Why You’re So Bored

Summary

In his video, Johnny Harris delves into the complex emotion of boredom, exploring its implications and origins. Despite living in a time filled with content, boredom is escalating, affecting our sense of meaning and purpose. Harris uses a road trip analogy to illustrate how attention and meaning fuel our lives. He examines how modern distractions, like smartphones, disrupt our ability to sit with boredom, robbing us of its potential benefits such as creativity and self-reflection. By engaging with boredom constructively, we can discover deeper meaning and purpose.

Highlights

• Boredom, akin to pain, signals a withdrawal of meaning, urging us to re-evaluate our actions. 🌟
• Our attention and purpose act as headlights and fuel in the journey of life. 🚗
• Excessive reliance on distractions like phones diminishes our ability to let boredom fuel creativity. 📵
• In historical contexts, boredom wasn't common due to predefined life paths by community and religion. 🏰
• Actively embracing boredom can lead to creative insights and redefine personal meaning. 🎨

Key Takeaways

• Boredom isn't just a lack of something to do; it's a complex emotion signaling a need for meaning. 🤔
• Our modern world, though filled with content, often distracts us from truly sitting with our boredom. 📱
• Traditionally, boredom was a cue for creativity and self-reflection, vital for a purposeful life. ✨
• Phones provide a quick fix but ultimately deepen our sense of boredom over time. 📉
• Embracing boredom can spur creativity, provide deeper insights, and enhance our life narrative. 💡

Overview

Johnny Harris tackles the often-ignored yet universally felt emotion of boredom in his insightful video. While many dismiss boredom as trivial, Harris highlights its significance as a powerful emotion that beckons us to seek deeper meaning and purpose in life. By likening life to a night-time road trip, he illustrates how our attention and sense of purpose serve as guiding lights, essential for navigating life's complexities.

Harris points out that the modern age's incessant distractions, especially through smartphones, prevent us from engaging with boredom constructively. Instead of letting boredom fuel our creativity and self-reflection, we often numb it with quick digital fixes, which paradoxically increase our overall state of boredom. Through engaging storytelling and a clever analogy, Harris illustrates how boredom should be welcomed rather than shunned.

Drawing on historical contexts, Harris explains that boredom was once almost non-existent due to the structured lives led by our ancestors. However, without inherent societal meanings, our modern lives need us to create personal narratives that fill our purpose tanks. By getting out of the 'car' and pushing through boredom, we can enhance our creativity, find new pathways, and strengthen our mental resilience against life's enduring monotony.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction This chapter opens with a humorous introduction to the topic of buying maps in 2025, poking fun at outdated navigation methods. The narrator immediately creates a relatable connection with the audience by addressing common feelings of boredom and expresses an intention to help alleviate this boredom. The introduction sets a casual and engaging tone, while setting up for the content that will follow.
• 00:30 - 03:00: Understanding Boredom Boredom is becoming more prevalent, even amid the abundance of content available today. It's not a simple or trivial emotion, but rather a painful one that affects our sense of meaning and purpose, akin to emotions like pain or disgust.
• 03:30 - 05:00: Sponsor Segment: Incogn In this chapter, the host discusses the rising prominence of boredom in modern society. After extensive research by the producer, Alex, and reviews of multiple books, a storyline emerges that reveals why people are experiencing more boredom than ever. Surprisingly, within this boredom lies a hidden element that could be crucial for leading a more meaningful and creative life. The host introduces an analogy comparing life to a road trip to explore this concept further.
• 05:00 - 09:00: The Science Behind Boredom Boredom is likened to a road trip taken in the dark, where attention acts as headlights illuminating the path, and a sense of meaning and purpose is the fuel that propels one's journey forward. The chapter highlights the importance of both attention and meaning in helping humans navigate through life, serving as tools for motivation and direction. Understanding these elements is crucial for comprehending the true essence of boredom.
