Boredom- A Manifesto

What boredom has taught me over the years; my tribute to the luxury of being bored

I have a very distinct memory from my 4th standard days.

I was at a close friend’s house where a few of us were hanging around, and we heard his younger sister crying very loudly. We thought there must be something wrong, but it turns out she was just bored, and that's why she was crying.

My friend casually mentioned that she does that, and we moved on with the day.

It was a funny moment that has stayed with me until today, but honestly, it is a trend that has significant implications in the real world today.

The moment boredom hits us, we often try to run away from it.

Social media has made it easy for us to not get bored. One slight hint of boredom and we can scroll through Instagram or Twitter to satisfy that boredom.

It has become frankly impossible to be bored in today’s day and age and that is where the problem arises.

In the past, boredom was considered a curse; today, it is a luxury to be bored with the easy availability of entertainment.

I have observed that some of my most insightful ideas come to me when I am doing absolutely nothing.

Boredom often leads to good ideas because the state of boredom allows the mind to wander.

If you’re waiting for brilliance to strike, try getting bored first. That’s the takeaway of a study published recently in the journal Academy of Management Discoveries, which found that boredom can spark individual productivity and creativity.

“In the study, people who had gone through a boredom-inducing task — methodically sorting a bowl of beans by color, one by one — later performed better on an idea-generating task than peers who first completed an interesting craft activity. (The task: to come up with excuses for being late that wouldn’t make someone look bad.) The bored folks outperformed the artists both in terms of idea quantity and quality, as ranked by objective outsiders who assigned uniqueness scores to each one.”

There are two types of boredom that I can break down based on my experience:

1. Avoidable Boredom:

   Boredom that you can avoid, one that serves no purpose. This includes stopping a show, movie, or book you are bored with or anything related to entertainment.

2. Unavoidable Boredom:

   Boredom that you cannot avoid and that is part of many phases in our lives. However, this type of boredom leads to growth. Examples include:

• Investing systematically for years without making any fancy changes.

• Doing the same kind of workout for years, gradually increasing the weight, pace, or number of repetitions each time.

• Following the same meal plan to maintain your health over the years.

• Performing routine tasks at work that accumulate into something big.

Human beings are desirous of some level of novelty and as soon as the novelty factor wears off, boredom starts creeping in.

The key to consistency in an investing plan, exercise plan, and work is getting past that boredom and novelty factor.

• Junk food provides a sense of novelty through its culinary taste.

• Finding the next big multi-bagger stock every other day is due to this chase of novelty.

• Finding that 30-day workout to get you ripped is another case of novelty.

The most successful people around me, whom I admire, continue to engage in the same routine tasks every single day without complaining, and they have been doing so for years on end.

In my real-life observations, I have seen this phenomenon play out in the gym. It is the reason why many individuals become bored with the slow rate of progress in the gym. They attempt to push themselves with heavier weights, go all in, and eventually fail, leading them to quit the entire process of going to the gym or they try to rush the process by getting their heart rate up higher than their previous workout in the hope of burning more calories than last time. However, they fail to understand that growth is a slow and time-consuming process.

A snippet of a slow boring process in the gym, only increasing by one rep or weight every workout

With clients at work, it often comes down to providing additional stocks in addition to their existing portfolios or determining whether we are making any changes to their similarly uneventful existing portfolio, which has grown well but has not undergone significant changes for a long time.

I often take a lot of these learnings from the gym and work and observe that they are very applicable to my personal life.

From Tim Ferris’ Tools of Titans Chapter- Lazy, A Manifesto

• Archimedes “Eureka” in the bath

• Newton’s Apple

• Jekyll and Hyde

• The benzine ring

History is full of stories or inspirations that came in idle moments of boredom.

A person who doesn’t get bored can be easily manipulated.

Every day is a learning experience, and I agree with that sentiment. However, if we strive too much for novelty experiences, we may neglect important tasks necessary for our growth because of our inability to accept boredom.

Life is about appreciating the beauty in the mundane and not avoiding it every time it comes with its warm embrace.

Conclusion

Let’s start being more accepting of boredom in life. I often find myself bored at times, but I have learned to live with it.

Now, I treat it more as a luxury than a punishment in this fast-paced world where we are constantly thinking about work or personal life during every waking hour of the day.