Why You Should Get Bored
At Least From Time To Time
I’ve noticed that my best ideas always bubble up when the outside world fails in its primary job of frightening, wounding or entertaining me.
What if boredom actually can be a meaningful experience — one that propels us to states of deeper thoughtfulness or creativity?
That’s the conclusion of a scientific study in which researchers asked a group of subjects to do something boring, like copying out numbers from a phone book, and then take tests of creative thinking, such as devising uses for a pair of cups. The result? Bored subjects came up with more ideas than an unbored control group, and their ideas were often more creative.
The trouble is that we live in an age in which we never get ourselves the chance to be bored. All the entertainment we could ever dream of is at our fingertips, waiting on the phone in our pants pocket.
Whenever you feel like you might have a free moment, you pull out your mobile phone, you scroll your Instagram or Facebook wall (I am convinced that the inventor of the infinite scrolling concept was a genius, you might as well just keep scrolling, right?). You might do different things on your phone, but it still an addiction, it’s like…
