There is a meme on the Internet about Middle Ages peasants working less hours than a modern white collar worker. The claim states that the church was ensuring peasants are happy and fulfilled by keeping them away from work for most of the year.
This claim is well debunked in a masterful series on the medieval peasant, by Dr. Bret C. Devereaux, particularly in part IVb. My thoughts are on the perceived modern need to be entertained at all times. Or, if you want to feel better about yourself, the grinding culture can help you feel productive at all times by consuming books, podcasts, courses, videos…Entertainment nonetheless, even if it's shit packaged as self-help.
This meme isn’t really about peasants it’s about how we romanticize entertainment. There seems to be a perception that you need to be fed information, reinforced by a sense of duty/productivity (more courses, more books, more podcasts, stock market news, crypto…), boredom (movies, tv shows, music…), addiction (gossip, doom-scrolling, nsfw…) or others. Tech, including social media companies, aims to take every waking moment of attention we have, having a solution to keep people entertained practically every moment of the day. Regardless, one of the things that is necessary and, sadly, dying is… just being bored. Allowing your brain to rest, allowing yourself to introspect and reflect, think on your own, and do stuff.
It’s in those moments when you’re bored when you ask yourself important questions about your life. Not necessarily philosophical cliche like the meaning of life but also practical ones for your day to day. What am I doing at work that is holding my career back? Am I in the right relationship? Did I offend that person? Is what I’m doing the best solution to the problem at hand? Did I treat my dog correctly? Am I eating the right food ? Should I clean my house?
When you’re bored you reset your pleasure baseline and bring it back down, there's even a trend of Dopamine Detox going on, although the science of most methods seems sketchy. We get bored after doing something exciting, and it is needed so we can introspect, reflect and learn about it. As well as a moment of pause to explore our situation and decide on next steps. If you get your phone out to watch a short when, you release more dopamine and bring that baseline even higher and higher. You do that for months or years without pause and real life interests you less and less as you constantly bombarded by pleasure hits straight from TikTok.
Why get bored?
Two reasons, personal happiness on one hand and professional performance on the other. And both have the same solution, being able to focus and enjoy the moment, the task at hand, the real moment spent doing something rather than being entertained. If you drop passive entertainment, specially short form, and focus on doing things you’ll eventually find a higher sense of satisfaction in doing these things, leading to more enjoyment and engagement doing them and more success. As well, you’d be bringing your entertainment threshold down in time and your day to day routine will start to look more and more engaging. Try sitting and doing literally nothing (no devices, nothing to entertain) for 5-10 min. Suddenly, cleaning the house seems like a better alternative. Bringing your enjoyment baseline down will help you find meaning and entertainment in your actual life and it will help you stay more engaged and active in it, leading to more happiness, joy and success. There’s no need for yet another book, another learning. If you have a dog, look at it now. Never read a book, never touched any tech and is far happier than pretty much any human doing the most mundane things. Dogs just want to be part of whatever you’re doing and they’re pretty much always hyper about doing anything at all. Einstein himself had a great quote along these lines:
Conclusion
When you get bored, use those moments to reflect a bit on what you’re dealing with. Think of it as a break from everything, a moment to be alone with yourself. You’ll start not liking what you see, but you will end up liking dealing with yourself given time . Use those moments to decide what to do next, what is it that you should be doing that are not. And get bored, a bit desperate for something to do. You’ll see then how pleasurable it is to get stuff done, and how enjoyable it can be. First time I tried it it was awful, but in a matter of weeks one of my favorite pastimes ended up being mopping the floor and organizing my garage. Just time alone for myself to do simple things and reflect on my own life doing them.
In general, we all would benefit from shifting our time and energy more from passive consumption towards activity. Even if the consumption seems productive (like reading books), try to find yourself doing and thinking more (try writing) vs just observing and consuming. You’ll find it impacts your life far more as well as being more satisfying.