The Lowe-Down

“How long the same things? Surely I will yawn, I will sleep, I will eat, I will be thirsty, I will be cold, I will be hot. Is there no end?” So says Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca, in a lament not dissimilar to many students around exam revision time. Boredom is generally not something we welcome and will in fact go to great lengths to avoid. James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, writes of 007 that, “boredom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice that Bond utterly condemned”. Hard liquor, dangerous women, fast cars and death-defying missions – Bond was up for all of these. But boredom, the feeling of missing out on life and an ever-pervading sense of greyness, was too much for Britain’s greatest spy. And many of us would agree with him. For most students the greatest condemnation of a lesson or activity is that it was boring.

So why are we so opposed to boredom? Writer Mark Sayers, drawing on the work of Mark Fisher, the former late British cultural critic and blogger, links our fear of boredom to the prevailing culture of hedonism or pleasure seeking. Fisher suggests that our modern Hedonism is less like, “I’m going to break away from the disciplinary society like a hippie and just enjoy pure pleasure.” It’s more you’re expected to continually be in pleasure. Sayers explains, “And to not be in a state where I’m experiencing some kind of pleasure would mean that something’s wrong. So boredom, difficulty, challenge, all these things become signals that you’re not experiencing something pleasurable and entertaining. So something must be wrong. So this means that you then become tremendously afraid of difficulty.” The problem of course is that to learn something, to create or build something, you are inevitably going to have to experience difficulty and probably boredom.

Psychologists James Danckert and John D Eastwood, the authors of ‘Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom’ suggest that boredom has been widely misunderstood, perhaps even unfairly maligned. Boredom evolved to help us, says Danckert. It signals that we are unengaged, in need of an activity to satisfy us. “I think that’s a good thing, in a lot of ways. How we respond to it is up to us. I think you can minimise it. But do you want to totally eliminate it? I don’t think you do.” That hasn’t stopped us trying though. Thanks in part to technology, we have plenty of distractions from boredom literally at our fingertips. Although it turns out this may not actually be helping. Columnist Elle Hunt reflects on this in her article, ‘Why it’s good to be bored’.
“But this over-abundance of things to do itself can exacerbate boredom. Eastwood evokes the “paradox of choice”, saying “options are not necessarily freeing and do not necessarily make us happy”. Seeking relief on the internet “can feel like trying to drink from a fire hose” Danckert and Eastwood write. Not only that, in hijacking our attention, technology may, over time, compound the issue it seems to alleviate. “It takes time and attention to scroll through Instagram or play Candy Crush, but at the end of it, you’re not satisfied, because you didn’t do the harder work of figuring out: ‘What do I really want to do?’ It’s a vicious cycle: you got some engagement, but it wasn’t the thing you needed,” says Danckert. That is the challenge that boredom lays down, he says: “to figure out what is going to be meaningful and useful to you in your life”.” https://www.theguardian.com/global/2020/may/03/why-its-good-to-be-bored

Boredom is an inevitable part of life and is not something we need to fear. As parents, your child’s complaint of boredom is not something you need to fix. It might actually be a good thing if your child is bored. No teacher sets out to create a boring lesson, but it may not be a bad thing if our students are occasionally bored at school. Valerie Kirk from Connections Academy suggests six benefits of boredom.

1. Boredom can stimulate creativity.
2. Boredom can help students learn how to solve problems.
3. Boredom can help students discover new interests.
4. Boredom can help build self-esteem.
5. Boredom can help student learn how to overcome failure.
6. Boredom can help kids make connections.

(https://www.connectionsacademy.com/support/resources/article/why-boredom-could-be-good-for-your-student/)

This is not a new idea of course. The author of the Book of James in the New Testament wrote this: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” (James 1:2-4)

We will all struggle with boredom at times, but we don’t need to fear it and we need to help our young people to cope with it. One of the ways Danckert and Eastwood suggest responding to boredom is to find purpose. Boredom is not an absence of things to do, it is the struggle to find value in any of the options available to you. Being able to connect with a reason “why” for doing something can make it less boring. Instead of agitating for anything to do, we should try to determine what’s really important – whether right now, or for the future.

So, the next time you or a young person near you reaches for a device out of boredom, pause a moment, sit with the boredom and use the time to ask, “What is something of value I could do right now?” You might be surprised by the fruit that a moment of boredom bears!