing. I’d grumble and huff as she manhandled me into an oversized waterproof, and yet these are the days that I remember fondly: my mother, meditative and silent, with her rod trailing quietly in the water; me lying on the floor of the boat, thinking, musing, pondering and planning. My mother no longer has her boat, but it lives on in my mind as a metaphor for the potential of boredom.
I do not think boredom, in itself, is a net good. But neither do I think that constantly filling what psychotherapist Adam Phillips calls ‘our vacancies of attention’ is much good, either. Boredom, when its wings are left unclipped, can segue into a glorious bout of daydreaming – and it is daydreaming, rather than 24/7 entertainment, that is essential to contentment. Some people believe that coronavirus is a karmic message from Mother Nature, warning us that the planet is in freefall. I am less sure of that, but I do hope that the Great Pause, as the actor Finn Wolfhard wonderfully refers to it, allows us to consider how many of us were careering towards ‘burnout’, which I think is more accurately described as, Trying To Do Too Much, All The Time.
This busy-boredom – fully occupied, but not always entertained – is humbling. A little bit of boredom keeps you clear-eyed about your choices; an interlude whereby you may reluctantly interrogate and ponder, rather than making knee-jerk assumptions and decisions from a prism of everyone else’s opinions. It allows us to marvel at how exceptional even the gentlest life once was: with its cinemas, barbecues and coffees with friends. I know of people who have decided to move to new areas; to change careers. For as much as the stagnancy of the pandemic has been boring, it has allowed us to reflect upon the lives we were leading – and the lives that we might want to live, on the other side.
I feel like it has offered me a reprieve from what was expected of me; an opportunity to recalibrate. And as the next stage of this pandemic dawns, and our old lives unfurl once again – ever so slowly, ever so nervously – I hope we might take those little pockets of reflective boredom with us. ‘How Do We Know We’re Doing It Right?’ is out 16 July (£14.99, Hutchinson); Doing It Right, Pandora’s new podcast series about modern life, is out now