A Mundane-less Society
I remember watching Wall-E as a child. What on the surface seemed like a heartfelt story about how robots had feelings too, was actually a harrowing tale of what a society much like ours could eventually become. Even so young, it terrified me. Lives filled with shared laughs and memories, people with passions and dreams, living in quiet endurance, navigating the ubiquitous feelings of pain and loss—reduced to nothing more than an endless stream of entertainment on hoverboard sofas that removed the need for desire. Every possible impulse was fulfilled within seconds.
This means that there was never room for the mundane. On paper this sounds like the dream—no struggle, no effort or striving—but in truth it is a living nightmare.
A lack of boredom affects all facets of our lives. A society without boredom looks like one that lacks empathy, one with a background hum of anxiety and depression, one that lacks the willpower of our predecessors. One in which we can’t decide on a suitor because we are so easily distracted by the prospect of being with another. Why stay with one person when there’s so many others out there? One in which we miss out on the depths of mastery because we wish to go on to the next thing when it gets too hard. This isn’t to say all of society is like this of course, but there is a huge number of the western population in which these are the sort of outcomes in their daily lives. And these mindsets lead on to affect the generations to come, who are the most vulnerable and impressionable. What will happen with a generation that is raised on these ideals?
Constant stimulation leads us to forget the beauty of life around us. It hinders our ability to live in the real world. To socialise with our fellow human beings. To see the extraordinary in the mundane. Our modern lives aren’t fit for our social, human brains. We’re not made for passive communication through a like or a comment on an instagram post. We crave physical touch, eye contact, the change in another’s voice when they’re sad or excited.
We’re supposed to be bored because it forces us to create, to connect and to find meaning in our lives. Boredom itself is not much. It is what boredom leads to which is what we are missing out on. Noticing the small things, having a quiet moment to yourself, a creative insight, a business idea or the space to deal with the thoughts you’ve been distracting yourself from for so long. It provides us with a stillness that cannot be accessed when we are distracted. It allows us to be fully immersed in our surroundings. With it, we are more obliged to do the hard things in life, the activities that require effort to derive pleasure from. Art, reading, writing, studying, communicating, exercising—all become easier to accomplish. Instead of waiting till the right time, with boredom you’ll get to it right away. In a world with constant stimulation, boredom is a secret superpower.
In ‘Dopamine Nation’ by Dr. Anne Lembke, she recounts a conversation with one of her patients who was addicted to constant stimulation. Said patient is not unlike many of us today who, “spends most of her waking hours plugged into some kind of device.” I’ve been there myself, and I never realised the consequences during that time. In this session, Anne prescribes boredom as the cure.
“Boredom is… an opportunity for discovery and invention. It creates the space necessary for a new thought to form, without which we're endlessly reacting to stimuli around us, rather than allowing ourselves to be within our lived experience.”
To quote Blaise Pascal, “most of the world’s problems come from the fact that men cannot sit in a room alone with themselves.” I’m sure many of us can relate to the common fear of sitting with our own thoughts. But this is how most of human civilisation has lived their lives. It is important to remind ourselves that the internet, smartphones and social media are all a recent trend. In the grand scheme of human history, these have only existed for a small speck of time.
There wasn’t much to distract ourselves with 500 years ago. Even 2 generations ago, we lived much quieter lives. Nokia phones that could survive atomic war but would take you 20 minutes to send a single line of text. The infant-like social media network that comprised of MySpace and BBN. A world 50% quieter, only two decades ago. We had more conversations, and in turn, more empathy for one another. Now, we have a world full of constant entertainment in our pockets, making Pascal’s words echo even louder. What’s even more eye-opening is that Pascal was a man of the 17th Century, showing that the problem of distraction is not a new one. However, compared to then, we are probably ten times more distracted and have a lot more opportunity to distract ourselves than ever before.
I am not saying this to romanticise the past. Simply because they had more time and boredom surely did not mean that their lives were easier than ours. Between the wars, famines, economical crashes… and more wars, it would be ignorant to think so. On the other hand, when we observe history purely with boredom in mind we can see that this component of life was readily available for them, and it’s something we are losing in today’s world. It is what allowed for many of the great works of art, literacy and overall human achievement to be created or accomplished, and I believe that not to be a coincidence.