• 09:00 - 15:00: Historical Perspective on Boredom In this chapter, the discussion revolves around the notion of boredom and how individuals make decisions within the constraints of their everyday experiences. It metaphorically compares life decisions to a road trip, where each decision is like a turn taken. It emphasizes how engaging in fulfilling activities, such as spending time with friends, enjoying nature, or consuming quality entertainment, adds meaning and purpose to life. Friendship and meaningful engagements are highlighted as essential components that fill one's 'tank' with purpose, steering away from boredom.
• 15:00 - 20:00: Boredom in Modern Society The chapter delves into the concept of boredom in modern society, defining it as a state where one's sense of purpose and meaning depletes leading to a lack of energy to engage in activities that could alleviate this feeling. It explores the notion that boredom arises from an inability to focus or maintain attention, and it suggests that mundane activities, such as checking emails, are often used as quick fixes to momentarily escape the feeling of emptiness.
• 20:00 - 25:00: Constructive Approaches to Boredom The chapter titled 'Constructive Approaches to Boredom' discusses how dealing with emails can feel productive, despite many being junk that you never signed up for. This extends to other forms of unwanted communication like robocalls, text messages, and junk mail. The author describes this constant buzz as something they dislike, which leads into a discussion about a sponsor, Incogn.
• 30:00 - 37:00: Managing Boredom: Tips and Strategies This chapter discusses the concept of data brokers and how they collect and sell personal information including addresses, shopping habits, birthdays, and court records to various entities like marketers and credit agencies. The speaker shares their experience with a service called 'Incogn,' which helps remove personal data from these brokers' lists by sending legal requests on behalf of the client, thereby protecting individual privacy.
• 37:00 - 38:00: Conclusion The chapter titled 'Conclusion' highlights the progress and satisfaction the speaker has achieved with their ongoing requests to data brokers. The speaker proudly notes that out of 744 total requests, 612 have been completed, showcasing a significant success rate. 132 requests are still in progress, reflecting the ongoing nature of their work. The speaker expresses satisfaction with the user-friendly dashboard that provides a comprehensive status update of all requests, indicating both the successful completion and those currently underway. This reflects a sense of achievement and the effective management of their data-related tasks.

Why You’re So Bored Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] How to buy the best maps in 2025. You're doing it wrong. You're still using this to navigate life. Embarrassing. [Music] I'm so bored right now and I truly hate the way it feels. You're probably bored, too. You clicked on this video trying to feel less bored and all you've got is a guy scrolling on his phone alone in a room. Here. Let me see if I can help
• 00:30 - 01:00 with that. Is this better? Good. It's not just you and me. It's everyone. Boredom is on the rise. Even at a time when we're in the golden age of content, boredom isn't simple. It's not trivial. It's not benign. It's actually a painful emotion that quietly haunts our sense of meaning and purpose. It's more like pain or disgust. We've
• 01:00 - 01:30 been going deep on this. There's a lot of great new science. My producer, Alex, read like five books on the topic. In all of this literature, I am starting to see a clear story that explains why all of us are more bored than ever. But I'm also seeing something that I didn't expect, something that's quietly hidden within the feeling of boredom. how this really unpleasant feeling, boredom, might actually be key to living a more purposeful, creative life. Your life is like a road trip. Stick with me while I build this analogy
• 01:30 - 02:00 because it's actually really useful for understanding the real meaning of boredom. It's a road trip in the dark. In this analogy, the most important parts are first off your headlights. This is your attention, your ability to pay attention and what you pay attention to. And the second most important part is this fuel tank. We're going to look at this a lot. This represents your sense of meaning and purpose. It helps motivate you, pushes you along the journey of your life. Attention and meaning are vital for how humans navigate their lives, how they make
• 02:00 - 02:30 decisions on where to go with the constraints of their everyday experience. These determine the route that you take on this road trip. So, you're going along your life. You're taking turns. You're making decisions on how to spend your time. You spend time with friends. You pay attention to this and look, your tank is filling up with meaning and purpose. For a lot of us, friendship is fuel. You go for a walk, maybe in nature, you listen to music. That is meaningful to you. Maybe you watch a good movie. You shine your attention on that and that is actually
• 02:30 - 03:00 pretty fulfilling. But life is heavy and hard. And sometimes your fuel runs out. Your attention fractures or fades. And then this happens. Lights out. This is boredom. the state where your sense of purpose and meaning is on empty and consequently you don't really have the ability to muster the energy to pay attention to something that would change the situation. Real quick before we go on, have you noticed that one way you might cure your boredom is email? Knocking out
• 03:00 - 03:30 a few emails makes you feel productive, doesn't take that much work sometimes, but if you look closely, you might note that a lot of the emails you're knocking out are actually junk. Like they shouldn't have been there. You don't want them there. You never signed up for them. This same thing extends to roocalls and all of those text messages you get and even junk mail being sent to your house. It's sort of a constant low-level buzz and one that I kind of hate. I'm telling you all this cuz it has to do with our sponsor today, Incogn.
