Go Ahead, Be Bored

I’ve been on a major Austin Kleon kick of late after re-reading Steal Like An Artist (a quick page-turner I recommend for anyone who wants to wants to kickstart their creative juice machine) and recently spent a good part of an afternoon going down the rabbit hole that is his website. One of my favorite blog posts of his that I read was this one on the benefits of boredom.

“The trouble is that we live in an age in which we never get ourselves the chance to be bored,” Kleon writes. “All the entertainment we could ever dream of is at our fingertips, waiting on the phone in our pants pocket.”

These words reminded me of a couple lines from Jonathan Franzen’s New York Times review of Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation, which I recently re-read for a discussion group I belong to.

“Conversation presupposes solitude, for example, because it’s in solitude that we learn to think for ourselves and develop a stable sense of self, which is essential for taking other people as they are. (If we’re unable to be separated from our smartphones, Turkle says, we consume other people “in bits and pieces; it is as though we use them as spare parts to support our fragile selves.”)”

The lesson: Boredom is not a bad thing. We don’t need to have our attention occupied every idle second of the day by phones, computers, televisions or whatever new smart device is competing for a spot on the medal stand in the Distraction Olympics. In fact, solitude and idle quiet time can be beneficial in that they encourage deeper thinking, can help spark the imagination of new ideas, and force you to pursue more meaningful conversations and deeper relationships with the people in your life.

“Conversation carries the risk of boredom,” writes Franzen, “the condition that smartphones have taught us most to fear, which is also the condition in which patience and imagination are developed.”