The sites we spend most of our time distracting ourselves with these days—Instagram, Facebook and Tiktok—are built to keep us on them. They want you stay on their longer—craving more dopamine to satisfy your thirst, which in truth will never be quenched. Even when you manage to eventually close the app you’ve been doomscrolling on, suddenly you find yourself on it again. What is even more frightening is that these companies are preying on your insecurities and using it for their own monetary gain.
“Facebook, it says (The Australian), can offer advertisers the chance to target millions of young users when at their most vulnerable… their algorithms can even pinpoint moments when young people ‘need a confidence boost’.” — Thomas Curran, The Perfection Trap
So we cannot blame only the individual in this regard. There is an ongoing, fundamental assault on our attention spans, one that we have failed to acknowledge for far too long. Our governments, as well as the companies that hold much of the power on the information that we receive, are entirely complicit in this attack. They are attempting to take away one of the most pivotal aspects of human existence simply for monetary gain, and we’re seeing the effects of this it at an ever increasing rate.
“One nationally representative survey of US adolescents found that among respondents who reported more time accessing media such as social media platforms or smartphone devices, there was significantly greater depressive symptoms and increased risk of suicide when compared to adolescents who reported spending more time on non-screen activities, such as in-person social interaction or sports and recreation activities (Twenge, Joiner, Rogers, & Martin, 2018).” — John A. Naslund, Social Media and Mental Health: Benefits, Risks, and Opportunities for Research and Practice
The good news is that we are starting to see a shift in our overstimulated society. Perhaps we’ve grown tired of it all, finally, and can return to the cabin in the woods so to speak. Ironically, there are an increasing amount of social media trends advocating for us to get off of social media. The return to reading on TikTok and Instagram, the self help influencers telling us to get off our phones and start journaling and the longing for the consumption of long-form content seen on Substack, Twitter and YouTube. The reclamation process has already begun.
One of the main trending remedies for an overstimulated mind is the dopamine detox and I believe it to be a beginning step to reclaim our boredom, but it is not sufficient enough for real, long-term change. The process involves abstaining from high dopamine inducing objects or activities for a long period of time, usually between 1-3 month(s). However, with how normal it is to use social media and how addicting the mechanism has become, even after detoxing it is almost inevitable to find yourself back on there—or what can also occur is substituting one high dopamine activity for another. Then, it simply becomes a repeating cycle that you think is working, but in truth, is causing you more stress than if you had simply stopped using the apps in the first place.
Which is the bad news, breaking free from the technological world and reclaiming simplicity is not so simple. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle”, is what I said to a friend of mine during a conversation about this topic. That is to say, our society has become too accustomed to this way of living to suddenly come to a halt and reclaim the simpler lives we had.
What would happen if all the technology in the world stopped working? You may think that the world would become more peaceful, that we would be less distracted and more present in our lives. And you would possibly be right. But not after a massive fallout around the world simply because we had lost the main infrastructure of our society.
We’ve reached a point in which we’ve developed technologically much quicker than we’ve been able to adapt to living with it—like a teenage boy after a growth spurt, stumbling even to get out of bed. It is now deeply imbedded to how our society operates that we cannot remove it without causing mass hysteria. Instead of doing without it, I’m suggesting we begin thinking more consciously on how we use it. Technology—for all the boredom it has taken from our lives—is not the enemy. It is a tool, and the wielder of the tool determines how it is used. When we reframe our mindset to technology in this way, we can reclaim our time again, leaving space for boredom and allowing us to be more present in our lives. We’re not seeking to abandon technology, but to make use of it with intention; to view technology as an infrastructure we can adopt to live healthier, more complete lives.
Instead of trying to become monk-like, we can slowly invite more stillness into our lives. We can create systems, adopt new technologies, share information about reclaiming our time and attention and replace the existing infrastructure with a more tangible, human experience.
Above all, it must be noted, that this is not a productivity hack—though it may result in you having more productive days. Living without boredom is a mental health risk, one that affects not just the individual but the whole modern world. In many ways it is much like the climate change crisis, but for the collective human mind. It would be best to begin reclaiming our boredom now before it is too late.