Boredom

What to do with it?

After working in high stress environments, with every minute of your days scheduled, and others depending on you to do your job on time and within budget, you might occasionally struggle with boredom when you retire.

I had never thought much about the concept of boredom, other than it is to be avoided. At one of my kid’s graduations, I remember the speaker saying that there was no such thing as a boring day, only boring people. I thought that was clever and used that line many times on my eye-rolling children.

Then I saw Harvard University Press’s review of the book Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom, which summarized the work as follows.

Psychologists James Danckert and John Eastwood contend that boredom isn’t bad for us. It’s just that we do a bad job of heeding its guidance. When we’re bored, our minds are telling us that whatever we are doing isn’t working—we’re failing to satisfy our basic psychological need to be engaged and effective.

Heeding the guidance of boredom was a new idea for me, so I decided to read the book. It was interesting.

The authors say that,

…the bored brain is not simply a brain with nothing to do but a brain that is hoping for, anticipating the possibility of something to do…boredom is the uncomfortable feeling of wanting, but being unable to, engage in satisfying activity.¹

It strikes me that many in late adulthood know exactly what that feels like. Your mental capacity is underutilized, and you know it.

In late adulthood our goals are often nebulous, not clearly identified or stated, and we don’t know what to do with our well-developed brains in this stage of life. We keep busy, but busyness isn’t the same as fully engaging our brains. We can be bored in our busyness.

Interestingly, the authors note that it’s a little like adolescence.

Teenagers and septuagenarians are both deeply uneasy when they have too much time on their hands and nothing to do with it. We’re not built to have endless hours of wandering through a mall when school is over. And we’re not built to sit at home and watch game shows and soap operas all day to fill out our retirement years. Boredom at the bookends of life, from cradle to grave, signals to us that we need something more.²

This is not the first comparison of late adulthood and teenage years that I’ve read. Teenagers are looking forward to developing a career, learning, and creating, and those of us in late adulthood realize that we’ve done those things but still have more to offer. Both teenagers and late adults are not sure what the future holds.

The cultural view of retirement hasn’t caught up with the reality that we have decades of life ahead of us and we want to live those years well.

Boredom doesn’t happen to us; we also have a part to play. When we recognize that we are a bit bored, we have options. We can distract ourselves with social media, television, or YouTube, but these activities can actually increase boredom as they temporarily occupy us but are not ultimately engaging. Some begin addictive behaviors like gambling, too much alcohol, or drugs, none of which lead to a good place.

Boredom is not necessarily bad; our responses to can be negative or positive.

In our attempts to outrun boredom we rob ourselves of the chance to learn how to be in the moment and redirect our energies in positive ways. To discover what it is we most deeply want to do, we need to tolerate periods of down time, time not filled by something guiding our thoughts and behavior from the outside. By accepting the risk of being bored we have the chance to find the antidote. Rather than fighting against boredom, accepting a boring situation gives us what we need to be free of it - the chance to identify our desires and goals so that we become engaged on our terms, as agents, committed to a purposeful course of action.³

Identifying desires and goals is not easy, may involve trial and error along with boring moments or days. The advice of these authors is to determine desires and goals and take purposeful action.

Read a good non-fiction book, call a friend and schedule a time to meet, begin that project that you’re putting off, purge one of your closets, check into volunteer opportunities and try one, or research a topic that you’ve been wanting to better understand. Then take the next step. Maybe the book taught you something interesting; learn more about it. The volunteer activity may or may not have fit your interests well, if it did, keep it up, of not, try another one. And there’s always another closet to organize.

The book summarizes their advice as follows:

In lieu of simple answers, we suggest the following principles. Seek out activities that clarify, rather than obscure, your desires and goals. Pursue goals that give expression to your values - things that matter to you. Do things for their own sake, rather than as a means to avoid something else. Pick activities that enchant your surroundings, so you are drawn into ever-deeper connections…Act so as to express and expand your efficacy. And find activities that engage you as a unique person and express who you are.

Boredom confronts us with the simple yet profound question: What will you do? It demands an answer. There are few more significant questions.⁴

What will you do? It is a highly significant question for those who want to engage their brains and live to the fullest in late adulthood. I still avoid boredom, but now I know a little better what to do when it hits.

How do you deal with boredom?

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

1. James Danckert and John D. Eastwood, Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom, (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2020) 18, 19

2. Ibid, p. 71

3. Ibid, p. 192

4. Ibid, p. 194