Back in January there was an article on Nautilus about boredom and the trend of people trying to endure forced boredom.
There are “Do Nothing Challenges” and “Rawdogging” where people intentionally do nothing. Rawdogging is especially something people try to do on long flights where they won’t watch videos, listen to music, or read.
Except you’re not really deriving much benefit from the practice.
But the Do Nothing challenge and the rawdogging trend suggest a fundamental misunderstanding of how boredom and disconnection work, says James Danckert, a researcher in the Boredom Lab at the University of Waterloo. Boredom is closer to hunger than to holiness, he argues, and forcing it on yourself for hours on end doesn’t by itself have restorative power. Instead, the feeling suggests something about your attention, agency, or meaning is out of alignment.
Danckert goes on to say that people aren’t listening to what boredom is telling them which is to try to find something meaningful to do. He says meaningful doesn’t necessarily refer to curing cancer. It could be tackling an enjoyable challenge like a tough Sodoku puzzle.
He also mentions that some people are actually seeking disconnection when they engage in one of these challenges. He says it is fine and important to veg out and relax, but it shouldn’t take the form of enforced discomfort.
Danckert also addresses what he feels is a myth about the connection between boredom and creativity. He says that boredom driving people to engage and practice a skill is what results in creativity, not just sitting around bored until inspiration strikes.
The creativity idea has been a bit of a bugbear of mine, and a number of my colleagues who do boredom research feel this way, too. I think there’s this great desire in people to want to believe that boredom will somehow make you creative.
[…]
The story I’ve used in the past a lot is from Jimi Hendrix. Somebody sees Jimi Hendrix play for the first time, and is just blown away and corners him backstage and says, “Man, where have you been hiding?” And Hendrix replies, “I’ve been playing the Chitlin’ Circuit, and I was bored shitless
[…]
But the kind of music that was expected in the Chitlin’ Circuit was old and not to Hendrix’s liking. So he did something else and became the guitar virtuoso that we know. But the logic there is all wrong. Boredom didn’t make Hendrix a genius. Practice made Hendrix a genius. Trying to do different things made Hendrix a genius.
If you’re bored, you might find reading the whole article about boredom interesting. It cites a number of studies and findings on boredom, including some Danckert and his colleagues have just about debunked. He cites one about a series of nine experiments where people were asked to sit alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. In one of the nine, people were allowed to administer electric shocks to themselves.
Quite a number of people who had been shocked prior to the isolation and said it was so uncomfortable they would pay to avoid being shocked again actually shocked themselves rather than sit and do nothing for 15 minutes. One guy shocked himself 196 times in the 15 minute period.
Thanks. Your explanation provides a lot of clarity on the concept that I was missing. Even as I wrote it,…