Units of Boredom in a smartphone world

Now that we all have smart phones, supposedly boredom has been eradicated, and supposedly this is For Better and For Worse. We never need be bored for a moment, and so we distract ourselves to our creative Detriment.

There is, however, a huge variability in Boredom – the micro boredom of standing in line or waiting for a bus is not a unit of time you were ever really going to fill with Creativity; I would argue that your life is much improved by being able to engage with the world, or other people, or the news, or a game, rather than being Bored for a handful of minutes. Those Micro Units of Boredom just build up sedimentary layers over time, and drag one down. Filling them with little micro bursts of entertainment is simply turning them into happy voids, rather than frustrated ones (not to mention that plenty of meaning *can* be packed into 140 characters, and therefore, the micro unit of non-boredom may not even be truly void).

There’s a next larger unit of time, which is still pretty small – a Power Nap can be fit into just fifteen minutes (and, in fact, should not be extended past twenty minutes, lest it become a sink hole of grogginess), and so can a Quick Creative unit.  So if we’re talking twenties of minutes, it’s an individual’s choice whether to try for a Quick Creative unit, or allow multiple Mico-Non-Boreds to string together. Important note: one has to be in the right frame of mind in order to engage in a Quick Creative unit – if you don’t feel the closeness of your inspiration, twenty minutes is not going to be enough to warm it up, engage it, produce something, and be ready to jump back into Responsibility Life (or whatever name you give what it is you’re doing when you’re not Being Creative). Twenty minutes engaged in Boredom can be a meditation of intended mindlessness from which one emerges refreshed, but this can also be sufficient time to fall into a funk, or ennui; much better to stave off a power burst of ennui by fucking around with your phone, I say.

So then, there are the larger chunks of time – an hour or two, the whole Swath of an Afternoon. Those, I believe, are the productive units to potentially engage in Boredom as a pursuit, the kind of Boredom its advocates are speaking of. And here, in the “I have a few hours” or the “what *shall* we do today” space of not yet pre-planned activities, one can legitimately complain of people “wasting” their time, when they could be Being Creative or Productive, because we are now speaking of a time sufficiently lengthy for those kinds of things to potentially have space to Become.

So yes, if someone defaults to passive entertainments during these longer stretches, I agree that they do lose the standing to complain about never getting anything Worthy done, because they are the one wasting the Creative Time available to them. And yes, plenty of times Creativity comes to you when you’re freaking Bored, and therefore you need to spend at least an occasional Swath of Afternoon being Freaking Bored…and see what comes to you.

**This blog post was the product of a Quick Creative Unit of time.**