The prevailing modern view seems to be that the modern life is inherently boring. That is why there is so much presence of ideas like “do it for the plot” or “you are only young once” – ideas that call on us to act in interesting ways because it is assumed that fear or lack of interest has made our lives boring. It feels like I must, in this modern society, run away from the mundane aspects of life.

There is too much to do, too much to achieve, to little time and too many options at any given time. So it doesnt make sense to just do housework or groceries or eat food – I must do housework while listening to podcasts so I can better myself, I must do grocery shopping with music followed by a night out in the city, I must eat food while listening to a Youtube video about self-development. I cannot bear to just do the difficult task of staying home on a Friday because of the fear that I am missing out on life which creates an urge to text certain people or do certain activities that I know will not produce a result that I want later.

I used to believe in these ideas and so found myself easily persuaded to act in ways that brought excitement into my life – like going out and drinking all night, doing certain activities on the weekend instead of staying home, meeting certain people to avoid the boredom of being alone.

But soon enough, I found that acting in such ways was destroying my focus, my ability to do hard things and my ability to feel emotionally satisfied. However, every time I tried to stop doing these activities I felt the burden, the FOMO, of not doing things for the plot or wasting my youth staying at home.

It is now clear to me that this need for life to be exciting is a reaction to the craving of dopamine. Life is not inherently boring but feels boring because our escape from the daily life through activities like social media, junk food, sugary foods, alcohol, nicotine etc creates such a high dopamine that mundane life activities cannot compare.

So, our minds create problems for us or invite us to create storylines to feel that level of dopamine. This goes to my earlier article on ‘Creating artificial problems’ which notes how I am realising that I am simply creating problems for myself to feel a level of dopamine that I get from doing the wrong thing. As a result of this, I feel such a sense of urge to ‘relapse’ and do the wrong thing. That is the substance of ‘do it for the plot’ notion which invites us to have the dopamine rush by doing the thing we are restricting ourselves from doing. In fact, this is just a craving for dopamine because I have become so addicted to high dopamine activities in the modern world.

The only way to remedy this is to embrace the boredom. Embrace not doing things for the plot. Embrace feeling FOMO and wasting the youth. Embracing boredom is the new rebellion. Doing the right thing and delaying gratification is a superpower and boredom is the start to getting that power.

But this begins with first giving myself permission to feel bored, ie. allowing myself to not do anything for a long period of time. One of the gifts that is provided with boredom is it helped me realise a lot of feelings that I was avoiding. For many people, including for me, there is a lot of guilt involved with boredom because it feels like you are wasting time. Since time is so precious, it ‘feels wrong’ to allow yourself to be bored. This is especially true in our hyper-capitalist productivity driven society where the value of time is determined by what outcome you produced with time. This guilt was the basis of my FOMO – the belief that I needed to justify my use of time to others. This discomfort was manifesting itself by making me do activities that I felt were necessary to justify my time – activities that I didn’t inherently want to do but felt almost forced to do to justify what I had done with my time. This was pulling me further and further from myself till my inner voice stopped speaking because I had stopped listening to it and I was caught in the trap.

Being bored forced me to look at the guilt and fear head-on. Can I accept that I will not be able to justify my time to someone else? Can I accept that other people will not understand how I am choosing to spend my time?

So I had to give myself permission first to feel bored. I had to accept that I will feel guilt and yet it is ok. Because I cannot ‘win’ time or ‘win at life’. Becuase some people will laugh at me for spending time at home on Friday or be concerned that I am wasting my youth. I needed to permit myself to feel these feelings of guilt and shame that come with boredom.

When I allowed myself to get bored, I magically found many other ways to use the time that really aligned with me.

The first thing that came was rest. When I allowed myself to be bored, I found that I was naturally gravitated to resting – napping, lying down, sitting in a bathtub, meditating etc. I realised that I had been avoiding rest so much because I felt forced to use up my time and energy for better things.

Next, I found that I was naturally gravitating towards writing and reading and thinking about things in a deeper way. I didnt have to force myself to do anything – the motivation, energy and effort came naturally as if I was out of body. It includes writing on this blog (something I would have had to force myself to do a year ago, followed by feelings of shame and guilt when I failed).

Once I gave myself permission to feel bored, I also found that life is special enough anyways. I didnt need 10 self development videos to listen to while I walked, I could just walk and enjoy the pleasure of walking. I could just be present for a lot of things and see and enjoy the specialness of the bird noises or the city noises.

Once I gave myself permission to feel bored, I also found that the feeling of an ‘other’ who I had to justify my life to was going away. The guilt, fear or shame that comes from the presence of this ‘other’ whose voice was telling me that I needed to use my time better actually started to get quieter when I allowed myself to rest and to do the things I wanted to do.

Boredom really helped me clarify what I wanted to do vs what I was doing simply because I was addicted to a certain level of dopamine or I simply because I thought I needed to justify my time to others. When I gave myself permission to rest and be bored, I found that I was not inherently lazy or life was inherently boring. In fact, it was already fun and I always had energy. But now I could use it in better ways that aligned with my personal beliefs.