Boredom is essential to building creativity and overcoming challenges.Getty Images/iStockphoto
When I was a kid, my siblings and I were not allowed to say “I’m bored.” If we uttered the forbidden phrase, we were instantly assigned a chore, so we learned to avoid it like the plague. I always assumed my parents enforced this rule because they didn’t want to hear us complain, but now I wonder if it had deeper historical roots.
As a culture, we have a fraught relationship with boredom. For a long time, it has been viewed as an unpleasant, even unethical feeling. In medieval times, according to Patricia Meyer Spacks, author of a book called Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind, if someone showed the symptoms of what we now identify as boredom, they were guilty of the sin of “acedia,” a “dangerous form of spiritual alienation” or apathy that was considered disrespectful toward the world and its creator.
The rise of industrialism and labour-saving devices only intensified our obsession with using time productively. Time spent doing nothing was viewed as time wasted, profit lost, opportunity neglected. Boredom was a feeling that needed to be actively defended against, more for economic reasons than moral ones.
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Today, we continue to view boredom with intense aversion. Many parents strive to banish boredom from their children’s lives, either because they don’t want the child to experience an unpleasant state of mind or miss a chance to get a leg up in a fiercely competitive world. Kids are often given devices for entertainment so they’ll never feel bored again – but is that a good thing? I don’t think so.
None of these attitudes toward boredom strikes me as healthy or beneficial. We need to move past these archaic conceptions of boredom as being something to avoid at all costs, and start viewing it as inevitable and necessary, even as an exciting prerequisite to discovery.
Boredom, at its best, sparks creativity. It is an intensely uncomfortable temporary state that children (and adults) must move through in order to reach the other side, where they will discover new interests, skills and hobbies. When we deprive children of boredom by offering instant, shallow screen-based distraction or overscheduling their lives with organized activities, we greatly diminish their chances of becoming good at new and challenging things.
The Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote about bored teens: “Only in solitude could those youths develop the creative habits – journaling, doodling, daydreaming – that lead to original work.” Without boredom, it is difficult to imagine how we might produce the next generation of artists, writers, musicians and scientists.
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Researchers hypothesize that declining scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking among American children today are linked to their increased use of screen-based technology during downtime. As Christine Rosen writes in The Extinction of Experience, instead of being left to their own imaginative devices, young wandering minds are captured by devices, at great cost to curiosity-driven rabbit holes and potential “aha!” moments.
The ability to cope with boredom and transform it into a creative force is like a muscle that must be trained to remain strong. Parents can encourage this by getting out of the way, protecting unscheduled time in their kids’ lives and not being afraid to let them be idle or aimless – a great approach for summer vacation. Kids do not remain bored for long; they are marvellously resourceful and always find things to do when they have no other choice.
Homes become more interesting with the addition of art supplies, books, cooking ingredients, musical instruments, carpentry materials, board games, pets, gardens, workout equipment and more. Make a list with your child of activities they enjoy and put it on the fridge for future reference. The outdoors is where most great adventures occur. Send kids outside to play whenever possible, ideally with friends for prolonged periods of time.
Most critically, limit access to handheld devices and video games. As Rosen writes, these eliminate boredom “not by teaching us how to cope with it but by outsourcing our attention so that we don’t have to cope with it.”
Boredom should not be feared or forbidden. Instead, think of it as fallow time, an important chance for the mind to rest in order to become more fertile in the future.
