An Appreciation For Boredom: I.e., An Antithesis to Mindless Scrolling
As a millennial, it boggles my mind that at one point, I existed without the Internet. A mobile device. A camera “on the go”. Facebook (Hey, you guys remember Friendster?). Instagram. YouTube. Google.
And while my life has not been that long that the number of years I lived with the Internet OUTNUMBERS the years I lived without it, the Internet has become such an intrinsic aspect of my life. Out for dinner and can’t remember where that quote your friend just said is from? Google it. On your morning commute and tired of seeing the same scenery over and over and over again? Scroll social media. Want to listen to a song that you don’t have downloaded already? Hit YouTube or Apple streaming (to think how crafty I had to be once upon a time to get songs on to my cassette for my Walkman). It’s all so simple and intuitive these days. Everything you need – right at your fingertips just so you can get everything you could possibly need RIGHT NOW. And in that manner, not be bored.
Initially, I didn’t see what the big deal was. Yes, I scroll on Instagram, and then Pinterest, and then Twitter and then back to Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, making an endless loop while I’m bored on some days. But the further I started to distance myself from social media for mental health reasons, the more I started to realise that this mindless scrolling and chasing away boredom had started to affect me. So subtly, that I didn't even realise I had a full blown problem in front of me.
We can all agree that as soon as we got our own phones and stored numbers, we promptly forgot everyone’s numbers, right? But this seemed to have exacerbated. I started to forget why I was in a room. I started to make a lot of mistakes in my writing. I take out my phone to do something and end up on a completely different app altogether, and then do something completely different and then lock it and put it away, not having done what I was supposed to do. And not remembering that I never got around to doing what I was supposed to until maybe two days later.
If this absent-mindedness was one thing, there was a completely whole different issue – sometimes I would have this overwhelming feeling like there were a thousand thoughts all fighting for my attention for RIGHT NOW within my brain. And funnily enough, this happens to be the case when I’m not using my phone. It only happens on the one day I decide not to bring my phone with me to the bathroom or the odd day I decide to people watch during my commute instead of mindlessly scrolling. This fighting for attention in my brain feels so overpowering and frustrating that I have let out a guttural roar on more than one occasion. It genuinely feels like my brain is racing towards an explosion and I want to remove my brain so that it can sit outside of me for a minute. My head would feel physically too small for my brain. It’s not pleasant, to say the least.
This chasing away boredom started to affect my work too. On multiple days, I would turn on my computer and sit down, all ready to work. Only to realise that my brain wasn’t here with me.
“Come on brain, I really need to work on this now. Please settle down and focus on this for me?”
“Nope.”
“Are you serious right now?”
“Byeeee.”
Then, as I’m in bed having meandered the day away, these fascinating ideas and thoughts crop up just as I’m about to lilt off to sleep. I often spend the next hour to two fighting off sleep and hastily scribbling things onto the notepad I keep near my bed. Lest I forget them before I get them on paper because my brain is racing ahead of my hand and pencil. This often means I wake up in the morning and squint at said scribbles because they’re usually along the lines of “Coffee flavoured juice” – Cue a fun game of wondering if I meant I wanted to buy coffee and orange flavoured juice and left out “orange” because my brain was ahead of me or if I actually wanted to infuse coffee and juice and drink it at one shot or if it was supposed to be a quirky title for a blog post someday.
All this filling boredom and void with mindless scrolling has only come to mean that I’m BOMBARDING my brain with a million other USELESS information like how YET another “friend” has gotten engaged or an influencer has gotten a book deal or about a Twitter war between two people I don’t even follow about a topic I don’t even care but I just want the tea. I have come to crave stimulation so much that I invest myself in all these dramas and feuds. When they have as much purpose for me as gelatine-infused yoghurt.
I’m not giving my brain the opportunity to just stop. And go empty. I’m never letting it get bored. Which is why it’s probably running in there like a headless chicken (oh, the irony) unable to locate the word “tomatoes” when I want to want to describe the red pasta sauce on the plat in front me, so overworked that it can’t tell the difference between “right” and “write” and so exhausted from determining what needs my attention right now. So, the second I decide to not do anything, EVERYTHING I ignored in the past few months come rushing in at full speed.
People always say infants need to sleep so much because they are learning and their brains are growing so much. And while I’m not here asking us all to be coddled, who said that we don’t naps, or at the very least, some emptiness for our brain to process what we are currently learning too? How have we so conveniently assumed that there’s no way we learn as much as an infant and thus don’t need to pause and just sit idly while our brain has the time to classify, categorise and organise new information in the background? I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that people took a nap because they were bored. Being bored meant we let our brain rest, we stimulated other aspects of it by trying to figure out what to do. Once upon a time, I made myself my own cashiering system, I had so much to doodle and write about, I saw links and associations between objects and lives that didn’t necessarily exist. Is anyone even playing “floor is lava” anymore?!
It’s so easy to dismiss these as the imagination of a child, something you simply “lose” as you “mature” but 1) what’s wrong with keeping your imagination as you continue to “get older”, 2) have we lost this imagination because we have gotten older or have we lost it altogether because we don’t give ourselves space for that aspect ourselves to wake up from its slumber? Letting ourselves get bored is how we allow ourselves to solve problems we can’t right now, it’s how we get in touch with how we are truly feeling and what we need. It’s how we help ourselves focus on ourselves instead of the various other ways through which society continues to tell us that we are not enough.
Stop scrolling. Lay on the floor and complain about being bored.
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