• 03:30 - 04:00 Incogn. These are companies who make a lot of money off of collecting your information, your address, your shopping habits, your birthday, your court records, and selling it to anyone willing to pay. marketers, credit agencies, insurance companies, you name it. I actually heard about incogn, I gave them permission to act on my behalf and then they went out to these data brokers and say to them in some legal language, "Hey, take Johnny off your lists and it has worked hundreds of times actually automatically without me having to do anything. I
• 04:00 - 04:30 actually just get to sit back and look at this fancy looking dashboard, see the status of all of the requests that have been made and the ones that have been successful, which at this point there's like hundreds of them. In fact, let me do a little update right now. Incogn what is my current number of? Dude, 744 total requests to these data brokers. And of those, 612 have been completed. That's very satisfying. 132 are in progress. Man, this is great. Just this month, there have been more than 10. Get to see all of this. It's very satisfying. They just launched this
• 04:30 - 05:00 unlimited plan which now allows you to request removal from any site, including those creepy people search sites that post your info online for anyone to see. So, if you want to try this out, go to incognito.com/jny Harris. Clicking that link helps support this channel. If you use the code Johnny Harris at checkout, you get 60% off the annual plan. I do the annual plan because, like I said, like every month there are more lists that I get added to and Incogn scans them and takes me off of them. So, thank you Incogn for sponsoring today's video, for allowing us to do this work. With
• 05:00 - 05:30 that, let's dive back into why we are so bored. The most surprising thing that I've learned so far while researching this is that boredom is not this trivial, mundane feeling. It's actually a pretty strong emotional experience and it kind of sucks. I define boredom as meaning withdrawal, as a sense of discomfort, telling you that your need for personal meaning is not being met. Your brain's way of telling you you need to change what you're doing because what
• 05:30 - 06:00 you're doing is unsatisfying. You find it hard to focus. And that feeling of like, I can't do anything about this. I don't have any, you know, agency here or what's the meaning of all of this? You're just kind of stuck there. I'd say that the experience of boredom is an experience of unfreedom, an experience of being trapped in the present without meaning. Time seems to slow. You're in a situation where I don't care about this. This really doesn't stimulate me in in in any way. Toltoy described boredom as
• 06:00 - 06:30 like a desire of desires. I also remember a friend of mine. He worked with the postal services when we were students and his job was to take mailbags and turn them inside out to see if there was uh any letters remaining in there. And one day he told me yesterday at work I just started weeping. I mean this was the myth of Seisphus the eternal recurrence of the same. There is no end to it. There will there would
• 06:30 - 07:00 always be another mailbag coming in that would have to be turned inside out. No progression, just the same over and over again. And he started weeping at work, though being a good Protestant, he continued to turn mailbags inside out while he was weeping. For me, this happens usually on a Saturday at like 300 p.m. This is when my kids are occupied playing with friends or playing Nintendo or whatever. I have time. I usually don't have time,
• 07:00 - 07:30 but Saturday at 3 p.m. I have precious free time that I don't get during the week. And I have all this stuff that I want to do, but then this emotion just hits me. This feeling that I don't really want to do anything. Like, I can't really muster the motivation to do any of it. And suddenly things get really dark for me. I start to question everything. I start to question my life choices. I'm angry at myself for not doing things that I know some part of me wants to do. I'm wondering if I've made
• 07:30 - 08:00 the right life choices. So, I know this feeling well, but before reporting the story, I never called it boredom. I kind of thought it was like some flash of depression or restlessness or maybe it was my ADD or something. Boredom always just felt like this thing that like there's nothing to do and so I'm bored. But that's actually not what's happening here. Many would call it an emotional state that has cognitive and physiological coralates. Bottom is the feeling of thinking. It's an affective response to underutilization of our
