"Sleep Is Just Death Being Shy." Holy SHIT, that's a cool youtube video title. I've gotta check this video out. Meh, I'll open it later. I'm not feeling it. Or, should I watch a movie? Oh, but what should I watch?
Googles for "Top 10 science-fiction movies ever made."
Ten minutes later.
Woah, that's a great earphone; I think I should get one soon. Oh, wait, what was I doing? Ah yes, I think I should watch a new lecture from MasterClass. Or, I'll watch it later?
This is my inconsistent monkey brain when bored. All thanks to Steve Jobs for revolutionizing the smartphone. Sighs.
Five minutes later, I've spiraled into existentialism.
It's been a long, long time since I've been staying indoors. Is This It?
The pandemic seems to get angrier and angrier the more we get advanced at building the vaccines. Is This It?
Why the hell is it so hard to explain Einstein's notion of gravity to someone else? Why is free will so damn hard to grasp?
So, Is This It, really? Well, I won't be commenting about how the pandemics would be projected into the near future or how it might end. Because it's like quantum mechanics, nobody knows. Although, I will share this quote from the book Pandemics: A Very Short Introduction, “Pandemics have been a regular feature of human history since the sixteenth century.” My key takeaway from the book is that our forefathers have thrived in such disasters; we can as well. Although, what I would write about in this article is some of the tools that can make things more bearable.
When I've tried to scour through articles, books, videos about why we feel so restless, I noticed a key term mentioned everywhere. Boredom. What is boredom? Boredom is a state in which one feels an aversion to being cognitively unengaged (the "I've to do something” urge). This instinct could be traced back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, where one wouldn't survive if they didn't use their mental abilities to the maximum. And what causes boredom? Either we didn't have anything to do, or we've got to do something we hate.
Boredom has more relevance than we imagine. Currently, free time is abundant amongst youngsters or anyone who stays home all day. Staying home all day in the modern era means that the number of possible ways to engage ourselves will mostly include a screen (phones, laptops, etc.), which is problematic. According to a study, using smartphones to alleviate our boredom will leave us only more tired and, worse, leave us more bored than previously. We pull out our slot machines (smartphones) in the hopes of seeing “that” video/post which will satisfy our thirst for dopamine rush (happy hormones). But nope, that never happens, and we end up wasting a lot of our time.
Neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris talks about boredom in his meditation app, Waking Up. I will paraphrase the session in the coming sentences. He says that there's no question that we wouldn't have to stay bored in this modern era. There's an abundance of content for one to distract from. Although we may never encounter boredom ever in life, there's a price that we've to pay for not being bored. The price being that one might never discover what's on the other side of boredom. If we could find bliss with doing something as regular as breathing, if we can be okay being with ourselves, we will never be “bored.” And it is to be noted that there's a huge difference between delegating the task of bliss to external stimuli (entertainment) and finding bliss in being alone with our thoughts. Our attention span has got so bad that we can't focus on anything. If a book gets boring, or a new task that you're trying to learn gets difficult, we divert our attention to something mediocre, something which could gratify our needs immediately (instant gratification.) This was one of Sam Harris's points when he talked about boredom.
“Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be.” - Cal Newport.
Delay of gratification is the act of postponing instant gratification in hopes of getting a reward in the future which is more valuable than the immediate reward. In Dopamine Nation, written by Anna Lembke, she writes, “High dopamine goods mess with our ability to delay gratification, a phenomenon called delay discounting.” We got so used to the instant rewards from these slot machines that we could not bear to withstand difficult tasks or emotions. The same has been addressed in another book called The Marshmallow Test, written by Walter Mischel, who conducted the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment. Walter deduced from the experiments that we automatically tend to go for instant gratification under stress. If the stress consistently comes back, our ability to delay gratification becomes weaker.
Stress. Inability to delay gratification. Boredom. These are the essence of whatever I've written in the previous paragraphs. What can be done about it? Is there a solution to this? The partial answer to these will be “meditation” (partial, because there's no right advice for anything.) There will be plenty feeling skeptical right now, and rightfully so, because we all have tried meditating at one point in our lives, and it didn't produce any noticeable results. But if done right, it's quite a superpower.
What is meditation? I will explain how this works with the help of an example. Consider our brain as a concert. There will be an audience and an orchestra for this concert. The audience is a metaphor for our awareness and orchestra for whatever our mind is thinking upon. When we are happy, the orchestra will be playing happy songs. Since happy songs equate to a nice concert, there will be more audience. And more audience means we will be more aware of ourselves with no worries. Now consider the opposite scenario when the orchestra plays a stressful and angry song. This scares the audience away. Gradually the number of audiences will be less than that of performers in the orchestra. That is, our mind goes out of our control and starts overthinking. The purpose of meditation is to keep the audience strength higher no matter how shit the concert is. Having control of our mind will help us contain the stress better than letting it loose. In other words, meditation helps us in staying mindful about everything.
As James Clear writes in his book Atomic Habits, we have to be consistent about our habits. It doesn't matter how much we get done each day. A three-minute meditation is so ridiculously easy that nobody can procrastinate doing that. This could be slowly increased as days progress.
Now, just because we've mastered the art of being bored doesn't mean we will never come across activities that are wasteful. The important distinction is that even if it's wasteful, we still have a sense of control over our thoughts and emotions. We won't be forced to pull out our phones or start fidgeting to satisfy our restless brains. Having control of the mind lays down the foundation for a better life. And, as always, I will stop at this:-