Why We Need To Be Bored

Most of us tend to avoid boredom, but the fact is that boredom is a necessary thing for us. If you want to be creative, if you want to be insightful or clever, you also need to be bored. Not all the time, and I’m not equating boredom with loneliness, but you do need to accept boredom for periods of time.

When you are bored, your discomfort comes from streams of inertia which have been running through your mind and which have run out of road. Some day we’ll be able to describe this with better terms, but this much is close enough.

The stopping of those processes is crucial to creativity, for a very simple reason: It frees space for other processes – subconscious processes – to operate. In the old days of computing, people had to compete for the use of a main server. So, putting this another way:

Boredom allows your subconscious processes to get server time.

Boredom, then, is crucial to creativity, to insights, to new formulations. All of these things require incubation time, and all of these things operate in the unconscious portions of our minds. Boredom gives them space.

So, embrace some boredom; you’ll be happy with what pops up afterward.