• 08:00 - 08:30 capacities of our cognitive skills. Right? So when you're bored, you're having that affective reaction to the fact that you're not using your brain as well as you could be. So yeah, boredom is an emotion and it's very uncomfortable. But luckily, I've got a very quick little medicine that is in my pocket at all times. Is not in my pocket right now. Uh-oh. Where's my little medicine? It's a small computer device that was probably made in China or India. And it's got software on it that numbs my boredom. Some people call it a
• 08:30 - 09:00 phone, but a phone is a thing that was invented like a 100 years ago where people talk to each other. Where is Where is it? Where does my phone? Oh, here she is. She was here the whole time. Ah, my precious. Now, the latest nuclear missile test conducted just hours. About 3 years ago, I was cooking rice to my test. Oh man, I love Tik Tok and all short form video that I consume to cure my boredom. And and to be clear, this video will critique all of this and tell us
• 09:00 - 09:30 about how the brain is kind of getting messed up with some of the stuff, but boy, it's fun while it lasts. Anyway, this device is very useful for curing my boredom, and I use it Saturdays at 3:00 p.m. when I'm feeling bored. And yes, later I will show you the studies that unpack boredom and phone use. But for now, I was actually curious if other people experience this the way I do because it's a deeply personal and emotional experience. And so I asked my team. So I usually get bored when I get
• 09:30 - 10:00 home from work and I've done all the things that I wanted to do like eat dinner, hang out with friends, go to the gym, do a hobby, and there's still time left over somehow. I get this really uncomfortable feeling, which is boredom. That's this like existential gut punch. and I think about what am I doing with my life and I want to crawl out of my own skin. Typically I will numb it with Tik Tok or playing video games. But sometimes I will sit in it, sit in the discomfort and think about my life, but that is a lot more work and exhausting. Ironically though, I I have noticed that
• 10:00 - 10:30 I find my phone to be a sort of boring replacement for the boredom. there's this sort of instant gratification with social media that feels like it's the addictive version of boredom and uh yeah that is kind of scary. Okay, before we get back to the car analogy, which is very good and very useful, I promise. I want to explain what I've learned about why. Why does boredom even exist inside of our brains?
• 10:30 - 11:00 And it turns out that it's actually a very natural biological signal that we developed a long time ago. What's happening when we're bored is a bunch of brain regions are coming together to tell us that we need to do something different with our situation. One of the defining traits of human beings is that we are restless. We need purpose and meaning to fuel our actions. And this has been one way that humans have been pushed to create and change their natural situation. Not just for more resources like all animals do, but also
• 11:00 - 11:30 in search of meaning. We're these self-aware apes who are able to tell stories of meaning and purpose to each other. And we ourselves are kind of characters in our own story. It's a major reason why humans have been able to cooperate in large numbers with each other. Looking towards stories like corporations or religions or countries. All of these are meaningful stories that bind us together to cooperate and change our situation. So a lot of experts now
• 11:30 - 12:00 think that boredom is this emotional cue that is pushing us to do something different with our lives to deliver on that need for meaning. But boredom today is pretty different. In fact, in the old days, most people didn't have time to get bored. It's typical for traditional societies that you don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about what to care about because it's already defined for you. Let's do one of my favorite things and rewind and see what my little road trip analogy would have looked like if I
• 12:00 - 12:30 lived 500 years ago. So, I'm a farmer. Most of us would have been farmers, FYI. And I spend most of my time working on the farm because if I don't, my family and I will die. So, my attention is locked into kind of one highstakes activity that defines my life. Let's look down at my meaning and purpose fuel tank. Oh, wo, it's doing great. And look, you can see why. Here on the farm, my sense of purpose and meaning flows in abundance from my family, my belonging to a community in which I was born that has well-defined culture and rituals
