Good Boredom

 What defines our lives is definitely not boredom.

Looking back on the boredom of my youth I see a kind of positivity in it. A positivity I certainly did not feel at the time... however it is not the boredom itself that is the positive but the reaction to it. 

Boredom breeds a way of thinking. The thinking of how do I escape this?. Imagination and inventiveness can come from this. As a teenager, when my younger cousins came to visit I would think of games to play with them in order to entertain myself as much as them. Playfulness is one aspect that can arise from us encountering boredom. For fear of sounding like an old fogey, we didn't have access to screens to keep us all individually sated. We thought and we played or we talked or read or drew or did whatever we could think of. We staved off boredom when we were not sat steeping in it. 

Now though the ease and comfort of a screen is often too tempting a distraction. It is far too easy to stimulate the brain in this low effort way. This way of fighting boredom does not engage the creativity that is within all of us. Through this we increasingly become passive absorbers of information. Often not fully absorbing due to distractions like second screens. Our brains are a muscle that we must use or they will atrophy. Boredom is not good for the brain on the face of it, but neither is a lazy reliance on quick hyper stimulation. Boredom should be allowed to happen. It is normal and healthy to be bored. The way it is tackled should be more thoughtful. 

One effective way to combat boredom and work your brain is through socialising. Face to face ideally. With a wide range of people, not just a small familiar group that fall back on the same topics again & again. There are many ways to tackle boredom but this article is not about the solutions. You find the solutions to your boredom. Maybe for you that is closing this article right now.

Do not be afraid to put yourself in a situation where you could be bored. How will you fix it? How will you do so without the use of a screen?

What am I trying to say here? Get some hobbies? Hang out with your friends? As usual I do not really know. Like everything on this blog I simply want to write something that at least sort of makes sense before I get bored and give up on it while it's still in my drafts. I want you to be happy. You deserve to be happy. After a hard day of work of course you are entitled to do what you want. If you have been using your brain all day it is a relief to turn to something where you do not need to use it. I'm just saying less of a reliance on screens seems to help me.

I wrote the word boredom twenty times in this article. Just kidding, it was fifteen. Kidding again, it was twelve. A thesaurus may be a good idea. Bit boring though.