“Why don’t you go outside and entertain yourself?”
My mother had phrased it as a question but we both knew she wasn’t asking. She was telling, with all the finality of a judge banging down a gavel, and appeal was futile.
It was so unfair. Didn’t she understand how bored I was already? Couldn’t she see that sending me outside was just going to make it infinitely worse?
As I trudged away I felt like a convict sent to solitary confinement: banished from life, suspended in a timeless void that nonetheless wasted my time, until I was allowed to return to the world and the clock started ticking again.
In past centuries we sentenced wrongdoers to pain. We chopped off hands and flogged backs. But Enlightenment thinkers understood that there was a punishment less cruel but no less awful: lost time. Today, instead of being stretched on the rack, criminals have time taken from them.
Perhaps growing secularism has helped make us more acutely aware of the value of time. More and more people are deciding that this is they only life we have, and when you see life as finite, time becomes even more priceless and wasting it becomes a sin of cosmic proportions.
No wonder, then, that we’re constantly warned against slacking off. Every gadget, advertisement and team-building meeting preaches the same gospel: thou shalt not waste time! Time-saving apps and schedules flutter in our wake as we rush to work where bosses remind us that time is money. When we go home we plan our free time. People barely out of their teens are required to have bucket lists of things they want to do before they die. All in all, we spend an astonishing amount of time worrying that we don’t have enough time.
But in this stampede towards efficiency, we might be missing an important truth, namely, that time-wasting – and more specifically, the boredom that slowly grows over it like moss – might be an essential ingredient of creativity.
A growing body of research is suggesting that boredom isn’t the pointless limbo we resented as children. Rather, it might be a deep psychological and emotional nudge that gets us to go and find something new to do or think or feel.
According to University of Southampton psychologist, Dr Wijnand van Tilburg, boredom reminds us “that there are more important matters to attend to than those at hand”. What those “more important matters” are will depend on your creative style, but in general they will be diffuse ghosts of ideas, percolating somewhere in your unconscious mind, ready to take the shape of new ideas, schemes, dreams…
If the scientists are right, then proper boredom – a twilight space somewhere between now and later – might be an asset rather than something to be avoided: a kind of psychological alchemy in which lethargy is transformed into creative passion.
Of course, we don’t really need the scientists to tell us this. I think we’ve known it all along.
I feel it every time the following scene plays out. You probably know it well, too. Perhaps I’ll be sitting gazing out of a window, seeing and not seeing the imperfections in the glass, the trees outside, the sky. Perhaps it will be a late-afternoon doodle on a shopping list, drawing intricate squiggles around the word “milk”. I’m barely aware that someone is approaching, but I look up when they ask, “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” I answer. It’s the acceptable answer, but I’ll know it’s not true. I’ll know that because their question feels like an interruption. Somewhere in there I was incubating something. I was holding space open in which ideas, sensations and emotions could slide across each other like pieces of a three-dimensional puzzle. And I had been waiting, watching, to see if they clicked into place.
Yes, despite our childhood protests, we’ve known the value of boredom since we were little. Still, it’s nice to have the PhDs on our side now. So next time you’re at work, entirely focused in an entirely unfocused way on folding a Post-it into the shape of Batman’s head, and your inner Puritan cracks the whip, tell it to go away. You’re not wasting time. In fact, you’re hard at work on your next project. You just don’t know what it is yet.
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