[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 Any idle moment has been replaced by the scrolling of a screen, whose main function is to keep us entertained.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.

[This text is part #1 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 #1 in Portuguese here.]

The current generation of the Creative Economy is based on doing and led by the makers. The democratization of personalization, greatly stimulated by the Internet, was also, in a certain way, the democratization of creativity. Now we all have the means to make and create. For example, we can identify the growing popularity of DIY (Do It Yourself) culture, as well as fast and free access to tutorials, materials, and educational content on different digital platforms.

Shifting the focus from the product to the creative process was the great leap of this generation.

However, what we are now more obviously persuaded to consume are the means to create. As Kirby Ferguson, creator of Everything is a Remix, once said, “we want the same, but different”. In the age of the Creative Economy, creating has become a lifestyle, packaged as an experience. Unfortunately, so much creation has left us blind to what really matters. “Doing for the sake of doing” and “doing more and faster” keep us anesthetized and inattentive, while giving us the illusion that we are being productive. Without realizing it, we keep creating more of the same, but different. It doesn’t matter how many cat videos you’ve seen or created – there’s always room for more.

At the same time, we see a growing concern about the impact of our attitudes and creations. Just creating is not enough – we also need to ask ourselves why it matters. But the answer to this question has been forgotten and its responsibility transferred to algorithms, which now tell us what should and shouldn’t be created.

Undoubtedly, this process of shifting the focus from the product to the process was important in gaining more autonomy and freedom to create. However, in this new era in which social responsibility is essential for the development of creativity, the need to evaluate our creations is once again of the utmost importance and can no longer remain exclusively in the hands of algorithms.

But this evaluation shouldn’t only take place at the outcome; it must take place throughout the process, from identifying and analyzing the problem, proposing possible solutions, and, finally, accepting or rejecting these solutions. In other words, creativity is the consequence of the continuous evaluation of the creative act by the individual and, subsequently, by the group. From this point on, we need to practice what I have called deliberate experimentation: our intention must be oriented towards experimentation, self-evaluation, and learning, and our attention oriented towards both processes and results.

Furthermore, with the emergence of complex environmental, social, and humanitarian issues, the mind of a single individual doesn’t seem to be enough to meet these new technological demands. So, with the maker generation, we have creativity as a social construct. It is integrated into the thinking of culture and society, actively collaborating in its construction through creative ecosystems.

We always build using what is already available. We create new technologies using technologies that already exist and, by doing this, we grow exponentially. The same happens with the development of ideas and concepts since they come from existing knowledge. It’s no different with creativity; we’re building on the shoulders of giants.

We experience the contradiction of keeping what we already know the way it is, while, at the same time, yearning for novelty and change. But this conflict between being conservative and disruptive is what makes the wheels of culture and society turn. As much as we like what creativity symbolizes today, we need to accept the fact that, like everything else on the planet, it is also constantly changing.

In the words of actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, “There’s a more powerful feeling than getting attention: paying attention.” Therefore, our attention must turn to the impact of our actions and creations, to stimulate attitudes that promote social and cultural development. Creativity is not only responsible for personal self-realization but is also the fruit of social interactions.

Creativity will only be fulfilled when we are able to cultivate ecosystems of questioning minds, where the exchange of ideas and the construction of knowledge are its most valuable assets.

In 1637, while studying Arithmetic books, mathematician Pierre de Fermat had an insight that led him to analyze the Pythagorean Theorem from another perspective. It states that the sum of the areas of the squares on the legs equals the area of the square on the hypotenuse, described in the equation x²+y²=z². But what if we raised it by a number greater than 2? At this point, Fermat wrote in the book’s margin: that the equation xn+yn=zn has no integer solutions for n>2. I have found a wonderful demonstration, but the margin of this book is too small for it.

There is no record of what the proof proposed by Fermat would be. However, a simple statement in the corner of the page gave rise to one of the greatest mysteries in mathematics, known as Fermat’s Last Theorem. What fascinated mathematicians over the centuries was the simplicity of the statement and the idea that there was a solution, but no one has been able to solve it. Given its complexity, most mathematicians thought such proof did not exist or was simply impossible to solve. After many unsuccessful attempts, the theorem fell by the wayside as other important questions in mathematics arose.

In 1963, Andrew Wiles was just ten years old when he found a copy of Fermat’s Last Theorem book in his town library. He was intrigued by a problem that even he could understand but that no one had been able to solve in over 300 years. “I knew at that moment that I would never give up. I had to solve it,” he said. Andrew grew up and devoted himself entirely to Mathematics. He majored in mathematics at Oxford and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge. Today, Wiles is a research professor at the Royal Society at the University of Oxford.

After more than 30 years of study, in 1995, Andrew Wiles finally proved the theorem, ending this nearly 400-year-old mystery. His curiosity guided him through all these years and, thanks to this passion for the challenge, he remained steadfast throughout the journey. Reaching this result was not only the highlight of his career, but also the culmination of a 10-year-old boy’s personal journey that began three decades earlier. The discovery won Wiles the Abel Prize in 2016, considered the Nobel Prize in Mathematics, in addition to generating one of the most complex areas of Number Theory and considerable advances in the field of Mathematics.

But the question remains: did Fermat really have a solution to this theorem? We will never know. However, it is believed not. To arrive at the result, Wiles used the ideas of dozens of other mathematicians of the 20th century, and even today, it is believed that only a tenth of the mathematicians in the world can fully understand Wiles’ solution.

Wiles could not rely on previous concepts as there was no correct answer to this situation. No one knew the answer, or even if there was one. When asked how he got the inspiration or ideas to solve this age-old problem, Wiles replied, “[I] tried to find general patterns. I did calculations that explained small math results to me, then tried to fit these calculations into my idea. Sometimes this would lead me to consult some books to see how something similar had been done. Other times, I had to make modifications and do more calculations. But I realized that these calculations had never been done before, so I had to work on something totally new.”

Just like Andrew, I’ve been always fascinated by things I don’t know. Curiosity has been a good friend, and sometimes I think it is important to just let yourself go and pursue questions made by your curiosity -even if they seem useless.

As I argued elsewhere, learning normally comes from questions we ask about the world around us. Also, with computers getting better and better at giving answers, we need people who know how to ask good questions.

The writer Pico Iyer put it differently:

“At some point, knowledge gives out. (…) [But] I don’t believe that ignorance is bliss. Science has unquestionably made our lives brighter and longer and healthier. (…) The opposite of knowledge, in other words, isn’t always ignorance. It can be wonder. Or mystery. Possibility. And in my life, I’ve found it’s the things I don’t know that have lifted me up and pushed me forward much more than the things I do know. It’s also the things I don’t know that have often brought me closer to everybody around me.”

Questions, after all, open more doors than answers ever could.