Yesterday I was reading another great essay by Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren, who writes a subscribers-only newsletter for The New York Times. She interviewed Krista Boan, who co-founded Screen Sanity.
Panic over screen time
Oh, the hand-wringing that goes into discussions about screen time, especially among parents! Holy crap, it’s like the blind leading the blind. Tons of parents don’t know the first thing about managing their own screen time, let alone that of their own kids. And just take a look around in any store, mall, or restaurant you venture into and count the number of kids in shopping carts and strollers zoned out with a cell phone in their hands. Little kids. Tiny baby kids who are missing out on the world around them.
This was the quote that absolutely captured me:
Another example for parents of little ones is children’s boredom. It can be excruciating to deal with as a parent. And it is so tempting to just pacify them.
Boredom is the doorway to deep creativity. If they can get through the conflict they’re experiencing internally, they will go into deep play. Deep play helps us keep calm and be recentered.
—Krista Boan, co-founder of Screen Sanity, in “Managing Screen Time is a Family Affair”
Being bored sparks creative fire
There’s absolutely no doubt that boredom has a constructive side, and not only when it comes to kids.
Our current society is hyper-connected and provides an endless number of stimuli to keep us constantly plugged in. It’s almost as if boredom has become something to avoid at all costs. Once you finally have even just two minutes without anything in particular to do, out comes the phone and the scroll. You see it on any public bus or subway, and especially in restaurants, where entire families are seated around a table and everyone is looking down at their own screen.
Get through the internal conflict
This idea that “boredom is the doorway to deep creativity” is so true. I’ll tell you a story. One summer when we were back visiting the US, I had my kids turn off all devices in the afternoon, and hoo boy did they complain! After maybe a half hour of them lamenting how bored—how incredibly, impossibly bored—they were, and me repeatedly responding that boredom never killed anyone, things grew eerily silent.
They suddenly needed paper, and markers. They asked if they could have my old tape recorder I had showed them from when I was a kid. They asked if I had any of those plastic badge holders people wear around their necks.
After a while, lo and behold, they invited me to come aboard their airplane. They had taken all the chairs in the house and lined them up in rows to simulate a small airplane interior. My daughter welcomed me onboard and began to play a “prerecorded safety announcement” on my 1980s tape recorder, while my other daughter went through all the silent motions of showing how to put your child’s oxygen mask on before your own. My son checked my ticket and helped me find my seat.
“If they can get through the conflict they’re experiencing internally, they will go into deep play. Deep play helps us keep calm and be recentered.”
Deep play. Calm. Recentered.
The trick is getting through the internal conflict and out to the other side.
Play as an adult
As we become adults, play and fun become massively underrated and undervalued. It’s as if adulting was never supposed to involve anything other than hard, tedious tasks that suck all the joy out of life.
And so many of us tend to pacify our boredom, anxiety, or any variety of uncomfortable feelings with screen time as a distraction. Mindless consumption once again, just like Temu, but in this case consuming with screen time on a device.
What if the next time you feel bored, on edge, and itching to scroll on your phone simply out of habit, you consciously choose to stay bored? To feel that internal conflict? To just sit in that boredom and see where it leads?
Mo Willems on fortuitous boredom
On his podcast Lightning Bugs, one of my favorite musicians, Ben Folds, interviewed the delightful children’s book author Mo Willems on Art as a Passion and Business and Learning to Stay a Child at Heart.
In the interview, Willems said he designates Tuesdays and Thursdays as “reactive” days of work in which he responds to things he needs to actively respond to. The other three days are left open to a sort of “fortuitous boredom” that allows him to “marinate” and facilitates the creative process.
It’s paradoxical, because by purposely allowing “empty” time, Willems expands his ability to create.
[42:04] Ben Folds: So what you're really doing is you're saying on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I’m going to make literally office hours and I’m going to just sit and squeeze out ideas?
Mo Willems: I’m gonna go for a walk, I’m going to draw some abstractions, I’ll have a swim … If I’m in production, I will be in production. If I have drawings that I have to do I'll do that, that's part of it, but um, I'm gonna let my mind wander … I’m gonna become … allow myself a fortuitous boredom.
Time for boredom isn’t a luxury
Making time and space for fortuitous boredom shouldn’t be something reserved only for famous creative people who have the income and the means to carve out special time to simply let their minds wander.
The kind of boredom I’m talking about here isn’t a chronic boredom characteristic of people who lack curiosity about the world around them. Rather, it’s the ability to let yourself disengage from the frenetic pace and stimuli of daily life and allow life to present itself to you organically, as it comes. It’s the ability to stop seeking out things to keep you constantly engaged and entertained and simply sit back to see what’s going on around you. It’s presence.
Fortuitous means “happening by chance rather than intention” and the reason Willems calls it a fortuitous boredom is because the very nature of “happening by chance” can let your brain relax enough to allow creative juices to flow.
Boredom: creating the conditions for creativity
Maria Popova’s brilliant website The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) has a wealth of great thinkers expounding on the constructive nature of boredom. If you’re feeling bored, have a look at a couple:
How often, in fact, the child’s boredom is met by that most perplexing form of disapproval, the adult’s wish to distract him — as though the adults have decided that the child’s life must be, or be seen to be, endlessly interesting. It is one of the most oppressive demands of adults that the child should be interested, rather than take time to find what interests him. Boredom is integral to the process of taking one’s time.
—Adam Phillips, “On Being Bored,” in his 1993 book On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life
Among those who are rich enough to choose their way of life, the particular brand of unendurable boredom from which they suffer is due, paradoxical as this may seem, to their fear of boredom. In flying from the fructifying kind of boredom, they fall a prey to the other far worse kind. A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.
—Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
I also enjoyed the reflections and links in the piece Is Boredom the Secret Weapon to Unlock Your Creative Genius? by Andy Murphy, published in Illumination, which included this gem, which I’ve heard time and time again:
An often-mentioned requirement for the creative process in artists and scientists is simply empty time. — Teaching originality? Common habits behind creative production in science and arts
So, the next time you feel like you need to “fill up” your time with something “productive,” remember that the simple experience of living in the fullness of time with nothing in particular to do, and allowing yourself to follow that time wherever it leads, is actually one of the foremost conditions for creative output. Let go and become curious to see where life will lead you when you stop trying to direct it.