• 12:30 - 13:00 that my ancestors have been doing for thousands of years. And perhaps most of all, I have a clear existential story in the form of religion. This makes death and suffering not so bad, and it fills me with a bigger purpose. This stuff is like rocket fuel for our sense of meaning and belonging and purpose. Now, it doesn't mean life was easy. Not at all. But it does mean that we didn't get bored. We didn't have time to get bored and we didn't have any lack of meaning and purpose. It was all kind of automated for us by our culture. I think that the experience of boredom was
• 13:00 - 13:30 certainly there in traditional or preodern societies, but it really gains traction in modernity. The word has has has maybe not been around as long as we might imagine, but that doesn't mean that the concept and the experience and the feeling isn't ancient. Boredom was more of a privilege for uh those who were the royal courts, the clergy and so on. Rich aristocrats were the rare human beings that had time on their hands. The other group were monks who had quite a bit of time before the rest of us. And
• 13:30 - 14:00 in fact, they had a word to describe this feeling of boredom. Called it acadia, a lack of motivation to fulfill your purpose, or in this case, your duties to God. Christians would frame this early concept of boredom as a dangerous sin that could kill your faith. They would nickname it the noonday demon, the most dangerous of all the demons because from boredom stemmed many other sinful behaviors and they were kind of on to something as we will see in the scientific literature very soon. French monks updated the interpretation to a desire to escape the
• 14:00 - 14:30 present, a tiredness and a hunger for variety. But then you get to like the 1600s and things start to change, at least in Europe, as people move to cities. They're working in factories. They're doing repetitive work. They have less and less freedom and autonomy and purpose and they're getting bored. The words for boredom in different languages for the most part. They pop up in 17th century around there in in most languages. You can see this in like the people have tracked all the etmology and these words that have been used in different languages. Here's the usage in
• 14:30 - 15:00 Spanish over time. Here it is in French, German, and here it is in English. People start to use the verb bore as a verb in letters and literature in the late 1700s. Back when London looked like this, needed words to describe an emotion that had become quite a lot more common. In modernity, boredom became available for everybody. It became democratized. Okay, the history part's over. Now, let's look at this part of the graph. This rise, boredom is surging. and kind of weird because it's
• 15:00 - 15:30 surging at a time when we have like more amazing, exciting experiences and content to watch than ever before. That is the mystery at the heart of this video and one I promise I will answer before we are done. Okay. Well, one thing is for certain, my life does not look like this anymore. We're not on the farm anymore, filled with meaning from our culture and religion. First off, our map is kind of full of way more possibilities. We're
• 15:30 - 16:00 not just going in one predetermined path. I have a million possible routes. And look at my purpose fuel tank down here. I've lost some very important sources of meaning. I don't have religion anymore, which is a huge hit to my sense of purpose and higher meaning. I'm a transplant in a big city in a highly individualistic country, so I don't have anywhere near the sense of community and old culture that my ancestors had. This may be different for you if you live in a small town in Europe or Vietnam and you are continuing
• 16:00 - 16:30 traditions that your ancestors did. My ancestors left their traditions and came to a new world to start new. So yeah, I lost that part. Now I do have family. That is a massive source of very deep meaning for me. But if I want to fill my tank with meaning, I got to kind of do it on my own. I have to create my own sense of purpose and meaning which to be clear is a really great thing. Like I get to determine how I live my life, how I raise my kids, what I do religiously or not religiously, community and what
• 16:30 - 17:00 people I invite into my community. That sense of freedom is wonderful. My point here is that a lot of us don't have our sense of meaning and purpose sort of automated for us like our ancestors did. And that is a major reason why we get bored. Oh, and not to mention that our meaning tanks are now much larger and our expectations kind of full all of the time. We expect or could perhaps even say demand that life should be filled to the brim with meaning at all occasions.
