Can boredom make you more creative?
Appreciating things being dull as heck and what this can do for your creative practice.
When things slow down and I find myself on my own with nothing to do, it’s easy to fill that silence. In fact, filling that space is a habit, executed without really thinking about it at all. I immediately seek out a podcast or an audiobook or a YouTube video. I let the noise of those things fill the background of my time.
I wrote recently about feeling overwhelmed in the noise of the world, but beyond managing my anxiety levels, there’s a great reason to block that noise out: creating the opportunity for boredom. Now, why would I want to do that?
There are lots of studies that suggest being bored is good for creativity. But I want to dig a bit deeper (beyond stats and studies) and think about this as a practitioner; I want to think about this as someone who feels boredom start up, and acts first, squashing that feeling out of existence, and then thinking second. What if I did something different? What if I just lean in to being bored?
Who’s afraid of being bored?
All of us, apparently. I think there’s a few parts to this:
The “productivity” lie we all believe;
How shit we are at measuring time;
Lizard brain nonsense (NB: Not a technical term) and the myth of multitasking.
Let’s get into it.
We believe in the productivity lie
Is everyone else just better, more disciplined, more productive than you are? Probably not. But we perceive this to be true, not only because we receive highly cultivated insights into each other’s lives online, but because we all worship at the altar of productivity.
What does it even mean to be productive? A while ago, when I wrote about the beauty of doing nothing, my friend Ian shared this quote from the essay An Apology for Idlers by Robert Louis Stevenson:
Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself.
Unspecified thinking time doesn’t conform to any of the markers of “productivity”. Who makes the rules on that? I think it’s right to be sceptical. The idea of productivity that we adhere to doesn’t come from inside ourselves - we learn to think about this a certain way. And what is that way, exactly?
Here’s another quote from that same essay:
It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none.
We have the urge to make it seem like we are doing something important, and so we each apply our own version of “achievement” as a measurable commodity over our pursuits. To some degree, this makes sense - are you a writer if you haven’t written anything? Yes, okay, perhaps if we haven’t ever written anything we might struggle to call ourselves writers. But does that mean we have to be writing, continuously and forever, in order to maintain the right to the title? I think this links neatly to the question of time and how we spend it.
We are shit at measuring time
We don’t actually know how long things take. Though this Brendan Loper cartoon gets sweetly at the heart of the ridiculousness of our own expectations, there is some evidence to suggest that consistency (even of just fifteen minutes a day) amounts to a better overall result than the binge/bust habit that impedes many of us from working. See the research of Robert Boice, if you want more on this. But in short, waiting until you have “enough” time is a great lie to tell yourself to ensure you never actually do any work at all. Or in other words, we can do a lot more in fifteen minutes than we think. Sometimes less time - but focused, quality time - is better spent than long stretches of poor quality and inconsistency. With just a small amount of consistent practice, you can get a lot further and do much more than you think.
Equally, our phones and the addictive design of social media can make fifteen minutes disappear in what feels like seconds. We are caught between two extremes - feeling as though we need more time in order to do anything, and somehow losing great swathes of time unintentionally. We are no good at understanding how long it takes to do stuff (see Hofstadter's law or the Planning fallacy or any number of these “rules” on humans being shit at time).
Lizard brain nonsense and the myth of multitasking
There’s a lot of chat out there about how distracted we are, how our attention spans are getting shorter. This may be true, but none of this is all that surprising - we are a bunch of lizard brains, for whom a quick source of dopamine is irresistible. Most of the apps on your phone, and every social media platform, is designed to distract and therefore keep you looking. We all seems to know this by now, and yet, we can’t stop. Many of us convince ourselves that we can watch a video or scroll a news feed while we are doing other things - or that somehow, we can ‘use’ distraction and restlessness to our advantage. We think we can multitask.
Turns out, we suck at multitasking. We think we’re being super efficient by listening to the podcast and “thinking” at the same time, but the reality is we aren’t doing both - we kinda do neither. To quote Oliver Burkeman in Four Thousand Weeks:
When you’re faced with too many demand, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer [instead] of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable. It grows alluring to try to multitask…
This is us trying to control time better, he says, and it sets us up for failure. This is because, instead of just “being time” as he calls it, we are always trying to evaluate our time for its future usefulness. Living this way, the present moment really falls away, and instead of mastering your time, as Burkeman points out, it “ends up mastering you.” You’re living forever in the promise of a future time, when the deep investment and focus you crave will be available, and your so-called efficiency pays off. Meanwhile, life has passed. And what did we do with it?
The promise of boredom
Alone, one feels the whole universe, and none of one's personality.
- Sheila Heti, Motherhood
I like this idea I read in a Maggie Nelson essay, that making art is the act of trying to ‘become a stranger to oneself’ (paraphrasing Adam Phillips). It’s moving outside the hard limits of your experience, through the medium of your experience, in order to see things anew. That’s the first big potential of silencing enough of the world to experience your own solitude and limitations in a way that feels capacious. Firing up a podcast or a video or scrolling a feed are all facsimiles for hanging out with other people, thereby curing your “boredom” before it even occurs. As Sheila Heti’s quote above suggests, it is a lack of contrast that opens up creative possibilities sometimes - alone, your personality has no reason to be spotlighted. Nobody else is there, and so you do become the whole universe for a while. There’s your chance to move beyond yourself, by seeing yourself differently.
This suggests another potential: not only seeing yourself anew, but seeing the world anew. Can we look at things differently without the distraction of other people?
(Agnès Varda & Nurith Aviv discussing the making of their film Daguerréotypes).
The act of looking is important. And the act of ‘artistic looking’ (to quote from Mary Gaitskill), means to afford things their due - really give them the respect and consideration they deserve. The potential here is to reconsider what might have otherwise been missed in speed, sound and restlessness.
To write, to do any kind of work well, I believe we must at least have a solitude of mind, a solitude of seeing. Of course there are those who collaborate, but even then there must be moments of retreat.
- Amina Cain, A Horse at Night
Retreat, as Amina Cain puts it in this quote, is the extreme end of things - but we need retreat, sometimes. We can’t expect creativity to flow when we are always sifting through inputs. We need time to synthesise, for all the connections to form and something new to emerge. But even this betrays an embedded kind of thinking that I am subject to; taking us right back to my first point on productivity, I quote Jenny Odell:
We inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.
- Jenny Odell, How to do Nothing
Being still, being silent, being alone - these may well be necessary for creative ‘newness’. But they also might simply serve as maintenance. Let the brain go fallow for a while, and give it a chance to embed the ideas, embed the knowledge, rather than always having to strive for the next productive piece.
Some final thoughts (for now)…
A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.
- Don DeLillo
We want to be able to focus, we say we don’t have time or the right environment, but then when the silence finally arrives, it’s scary. So scary, we’re desperate to fill it. End the silence as quickly as possible and get the relief of doing exactly what it seems you were supposed to be doing - avoiding being too alone, too unproductive, or wasting time. Quick, look busy! Here’s a final quote from the Stevenson essay:
Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality… Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough…
Perhaps here lies a more positive interpretation of your boredom; it is an act of generosity, in which you expand beyond the remit of “Necessity” (as Stevenson calls it) and exercise a more balanced, energetic and curious self. What else might be possible when you stop for a moment, and just let yourself be bored? I won’t know until I let go, and try it.
I ask you: when’s the last time you were truly, properly bored?
Until next time,
Be well.
CCx