The Importance Of Boredom & Daydreaming

As I think I’ve said here, when our children were growing up, I did not allow them to say the “B-word.” That is, “bored.”

Not that I censored the word, but whenever I heard one of them complain, “I’m bored,” I’d make them pay.

Sometimes I’d give them a theological lecture, citing G. K. Chesterton on how nothing in creation is boring in itself, but we just need to approach it in the right way. I’d make them listen to me reading from Heretics:

“There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly required than a defense of bores. When Byron divided humanity into the bores and bored, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he counted himself. The bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness, may, in some sense, have proved himself poetical. The bored has certainly proved himself prosaic.”

Sometimes I’d give them a literary lecture, citing the character Dunbar in Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, who purposefully cultivated boredom because when you are bored, time drags, so it seems like you have more of it, thus extending your life.

“Life seems longer,” Dunbar concluded, “if it’s filled with periods of boredom and discomfort.” Thus, “Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly. He had figured out that a single hour on the skeet-shooting range with people like Havermeyer and Appleby could be worth as much as eleven-times-seventeen years.”

Sometimes I’d come back with an annoying remark: “I’m bored.” I’d reply, “Just think!” “Think about what?” “I don’t care, just think!”

Once again, my curmudgeonly rants are confirmed by modern science.

Christine Rosen has written a piece for the After Babel substack entitled On The Death of Daydreaming with the deck, “What we lose when phones take away boredom and interstitial time.”

Drawing from her book The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, Rosen notes that people today have trouble handling “interstitial time”–the moments between the times when we are doing something specific. For example, the time we spend driving from one place to another, waiting for an appointment, riding an elevator, being between tasks. Today, we feel like we need to “fill” those times. We do so by means of our phones–playing a game, checking email, scrolling through the news, catching up with social media. Rosen has noticed that many drivers at stoplights cannot even wait until the light changes without getting on their phones.

We are losing the ability to wait, the virtue of patience, and the pleasures of anticipation. And we have stopped doing what people used to do: daydreaming, letting the mind wander, engaging in aimless reverie. “Just thinking.” But at least we aren’t bored.

Rosen begins her essay,

Can you remember the last time you daydreamed? Or coped with boredom without reaching for your phone? Before the era of mobile technology, most of us had no choice but to wait without stimulation, and often, that meant being bored.

But today we need never be bored. We have an indefatigable boredom-killing machine: the smartphone. No matter how brief our wait, the smartphone promises an alleviation for our suffering.

Yet the smartphone’s triumph over boredom might prove a Pyrrhic victory. As Jonathan Haidt showed in The Anxious Generation, the rapid adoption of smartphones and social media, particularly by the young, led to many negative unintended consequences such as increased rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and self-harm. So, too, our efforts to vanquish boredom have had deleterious impacts such as on our ability to let our minds wander, to cultivate patience, and to experience anticipation.

It turns out, as she shows, we need to daydream and to let our minds wander. We even need to be bored sometimes. She quotes Freud: “For a living organism, protection against stimuli is an almost more important function than the reception of stimuli.” And yet, we try to keep ourselves stimulated all the time.

She also cites contemporary research about the importance of letting our minds wander, whether in daydreaming or just letting our thoughts go where they will:

Researchers have found numerous positive effects of a wandering mind. Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman summarized them:

“self-awareness, creative incubation, improvisation and evaluation, memory consolidation, autobiographical planning, goal driven thought, future planning, retrieval of deeply personal memories, reflective consideration of the meaning of events and experiences, simulating the perspective of another person, evaluating the implications of self and others’ emotional reactions, moral reasoning, and reflective compassion.”

Daydreaming exercises an important power of our minds–namely, the imagination, the ability to think not just in abstractions but to conjure up images in our minds, whether memories, possibilities in the future, or sheer fantasies. (That’s my contribution, not Rosen’s. See my book with Matt Ristuccia, Imagination Redeemed for more on this.)

Rosen does say these faculties are important in the development of children. “Parents have a crucial role to play in teaching children how to deal with boredom, and it can be as easy and as old-school as simply telling them: ‘Go outside and play.’” (How about reading Chesterton or Catch-22 to them or telling them to “just think”? Such harassment always made my children want to go out and play!)

Children are extraordinarily creative when given the space and time to indulge their wandering minds, but this often requires first overcoming the immediate challenge of handling their frustration and boredom. Placing the burden of alleviating one’s boredom back on a child isn’t a punishment; it’s an opportunity for them to find creative solutions to their discomfort.

Rosen also urges parents to teach by example. When children see their parents checking their phones during a red light, they will learn to do the same. We adults have much to unlearn. She makes a suggestion:

Try this experiment: For one day, do not pick up your smartphone during small breaks in your routine, such as waiting for the train, or sitting in your car at a stoplight. If you find yourself in a doctor’s waiting room, or waiting for a friend at a restaurant, don’t pick up your phone to fill those few minutes. Pay attention to what is around you, or let your mind wander.

She concludes, “a bit of boredom is good for us, so the next time you have a minute to spare, instead of reaching for your phone, be rebellious: Daydream.”

Illustration: Daydreaming in Cafeteria via Stockcake, Public Domain