• 17:00 - 17:30 We have very little tolerance for these gaps of emptiness in our existence in which nothing really happens. We're we're having trouble dealing with those. Pair that with the fact that there's been an assault on my attention abilities thanks to all these flashing buttons and viral videos. And you can see why sometimes this [Music] happens. The car goes dark. It's 3:00 p.m. on a Saturday and I'm stuck. I don't have the attention and the purpose
• 17:30 - 18:00 to go anywhere. I'm bored. And it feels pretty horrible. Okay, this is the most important part of the video, I would say, because I just spent all this time giving you the history, building this car analogy, but the car analogy really starts to like pay off from here forward. And this is the part of the video where we see how boredom can be good, how this can actually be a hopeful thing. It's not all bad. It can actually be the most important thing for helping you live a more meaningful life. So, let me show
• 18:00 - 18:30 you. Okay, so I'm bored. I'm stuck without meaning and the ability to pay attention to anything. And for those who need a quick 45se secondond grounding in the actual neuroscience so that you don't think I'm just winging it with this analogy, here it goes. When scientists put people in a room and make them watch a boring video like this one of two guys hanging laundry, the participants brains look like this. I should have printed it in color, but probably seen it in color on your video. Lucky you. Boredom. That's what your brain looks like when you're bored. It
• 18:30 - 19:00 activates all of these regions that are associated with daydreaming, mind wandering, and thinking about the past and future. Nostalgia, something I'm very into actually. Look at this. This is a brain that is in big picture mind wandering mode. Default mode network is technically what it's called. But if you go deeper into the center of the brain, you will see that the part of the brain that drives me to pay attention to make decisions is anti-correlated. It's kind of turned off. that's not in sync. So,
• 19:00 - 19:30 I'm feeling all nostalgic about my life story and the meaning behind everything. But, it's paired with this inability to channel my attention to make decisions that are meaningful to me. Learning all of this was actually very helpful for me to understand why my 300 p.m. Saturday boredom is so existential feeling. It actually like feels like really terrible. Like I'm like I start to question everything. I'm thinking about my past, my future. I now understand why. Now, there's way more science and study on this. I'm going to leave all the sources in the uh sources doc that
• 19:30 - 20:00 is in the description. But just know that my car analogy is grounded in all of this. Let's get back to the car. So, we're here in the dark car. We're bored. We're out of gas. Now, let's look what people do when they're in this state. You can do a few things. Number one is you can become really mean on the relation of boredom and sadistic aggression. It's a great paper. So, one cure for boredom is sadism. Defined here as harming others for pleasure. For some reason, the moment you decide to do harm. Look what happens to your car. It
• 20:00 - 20:30 revs back up. And weirdly, our purpose tank gets really full. Our attention fires up. Our car is running again. We turn down this sketchy road where we snap at our partner or yell at our kids with the intent to hurt them. We get online and we start stirring people up. We make them angry with bad faith critiques, trying to inflame them, trying to hurt them. This is one that I'm familiar with. Not doing it, but receiving it. While this is happening, look at the purpose fuel tank. It is full to the brim. Ah, so the monks were
• 20:30 - 21:00 right. There is a noonday demon within boredom. The way this looks in the studies is that they put people at a table with worms and a coffee grinder. Bored people are more likely to take these worms and grind them up in the coffee grinder for no other reason other than to cure their boredom. And they even gave these worms names to humanize them so that it would kind of seem even more cruel. names like Toto, Tifi, Kiki. Oh, and if you're concerned about the worms, the coffee grinders were fake. The worms didn't actually die, but the participants didn't know that. In other
• 21:00 - 21:30 studies, bored people are more likely to take away money from random people that they don't even know. Not because they gained anything, just because they were bored. And being mean helped take the edge off. Now, these studies do have some caveats like some people have a higher propensity to be bored or some people have a higher propensity to be sadistic. But even controlling for that, when you and I, all of us, the general person is bored, we are more likely to engage in sadistic behavior to harm others for pleasure. I mean, this is kind of wellknown. You see headlines every once in a while of like destructive terrible things that have
