Boredom and freedom of thought

This post is part of The Quiet Lane series.

I used to accept boredom much more easily. Scratch that. I used to accept boredom as part of life, period. Without question, without torment. Like many of you—I imagine—I come from the pre-internet generation, a time when instant access to anything crossing our minds—topic, song, movie, book, article—didn't exist. There were no feeds to plug into, no immediate delivery of content. To reach the outside world we either stepped out, literally, or accepted the few pieces of it we'd gathered around us like small treasure: records, books, a couple of magazines; the day's newspaper rolled up on the kitchen table if we had it delivered that morning. Back then I could sit for hours, listening to albums, or aimlessly daydreaming—without goal, or purpose, without any attempt at betterment through some supposedly mindful act of contemplation. And without awareness that this so-called void should be considered boring. The act of standing still without other voices chiming in was a perfectly normal aspect of existence.

I'm trying to re-learn how to be that person again.

Constantly looking down at a screen means rarely looking up. It means never allowing the mind to freely associate, to connect tangible input—what we see and hear and touch here and now—without instructions. Without an imposed subject. Without external commentaries to sway the process or worse, dictate a line of thought.

In a recent article, Joan Westenberg writes that "The truly high-status move in 2025 might be the ability to sit in a room for four hours doing absolutely nothing. Not meditating. Not practicing mindfulness. Not achieving goals. Just existing, bored out of your mind, and being completely okay with it."

Yes. Boredom might well be the true liberty. It's the space in which ideas develop, unconstrained. And yet here we are, willingly immersing ourselves in constant noise. We've taken the notion of nature abhorring a vacuum to extremes, filling any void, however short, however temporary, with "something"—news, pictures, chats, videos... It doesn't matter. As long as we don't face our inner monologue.

The result of this cacophony appears to be an acute numbing of our soul. The inability, all too often, to discern truth from lies through a methodical impoverishment of thought, and judgment. This is subjugation through surrender: when external content fills every waking minute, then we disappear. Our thoughts, our ideas... There's no room left for us.    

If we never stop to digest what we consume, we can't reap the benefits of personal experience, knowledge, values, or wisdom. If we don't add our input, then all that's left is group-think.

In his book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, Cal Newport devotes a couple of chapters to the concept of solitude, and to its historical importance in the lives of thinkers from every corner of human activity—artists, scientists, philosophers, politicians, writers etc. Not the solitude of physical isolation, but of the wandering mind. Here's an excerpt (emphasis mine):

Many people mistakenly associate this term with physical separation—requiring, perhaps, that you hike to a remote cabin miles from another human being. This flawed definition introduces a standard of isolation that can be impractical for most to satisfy on any sort of a regular basis. As Kethledge and Erwin explain, however, solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.

True solitude is the boredom of hearing nothing but our own voice. That's an increasingly rare occurrence.