We live in incredible times. I carry around a small device that, with a few simple taps, I can call up images of distant black holes, the collected works of Shakespeare, and the dankest, silliest memes. When I’m waiting on line to check out at the supermarket, I can check my work email. While I’m waiting my turn at the dentist’s office, I can check what’s trending on Twitter. While I’m sitting on the toilet, I can scroll through pretty Instagram pictures. Even watching TV, if I’m not fully invested in the plot, all I have to do is pick up my phone and I’m whisked away to another dimension.
This is a technological miracle, and I value having this ability. But it’s a dangerous one. It’s a terrible thing to never be bored, to always have one form of media or another piped into your brain at gigabits per second.
When I was a kid (long ago in the pre-Internet days) and my friends weren’t around, I’d complain to my mother, “Mom, I’m so bored!” And she’d respond in her typical Eastern-European Jewish curt way, “Then go play with yourself!”
She wasn’t trying to be cute or make a gross pun. She was telling me to use my imagination. And one day, amidst my strongly manifested boredom, I created an adventure in my backyard to entertain myself. I dreamed up imaginary characters and galaxy-spanning plots, and I, of course, was the hero.
I played by myself, but I was never alone.
Something clicked that day, something that’s never left me: I realized that I had the power to control my view of the world. I realized that if I used my imagination I would never be bored again. This was a revelation to me, and I can trace a direct path from that weekend afternoon many years ago to myself now, a writer, artist, and coder — all tasks that require exercising strong powers of imagination.
Social media murders the imagination. Boredom cultivates it.
Cal Newport in his excellent book Deep Work speaks of setting aside three to four hours every day to turn off all distractions. Silence your phone and disconnect from your email. Remove all potential interruptions. This quiet space allows you to enter what artists call “flow” or “being in the zone,” that deeply immersive state of intentional creativity. Getting into a flow state takes practice. It’s a muscle that you need to exercise. But with endless, constant interruptions, that muscle atrophies faster than the latest hashtag.
I’d like you to try this experiment: All day today, try to notice how often you reach for your phone when you’re bored. Do you reach for it at lunch? While waiting in line for coffee? Between work tasks? How much time do you spend scrolling Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok? Today I’d like you to try something different. Instead of opening that app, put down that phone, and just sit.
“And do what?” you say.
Do nothing.
Allow yourself to be bored.
Have a look around.
Take in your surroundings.
Have a look at the table. How was it made? Look out the window at the leaves on that tree. Notice their colors. Listen to the sounds of cars or birds or people. Smell the the coffee, pollen, the laundry scent of your own clothing.
Just take in the world. Breathe. Sit.
Without the constant stimulation of social media, you may find things oddly…quiet. And uncomfortable.
At this point, you may really want pick up that phone. Don’t. Examine this feeling some more. Do you feel an almost overwhelming urge to pick up your phone? To check your email? To scan TikTok? That discomfort you feel is a real addiction, your desperate need to get that hit of dopamine from views and likes and subscribes. Social media is deliberately designed this way — to keep you addicted and coming back.
If you feel this pull strongly — and I have felt it too — I’d advise you to read Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier. Jaron was a pioneer of virtual reality and the early internet, and he was a strong believer in the power of technology to liberate humanity. But he changed his views when he realized how social media was designed to amplify the worst human traits to get advertiser clicks, how it’s been engineered to keep you addicted, upset, and most of all engaged.
This addiction isn’t your fault. You’ve been hoodwinked by malicious psychologists and morally repugnant technologists hungry for self-profit. They’re the equivalent of heroin dealers offering up free samples of their brown powder.
Social media is always free, because they know you’ll come back for more.
Social media is the imagination killer. In the realm of free thought that boredom allows, the mind has free space to wander. Instead of drowning your mind with images and videos and ideas that some pernicious algorithm hopes will keep you engaged, boredom means you’re stuck with your self alone.
What might you notice on that supermarket check-out line when not scrolling on your phone? What ideas might you dream up on your lunch break if you weren’t on Twitter? What new associations and ideas could arise in your mind if you exercise your imagination instead of having your mind exorcised? Boredom allows you the space to be creative. With boredom, you confront yourself and your relationship to others.
Recently I was watching a TV show from the early 2000s with a scene in a coffee shop. I noticed that no one was on their phones. They were reading books or chatting or just sitting and looking out the window. This show was fiction, but it reflects a truth. Before about 2008, before iPhones and Android devices hijacked our attention, before social media infected into our lives, the world looked and felt much different. Now, when I go to my local coffee shop or restaurant, and even the small local bookstore, I see everyone on their phones, even when sitting with others.
I’m not a Luddite. I work in IT. I recognize the ability of technology to liberate humanity. But technology can be a prison too. We’ve let social media companies pull the wool over our eyes. We’ve let algorithms and profits suck away our capacity for extended, creative play, which can only happen in a distraction-free space.
The poet and artist William Blake, in his four-fold vision, said that imagination is the greatest human trait, and only by exercising our imagination can we realize our greatest creative potential.
Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
In a recent New York Times op-ed, writer David Brooks says, “What happens to a society that lets so much of its imaginative capacity lie fallow? Perhaps you wind up in a society in which people are strangers to one another and themselves.”
What happens in a world where we’re so constantly distracted, so eager to alleviate even the slightest hint of boredom, that we have no space left over for imaginative play? You get the world we’re in now — full of disconnected, paranoid, anxious, and inflexible people. A world where most have trouble envisioning a better world because the current one is continually, constantly, scrolling past us at 240 characters per second.
Set aside time to be bored. You’ll not only increase your capacity for imaginative play, you’ll see the world differently. You’ll allow yourself space to dream up new ideas, to make new connections and associations that you’d never do in a state constant, agitated distraction.
I am a VERY novice writer...I started writing out of BOREDOM. I am 60 years old. I grew up on a ranch in Northern Idaho. In my middle-teens, I started working in the woods building logging roads and cleaning up 'Rape-and-Run' trash-wood fields from ruined logging activity from a hundred years earlier.
In my mid-20's, after having many friends killed in the woods, I decided to join the U.S. military...because it was safer. I served in the Navy as a shipboard engineer working with gas turbines and primitive computers. 61 countries, 20 years, some combat time, and some completely debilitating injuries later, I can't work anymore.
So I tried the computer thing...and quickly became 'addicted' to social media. One day a few months later, when my wife came home from her job...and I had been on Facebook ALL DAY! I quit doing that. Now do as much physical work as I can, puttering in the garden, fixing cast-off lawnmowers and giving them away, and doing light housework. That's all great, but not much mental stimulation. So I started writing to fill that blank.
Somehow, I organically arrived at the conclusion that most social media is destructive and walked away.
Funny, because I'm not that bright...
A great reminder. Let's hope it sticks. :)