• 21:30 - 22:00 happened because quote someone was bored. A search for meaning and a lack of mobility to create that meaning leads people to turn to destruction. Sometimes self-destruction. There's one study where people will sit around and instead of just sit and be bored, they will like zap themselves, hurt themselves. Even when the only option is to do something that you don't like that's potentially harmful to you, you'll go ahead and do it anyway as a preference over doing nothing. This can manifest in other kinds of selfharm for people who are bored, who are looking for like a
• 22:00 - 22:30 physical sensation to help distract them from the very uncomfortable mental pain that comes with boredom. has the function to avoid or escape from aversive emotional experiences. Okay, but this is like the dark side of boredom. You have another choice. Here's the hopeful side of boredom. Rewind the clock. Get me back to being bored in that dark car before the trolling and being mean to my kids and partner began. Here we go. We're stuck here. Instead of revving your car up with that demonic fuel that we just saw, you can do the much harder thing. You can get out of
• 22:30 - 23:00 the car and push it. You can push it down a road that you know contains some meaningful experience. Here I am pushing mine towards going on a walk in nature. It's actually a lot of effort. I do not want to do this by definition because I am bored. I am manually pushing it. But as I push my mind is kind of in this big picture place. Remember the default mode network. I'm thinking about the past and the future about the meaning of my life. I'm feeling things and reading my thoughts in a way that I usually don't
• 23:00 - 23:30 get to. And look what happens when I get close. This worked. My car fires back up. And yes, it took some effort, but my purpose tank is filling up. My attention and my ability to keep it is flickering back on. I'm going back to things that bring me purpose without having to harm anyone. And and in fact, the benefit of all of this is I'm now more in touch with my sense of meaning and purpose because I've had to sit with it. I've had to struggle through not feeling it and contemplate what meaning is for me.
• 23:30 - 24:00 what do I actually want to do with my life? So, I get back in the car and I'm rethinking my route on this map, what turns I want to take. And to stretch this analogy even further, I'm stronger. I'm stronger because I got out and pushed my car. So, like my muscles are stronger. Next time I get bored, I have the mental muscles to push through. And this is why some studies, not all, demonstrate a statistically significant correlation between boredom and creativity. Being bored makes you more creative, according to some of these
• 24:00 - 24:30 studies. Which gets to answering another question I've had for a long time, which is why some cultures have entire concepts that embrace this idea of boredom. Ilod fare is an Italian phrase that translates into the sweetness of doing nothing. The Dutch have this word niken. I think that's how you say it, which is like the verb to nothing. The practice of intentionally embracing a state of boredom and seeing the benefits from it. There's an entire religion or spiritual tradition, I guess, Dowoism that is dedicated to embracing
• 24:30 - 25:00 non-action in the name of realigning your actions in harmony with your values. And remember, our biology gave us boredom for a reason. It is a very important part of being humans who are driven by meaning and who are always looking for ways to chase after what is meaningful to them. living with it, dealing with it actually creates a space in which you can actually have an encounter with yourself. You can actually be in your own company and not
• 25:00 - 25:30 just the company of everybody else. Okay? But I always get annoyed when people conclude that like the answer is to embrace the discomfort and just embrace it. And that's that's as simple as it can be. I'm not going to do that because in this case, I think there are actual tips that I think are helping me as I practice them and that could help you too. and it is not become more enlightened and embrace dowoism. That might work for you. But for the rest of us, we are putting together a guide of tips on how to manage boredom. And I will get to that in a sec. But first, I want to show you the last really
• 25:30 - 26:00 important part of this, the answer to why we've got this graph. Boredom is on the rise, not just here, but kind of in lots of different countries. sort of a paradox because we're at a time of life where there's more exciting content and experiences and freedom and opportunity than ever before. Why is this happening? Well, we've already answered part one of that, which is we have less inherent meaning in our lives because we've moved away from some of these collective sources of meaning like religion,
• 26:00 - 26:30 community, ritual, etc. But the other part is something you're also probably very familiar with. Let me show you. Okay, let's get back to the bored dark car. Clear out all this wholesome meaning stuff. Let's get back to one more scenario of what we can do when I'm sitting here questioning my existence. I've got this other option. And damn, it's a good option. Oh, and before you think I'm going to get all judgy and start condemning you for using your phone or watching Netflix, I'm not. That would be dumb. I'm not going to do that. This is our lives. I'm literally a person who makes
