We are living in a society where boredom is viewed as a problem. We should always be doing something. Meeting up with friends, going somewhere, taking on new hobbies, texting, scrolling through social media, binge watching series online. Never a dull moment, right? Wrong. We are overloading our brains. I sometimes jokingly say 'I do not have enough GB in my brain to comprehend this shit!' when someone does something stupid. But there's a big truth in my not so funny joke. Research shows that we digest 5 times more information than in 1986. And those numbers aren't even recent! Those results are from 7 years ago. So imagine the amount of information we get to process now on a daily basis. It's insane. Not figuratively, no, literally. We are driving ourselves insane. Just look up growth numbers for social anxiety, depression, burn-out or substance abuse. And don't just think of the information we take in from our computers and devices. Also think of the amount of brands of the same product, like chips, in the supermarket, the amount of billboards on the side of the roads, the rapid succession of singles being put out by artists, fashion trends, news, seasonal products in the shops. It's not uncommon now to find Christmas decorations in the shops in September! We are already starting them young too. We're conditioning babies to never be bored. Hang a mobile toy above the crib! Get a car seat toy! Stick the pacifier in their mouth! Sign them up for baby yoga! I just made up baby yoga. I don't even know if it's a thing, but whatever. It sounds pretty useless. What about when they're older? Get them into tennissoccerballetdrummingplaydatestutoring! What's wrong with letting a child stare at the fabric of the front seat in the car. Have you ever noticed the beauty of the pattern? Or would it be so horrible to let them watch the streetlights as they glide by in a steady cadence? Or, heaven forbid, they follow the rain droplets on their window or the shadows of the trees on the windshield. No! Entertain them before they get bored! But do you, yes you who has been bored plenty times when young, remember what happens when you're bored? Our brains scale back to our immediate surroundings. Starts observing more. Starts seeing patterns. Starts seeing things that were overlooked before. Starts wondering. Starts analyzing. Starts being creative. Curious. So let it! Let the brain do what it is made to do: flow from one process into the next, naturally. Not forcibly, because the toy is shiny, or the phone bleeps or the 3 seconds are over on netflix. Let a new desire be born, naturally. I'm as much a victim of the enticement of binge watching 5 episodes in 1 go as the next person. And I suffer from FOMO too. I also take my phone to the bathroom to poop (yes, I poop!) and I also check social media first thing in the morning. But I do try to be more conscious of the information I take in. (Which can be hard with a brain that is a slave to text. If my eyes see text they have to read it, even if it's for the umpteenth time. Labels, billboards, text on a t-shirt, memes, catchy titles for bogus articles, subtitles, endless lists like these. ) I have been tv-less since 2006. I listen to (yes, the same old) songs on my phone instead of the radio. I'm not subscribed to a newspaper. I have most phone app alerts on silent. I try to multitask a little less and I try to put out less information on social media. Did you know that every day we produce more than 6 newspapers worth of information, compared with just 2.5 pages 30 years ago? In an effort to step up my boredom game I'm going to stop checking social media first thing in the morning and start a gratitude journal instead. I thought and looked up some other tips to allow more boredom into your life, in case your curious mind is curious: - Set a fixed time slot for the two minute stuff. 'If you have a lot of little tasks, designate 45 minutes or an hour every day to plow through any items that will take you two minutes or less, like emails, phone calls, tidying up, checking your financial accounts, etc.' [source] And then be done with it. What didn't get done today will get done tomorrow. - Daydream. 'The brain operates in two oppositional modes: "one is when you’re directing the thoughts, and the other is when the thoughts take over and run themselves.” In daydreaming mode “one thought melds into another and they’re not particularly related.” This daydreaming mode acts as a neural reset button and replenishes some of the glucose you use up in staying on a task.' [source] - Leave your phone when going to the bathroom. Leave your laptop when going on vacation. Put your phone on silent during dinner or at work. (Did you know recovery time to get back to a task is 10-20 times the duration of the interruption?) - Practice beelining. In the supermarket, walk straight to the products you always get and train yourself to ignore all the other products and sales and 2-for-1 specials. - Turn off the tv when you're not watching it (and get rid of the one in the bedroom!). Turn off Netflix after 2 episodes. Turn off the radio for a while when you're in the car. - Quality over quantity. And need to know over nice to know (no more clickbaits for you!). - Use an ad-blocker in your browser. And use another search engine instead of google. - Let your kid be bored. Be bored together. Stare at the ceiling together and see what comes up. I resolve to breathe a little more and slow down a little more. To not be in the know. To be more conscious of my information seeking and information output behavior. Which is kind of ironic, since I blog sometimes and my main income at the moment is from freelancing as a content manager. I know. The irony doesn't escape me, but I see it as even more reason to be conscious about what is put out there. And I hope to have activated some overload awareness in you with this blog.
We cannot live a totally disconnected life, and maybe we shouldn't want to try to either, but we can be conscious of how we allocate our gigabytes of internal storage.
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Photos used under Creative Commons from julian_fern, Humphrey King