Boredom, daydreaming, and writing
This past fall I was lucky enough to have lunch with a dozen or so of our extended family members and long-time friends. Though many of these people didn’t know each other, I think the close connection that each of them had with my wife and me created a opportunity for the sort of engagement ordinarily reserved for long-time close friends. It was a remarkable occasion, with the conversation topics ranging from politics to favorite foods to religion and sports.
One part of the conversation has remained with me for months. Someone at the table invited us to consider the experience of being bored. “Would you say that you get bored often or only occasionally?” Several talked about being bored on occasion. I said (perhaps too arrogantly) that I’ve never been bored, simply because I always have something to think about. In fact, I said, there have been many times in my life when I’ve fervently wished that I could stop thinking, even if just for a moment.
But as I’ve thought about this claim again and again (see what I did there?) over the last few months, I’ve come to see a different side of it. Recalling this exchange is not the only thing that opens this up for me. There’s also the unsettling realization that almost every time I come to a break in the flow of my life I reach for my phone. I’m watching the Celtics game (can you believe that the Celtics are now in second place in the NBA Easter Conference, a half game up on the Knicks?!?). The action on the floor stops because of a time-out or the end of a quarter and the television goes to a commercial. Without giving it a thought, I reach for the phone that’s in my pocket. Sometimes — but not every time — I catch myself while the phone is still in my pocket and push myself to leave it there. “Surely you can think for a minute!” I say to myself. “Mute the television and think!” I say. And I do.
In The Siren’s Call, Chris Hayes writes that “the experience of boredom — when it appears, how important it is, whether it even exists — changes across time and the forms of human social and economic organization. Our age features a set of technologies and social conditions that work together to maximize our boredom if we are not constantly diverted from it” (p. 66). Those technologies and social conditions are in my pocket throughout the day. When the Celtics game broadcast goes to commercial, I don’t consciously decide to look at my phone. But something in me pushes for an external stimulus that keeps me from turning inward. I’m still not convinced that I’m bored if I’m left without some sort of external stimulus, but reaching immediately for my phone, whether by deliberate decision or mere habit, suggests that I’m trying to avoid something. When I watch my hand moving toward the pocket, I can’t help but think of the person who recently stopped smoking, unconsciously reaching for the pocket where the cigarettes used to be.
Arthur Brooks suggests that boredom is crucial to our well-being because it’s when the brain’s default mode kicks in. In I heard there was a secret chord, Daniel Levitin describes the default mode network as “a collection of distributed, interconnected brain regions that are suppressed when a person is focused on something in the external environment. … This same network is active when our brains are at rest during quiet waking, or when our thoughts are unguided during daydreaming” (p. 81).
I know that this is a major theme in contemporary culture, and that I’m by no means the only one determined to leave the phone alone. But I’m struggling with it in large part because of what I’m trying to do in this blog. I also know that we humans faced this problem before the advent of the smart phone. Consider this from Lyanda Haupt’s Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit:
“…in her 1938 classic, If you want to write, Brenda Ueland declares aimless attention essential to good work and deep thought: ‘So you see the imagination needs moodling — long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling, and puttering. These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas … but they have no big ideas’” (pp. 72f).
So, the question whether I say that I’m bored, thinking, or daydreaming seems to be beside the question. The real question — or, perhaps I should say — the challenge I face — is whether I’m willing to spend at least part of my time without external stimulus, merely letting my thoughts roam where they will. I’d really like to do more to test the thesis that aimless thought could indeed lead to more focused writing.
