[This text is part #2 of the trilogy I wrote with my dear friends William Barter and Mirian Rodrigues. The idea for exploring these topics further came from our podcast episode together. You can read the full text of part #2 in Portuguese here.]
Technology has undoubtedly made us less susceptible to boredom. Any idle moment has been replaced by the scrolling of a screen, whose main function is to keep us entertained.
In his controversial article Quit Social Media, published in 2016, Cal Newport commented that “at the time, in response to my critique, it felt like a cultural immune reaction. The idea of completely moving away from powerful new tools like social media was simply not acceptable. (…) The use of the phrase ‘quit social media’ in the title of an important publication was like a temporary glitch in the matrix that needed to be quickly corrected and then explained.”
But the immune system of “entertainment at any cost” has been fighting boredom for a long time. As communication theorist Neil Postman explained in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death back in 1992, the struggle between technology and traditional values has been resolved, with technology emerging as the clear winner.
The result has been the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technology. For example, it’s not hard to see 2-year-olds today with tablets in hand to keep themselves entertained at family dinners, where the smartphone is the main guest. “Once a technology is accepted, it fulfills its role: it does what it was designed to do,” Postman wrote, “our task is to understand what that design is, in other words, when we admit a new technology into the culture, we must do so with our eyes wide open.”
So, it takes an initial effort to resist the urge to turn to our pocket boredom-killer in favor of something that may not be so pleasurable initially, but which can be much more rewarding in the medium or long term: thinking.
Reflecting on the questions we want to answer can provide interesting answers for both our personal and professional lives.
But what would be the “price” to pay for having to deal with boredom?
As I’ve argued elsewhere, you must both restrict yourself to freedom and balance the relationship between autonomy and dependence.
For author George Dyer, “films and books make us think that there will be certain moments in our lives when, if we can make some grand and unique gesture of renouncing or defending a certain principle, we will be liberated, free. But there’s no escaping everyday life. In fact, it takes a daily effort to be free. Being free is not the result of one decisive action at one time, but a project to be constantly renewed.”
Dealing with boredom is the same thing: a project to be constantly renewed. Only, in accepting boredom, the real question is not to be free from what, but to be free for what.
Moments of boredom will always exist. This means that embracing boredom means choosing the freedom to reflect and/or devote yourself to other things. So, it’s up to you to make a conscious daily decision about where you’re going to spend your time.
Less screen time to avoid boredom equals more time to devote to what really matters.
As psychologist Howard Gruber has argued, meaningful work depends on how we reorganize our resources. Therefore, the “freedom for what” is our autonomy, and the “constraints” are our dependencies.
Our freedom is negotiated daily, balancing the autonomy-dependence relationship so that we can devote ourselves to what is most important to us. In other words, giving up the entertainment of technology in order to face boredom will always be a trade-off (“Do I want to give up X for Y?”).
So, know what questions you’re trying to answer and be ready to free yourself from certain dependencies to ensure maximum autonomy in learning to deal with boredom.