I'm a mormon for boredom, and we're all a bit fucked.

So I’ve begun my 800th ADHD passion project, and I wont tell you about it yet, partially because I’m trying to adopt Dan Berry’s wonderful “make it then tell everybody” ethos from his podcast of the same name, and partially because I’m honestly not sure it will ever see the light of day or get finished.

But through this project it’s led me down a research rabbit hole about elevators. In the 1800s when elevators were still early days, a dude named Otis figured out how to make them safe to carry people, and this revolutionised how tall we could make buildings.

Then, famously, there was a hotel/ apartment building in New York with an elevator that was constantly getting complaints about how slow the elevator was. They looked at all the ways to make the elevator faster, but were too expensive to execute. One of their new hires, who had just been studying psychology, pointed out that the problem wasn’t that the elevator wasn’t fast enough… but instead something else.

He puzzled over why people were so impatient about a journey that took mere minutes, and he put it down to boredom. They installed mirrors in the elevators, and the complaints stopped overnight.

Most people take from this some kind of LinkedIn-able story of problem solving and making sure you solve the correct problem to save money and blah blah blah.

What I take away from this, is that it’s a story about the general public of people in the mid 1800s who couldn’t sit alone with their thoughts for a few minutes. They just didn’t like being alone, their attention span was too short for an elevator ride. In 1849.

I appreciate that they weren’t mocked for having a bad attention span or told to get over it. They just got their problem solved. Whilst I understand that the criticism Gen Z and Gen Alpha get about technology and attention spans, and how some of these are very real concerns about the effects of short form media on our literal brain chemistry, I do feel as though we have lost touch with how much of this conversation is related to technology, and how much of it is straight up humanness.

The feeling of emptiness and periods of time with less in them has existed for as long as humans have, but the term “boredom” is a relatively new concept. (spoiler alert: its capitalism… again)

The concept and use of the specific word ‘boredom’ was popularised around the time of the industrial revolution, when repetitive tasks were enforced into an unregulated working week, well before employment laws and unions were invented.

Before this, times of extended nothingness were described with words like melancholy and ennui. (which are much whimsier if you ask me)

TLDR, boredom is a capitalist term to make us feel guilty for our lack of productivity.

But what I’ve also stumbled across in this research rabbit hole, and oh my what a rabbit hole it is, is that governments have historically feared the bored.

People who are bored have more time to be curious, engaged, and alert. People who are too tired don’t protest, they don’t unionise, they don’t create community. Disparate, tired, and occupied people are easier to govern, because they don’t have the time or energy to care.

And look as much as I want to sit here with my tinfoil hat and say that governments and corporations have created the attention economy that keeps us zombies to our phones to make us easier to govern, I understand that that’s not really how it works. There’s a gazillion different micro events happening all across time and across the globe that have gotten us here. Its just really interesting to see how it’s all come together.

Frequent periods of nothingness are really good for you.

I once heard an analogy about manifesting that I think applies here too. If you put your order into the kitchen, but every 2 minutes you call the waitress back to change your order because its taking too long, you’re never going to get any food, because the chefs don’t have time to start cooking anything before you want something else and they have to start from scratch again.

Our brain works this way too - ‘downtime’ for lack of a better word, is where our brain synthesises things, where it connects dots, and CREATES things. If you keep feeding it new information all the time it spends its whole time cataloguing and processing, and none of it synthesising or… thinking. (This is one of the leading theories for why we dream)

A hunter who never takes a second to butcher his spoils but instead seeks the next will die in his endeavour for more.

I highly recommend you go read one of my favourite papers that I discovered during my master’s studies that’s titled “Doing Nothing and Nothing To Do: The Hidden Value of Empty Time and Boredom” by Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries. (link here). Its one of those essays that has changed the way I move through the world. If nothing else, just go read the abstract - its less than a page!

Please note, due to the structure of the title, I am often left with the Curtis Roach song “Bored in the house” lyrics “bored in the house, and I’m in the house bored” on repeat in my brain, that resonated with so many of us in lockdown, that you can listen to here: https://youtu.be/StLfJr4jnDs

Kiets de Vries discussed mental health benefits, creativity boosters, and information overload… AND HE WROTE IT IN 2014. He said;

“But although being busy may give us a temporary high, the danger of all this busyness is that we may lose our connections not just with one another but also with ourselves. We may become strangers to our own feelings and needs. We may become alienated from ourselves, and lose sight of who we are.’

Its exhausting to be mocked for our short attention spans by the same people who directly benefit from our inattentiveness. Being bored is really difficult at the start, but I think it’s a really important act of self-care and modern rebellion. I’m not suggesting you go jump on an NX2 at 8am with no headphones, i’m not a monster, but maybe just listen to music one time on the commute and leave the doom scrolling at home. Look at the neighbourhood go by, watch the absolute corporate creatures on the busses at rush hour, and give yourself some time to think.

These times of boredom are deeply sacred to me now. They allow me to experience flow state, and from there I can daydream.

These daydreams make up the core of my art practice, and I wouldn’t be the same person without them.

I remember being 7 and having my first personal music device - I think a hand-me-down ipod shuffle from 2006 (pictured below) and not being able to go to sleep until I’d worn myself out pretending I was a rockstar performing Saddle Club and Hannah Montana songs. I think its what makes me so creative. I’ve built strong neural pathways from being bored a lot.

So go forth my beautiful friends, go forth and be bored! Synthesise, hypothesise, fantasise, and becomes gorgeously ungovernable.

Let me know how you go.

See you next time.

Becks