when boredom is a superpower
Reading time: 978 words in approx 5 minutes
Originally published elsewhere.
I live in a world where novelty (and its accompanying buzz) is only a click, tap, or voice command away.
It's easier to find novel stimuli instead of "suffering" through boredom. But boredom is the soil in which grows imagination, creativity, play, and inspiration. There is beauty in boredom.
Nobody wants to be bored
My partner walked into the room earlier today and announced: "Manil, I'm bored".
We're dealing with a much more limited set of activities this year, but nobody wants to be bored. I've rewired my brain through years of internet-attached behaviour, where I now default to seeking novelty. When boredom is imminent, I hit CTRL+T and type whatever first comes to mind that will make the search engine give me stimulus.
When I let boredom work against me
Boredom is a lack of stimulus. For the most part, we are thinking meatbags that find a lack of stimulus unpleasant. But boredom can hit me when I am too frustrated by my task. In other words, my aversion to boredom can, and does, often block my attempts to enter Flow.
Flow is a middle ground. It lies between the feeling of achievement when pushing against the current limits of my abilities, and, the feeling of frustration with a task that is too far beyond my current abilities.
On the other hand, when I learn to embrace boredom, I acquire a competitive advantage in thinking my way past problems, learning faster, and thriving in a distracted world.
How to get heavy shit done by embracing boredom
I see people strategically substitute computers with analog tools (like, pen and paper) to encourage deep work. That helps some folks, but it doesn't help me. For better or worse, computers are my default tools. But I do think that these machines can be made to empower my attempts at deep work.
I needed to unlearn novelty-seeking behaviour. I decided to focus my efforts on distractions which take hold when I am doing deep work. These distractions were often well-intentioned research which turned into rabbit holes of unrelated actions. I found that my novelty-seeking is most often unconscious. So I was looking for a way to interrupt an unconscious action.
I searched for browser add-ons that would let me whitelist the URLs that I absolutely needed for deep work and found LeechBlock NG. It should let me use calendar.google.com, trello.com, etc while preventing the illusion of productivity had from going down infinite rabbitholes.
What calm looks like now 🧘🏽♀️
Today, after coffee and light cleaning, I started my workday by writing in a journal. The journal is meant to be an unfiltered, stream-of-consciousness reproduction of my thoughts. I was startled to see how frequently the configuration I set earlier interrupted my near-unconscious action of searching for contextual information － that gateway to unchecked distractions.
Later, I stared at a lamp for a few minutes. At the end of those minutes, I had the perfect bit of code to make a PUT request for a database entry!
The code didn't work. But that's OK.
Check out a previous post about restoring my ability to focus.