Boredom, childhood, and some usual rants

EDIT: I have recently found out that I no longer agree with some of the ways I have described things in this blog. A person sometimes tries to explain in words the image he has in mind. During the explanation, he assumes that readers also perceive some notions the same way as the writer does, but both unfortunately and fortunately, readers can’t read mind, so I need to be more careful when describing things. The post is here for archival purpose only.

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 “Mom! I’m bored” was my most frequently expressed statement during childhood (like most children). I would utter that every time I had nothing to do. What would happen next was based on the circumstances. If they were favorable, my mother would suggest me a game to play or something like that, and if I had said that at the wrong time, then… – well, you can guess the unfortunate consequences yourself. I now realize how much I had annoyed my mother as a child, but, anyways, boredom was my most common state during childhood, but as much as I detested it, I now think it was not actually that bad.

Boredom can be classified into two conditions, (1) when one is uninterested in what he is doing at the time, not out of dislike but because it is not interesting enough, and (2) when one is unsatisfied because he is not occupied in anything at all. In this article, I will explain how getting bored, is one of the most wonderful things to do. If you are like me from the past and are feeling seriously annoyed that I am presenting your most unpleasant experience of childhood as something cherishable, please calm down, bear with me and hopefully, by the end, you will understand what I mean.

Here’s a question for you. Has this ever happened to you that you are doing a routine task that requires little to no mental effort (such as taking a bath or doing laundry), and suddenly you are struck with a wonderful idea about anything? The idea does not have to be the next world-changing invention, but anything as simple as an alternative sentence you could have said in a conversation you had with someone two days ago, or a correlation between two facts you had listened from two different places. Such untimed revelations are usual for human beings to have when their brains are sitting idle. Now, if I connect that with my childhood, I realize how most of the innovative thoughts (no matter how impractical or useless they were) would come at a time of boredom, whether it’s the invention of a new game or an evil+innocent mischief. The mind-boggling questions that children ask do not arise from the fact that they read self-help books or listen to podcasts which improve their critical thinking. These out-of-the-box questions and unconventional thoughts are fruits of the tree of curiosity, and that tree of curiosity is nurtured by the state of boredom.

This fact not only applies to children but to adults as well (if they are able to retain the positive childish nature – not being able to do so is a separate problem, but let’s leave that for another time). For instance, in 1966, a bored assembly-line operator at a Japanese toy factory made a grabbing toy during his spare time for his own amusement. The president of the company on a visit to the factory noticed it and asked him to convert it into a product, which later became a huge success. The worker was promoted and he later became a well-known game designer and is most famously known as the designer of the popular “Game Boy”. His name was Gunpei Yokoi and the toy factory he worked at was none other than Nintendo.

The innovativeness of the revelations you receive will be directly proportional to the nature of the activities in which you indulge yourselves completely. So, it’s a two-ingredient recipe. Sitting idle only isn’t going to help you, what actually will, is that when you do something, get involved in it completely, and sometimes, have some time for yourself when your brain is not directly involved in something. It is also important to understand that getting bored is not just a matter of being productive later on because that nulls the meaning of what it means to do nothing. You need to understand that you, as a human, need time to allow yourself to do nothing. When you accept this fact, you break the walls of conventional thoughts you have built around yourself and open up new perceptions to see the world through; then, you are able to see things right in front of you that were previously invisible.

Now here arises another question. Many among us are idle and mentally unoccupied a lot of times, but it doesn’t prove useful to us at all. This is because our notion of being mentally unoccupied is quite wrong. I have observed in my hostel that when students or professionals would return to their room, tired after a hot scorching day, the first thing they would do is not to change clothes or freshen themselves, rather they would fall on their beds and start scrolling on their mobile phones with their shoes still on. Similarly, while waiting for an order at a restaurant, or standing in a queue outside ATM, people would instantly pull out their phones, instead of having a look at their surroundings. I am not at all against utilizing your idle waiting time productively, but what I detest is draining out your precious mental energy such that nothing is left for your human curiosity. So, when someone tells me that he is “wela” (free) whole day, most often, he means that he spends his entire day sleeping, scrolling through social media, listening to songs, watching reels/TikTok, or gossiping with friends, etc.

We are living in the era of attention economy where our attention is someone else’s money. We are constantly being nudged to sell our attention and mental energy at a pathetic price. The result of this attention theft is that our human abilities of deep contemplation, close observation, active listening, and childish curiosity are fading away.

You must have heard the phrase that something is just a click away. What if I tell you that boredom is also a click away? The only difference is that it’s a click on “Unfollow” and all its other names. Thus, the recipe is simple: when you have nothing to do, do completely nothing. If you are able to control your temptation to pull out your phone or to start talking with someone, the moment you have nothing to do, you have a good chance that you can get bored. Take a deep breath, relax, and accept that it is okay to look stupid sometimes and soon you will realize that no one cares anyways.

At the end, I will share the story of what led me to contemplate, research, and then write on this topic of boredom. It was some months ago; I was bored and I had nothing to do. So, I googled, “how to do nothing”. Very strangely, it was the name of a book someone had written, “How to Do Nothing – Resisting the Attention Economy.” I just closed it. Some weeks later, once again, out of boredom, I googled the same term and I got the same book as the search result. I looked a little bit at what the book was about, and I thought it could be a good read, but still, I ignored it and closed it. Months later, once again, I asked Google “how to do nothing”, got the same result, and then researched further about the book. This time, the book seemed very interesting, but I knew it would be very difficult to find its physical copy nearby to where I live (I don’t read ebooks). I scrolled further in the search results, and luckily, I found some talks by the author Jenny Odell. I listened to one whole talk and that was my lightbulb moment. Everything started to make sense, and from then on, I gave this whole concept a plentiful thought and I researched further, and then summed up some of my ideas here. I would highly suggest you to listen to the talk, as, ironically, it is the most “unboring” talk I have ever listened to. Here’s the link:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izjlP9qtmBU

Stay hungry. Stay foolish!