Being Bored is A Gift: Here’s How to Use It

Stephanie Domet: Listen, I hope you can stay awake for this one. I need you to focus in. You know, I’m with Barry in his office at Mindful, the windows open. Squeaky chair is here and we’re getting ready to talk about, are you ready for this? We’re gonna talk about boredom. 

Barry, I feel that boredom is such a rich topic for a writer and for a meditator, and you start by writing about those long afternoons of childhood. And I feel like I can summon one of those up right now, forty-five years later. “Mom, I’m bored.” 

I know why boredom and thinking about it is important to me. But why was boredom on your agenda to write about?

Barry Boyce: Well, the Point of View is really about looking at the intersection between life and meditation and mindfulness practice. And it is just such a common experience to practice meditation and find that you’re bored, maybe even, you know, extremely irritatingly fingernails on the blackboard type of bored. So that was one reason to explore what the quality of boredom is and in mindfulness meditation practice and why it’s there, what its value might be. But also there is a lot being discussed and written about boredom these days because of the hyper stimulation that’s emerged from all the stuff that’s available to us on our devices. So people are writing about reclaiming boredom and enjoying boredom. And so I thought I would throw my hat in the ring.

Stephanie Domet: So it’s not generally socially acceptable for an adult to whine that classic sentence. “I’m bored.” But we do get bored. And you’ve thought a lot about this. So what is boredom made of? 

Barry Boyce: Well, of course, I’m no expert. And except for my own contemplative study of it and a bit of reading. But it seems like, you know, we’re made of on time and off time and something in between, you know, if we think of ourselves as beings who would be down in the wild having to survive. You know, there’s in-between time when we’re needing to be on the lookout. Then there’s time when we’re responding. Moving. Acting. And then there’s complete downtime. I think we have trouble with that middle space. We feel like we should be doing something. We should be stimulated. We’re kind of built to be stimulated or to relax from that, right. And yeah,. 

Stephanie Domet: Like I look at the chipmunks in my yard and you’re right, they’re on or off. That guy is never bored. Yeah. He’s either in fear for his life or he’s asleep.

Barry Boyce: Yeah, exactly. It’s that in-between space I really wonder whether evolutionarily when we were out in the wild, you know, how bored did we really get? I think boredom is a bit of an accident of having so much entertainment available. I think that part of the reason it’s interesting is that when we lurch toward entertaining ourselves too quickly, we step over the simple perception of where we are and what’s going on. 

Stephanie Domet: Yeah, which sometimes we want to perceive that sometimes, we really don’t. And you’re right about some of those classic places where boredom presents itself. You had a job at a grocery store, which had it in my reading of your column, almost comically large clock as a symbol of those minutes just dragging by. 

Barry Boyce: Yes, it was comically large. That clerk was unbelievably big. I haven’t seen a clock that big inside a building since. 

Encountering Boredom in Meditation

Stephanie Domet: Your boredom writ large and school, of course, where the minutes never seemed to end. But then you also write about encountering boredom in meditation and meditation adjacent activities, of course. And so I’m wondering how your relationship with boredom changed as you went deeper into your practice. 

Barry Boyce: It somewhat came down to the simple fact of whether I was just going to quit or not. 

Stephanie Domet: Quit meditating? 

Barry Boyce: Yeah, because it’s you know, and this came about from I would do like a minute or a couple of minutes. But, you know, when we were talking about doing a few hours or more, you got into a level of boredom and lack of stimulation that bordered on painful. And, you know, I started to battle with it. Every entertainment I came up with couldn&#