• 26:30 - 27:00 content for the internet. I'm addicted to social media and TV just like you are. That's fine. I'm not a zealot and I'm not going to judge anyone. But now that I've read all the literature, I do want to let you in on what happens when the phone and the scrolling turns into our medicine for boredom. Okay, the car's back on. We're moving. Let's look at the meaning tank here. Okay, so it's Saturday 3 p.m. I'm bored, but look, my car's back on. Scrolling some YouTube shorts here and uh we're moving. My meaning tank isn't full, but there's
• 27:00 - 27:30 enough for the car to go. But wait, something's off here. Oh, look. My attention headlights aren't even working. They're not pointed at the road. I can't really tell where I'm going. Ah, I see why. All my attention power is being used to power my phone. This is what I am paying attention to. So, my car is driving. I'm moving, but I'm sort of just driving in a straight line. There's kind of a sense of meaning and entertainment, but I get the sense that I'm not totally choosing this as I
• 27:30 - 28:00 scroll. Oh, yes. Look over here. I've pressed cruise control, autopilot. I'm not hurting anyone. I'm not an internet troll. I'm not in that demonic mode. I'm not on some sketchy street somewhere. But I'm also not using boredom to do the hard work of reassessing my route. I'm just going straight. I'm on cruise control, which again is fine. Like after a week of work, I'm not interested in like reassessing my life. I want to decompress. I want to hit cruise control. and I want to sit back and I want to passively be given a sense of
• 28:00 - 28:30 meaning about the story that I'm watching on Netflix or the Instagram, whatever. That is a way that we decompress stories. People have been doing it forever. I know I've said this, but the last thing we need is more judgy energy around this stuff. But what happens if phones and scrolling become the medicine I use every time I'm bored? Well, there are good studies around this. Now, first, what they're finding, unsurprisingly, is that people are more and more using their phones to cure the feeling of boredom. I mean, yeah, that
• 28:30 - 29:00 makes total sense. You're bored waiting for a train or whatever. You pull out your phone. What this means is that you never get out to push your car. You never sit in the default mode network and push your car and assess your life and do the uncomfortable thing of thinking big about the future and the past. This cruise control is kind of like a nice morphine drip into our purpose tank. We don't ever need to get out and push the car and do the big mind wandering thing that leads us sometimes to more creative or meaningful actions. And according to this one study, what they're finding is that evidence shows
• 29:00 - 29:30 that digital media rather than reducing our boredom or like satiating it, it actually increases it. So to push our analogy to its absolute limits, not only does the phone never give us a chance to break down and reassess our route, but it actually makes us more likely to break down. It's as if the fuel that we get from this is like this radioactive goo that creates a leak in our fuel tank. So, it runs out quicker and we break down more often. We get bored more often, which in turn leads us to grab
• 29:30 - 30:00 our phone to satiate or get rid of our boredom. Psychologists call this a vicious cycle between boredom and phones. Now, look, I knew phones were addictive. I've read all this stuff, the dopamine, all we all know this is happening. But I didn't know this when I got into this story. I didn't realize this natural psychological cue called boredom that has a lot to do with my mind's ability to make meaning and purpose is being totally messed with because of my propensity to grab the phone to like cure it, which makes me more likely to get bored, which makes me
• 30:00 - 30:30 more likely to grab my phone. Like, I didn't realize that that existed and it's actually blowing my mind. Okay, so to recap, you get bored, you have three options. Go down the demonic route, start to hurt people and be mean. Go down the constructive route. Do the hard work of sitting with it. Let your mind drift into broad creative nostalgic thinking even though it's uncomfortable. Or take the middle road. Turn on cruise control and take neither route. Kind of numb the whole system. The last question I want to try to answer or start to answer is, okay, so what do we do? This
• 30:30 - 31:00 exists. Phones aren't going away. I'm not getting rid of my phone anytime soon. How do I manage boredom in a modern world? That's the last section of this video. [Music] So, if you clicked on this video because you wanted to learn about the history and neuroscience of boredom and you yourself have no interest in figuring out how to manage your own boredom, then now is the time for you to click away and go find something else to do. The rest of us, I want to take the rest of this video to go through some really
• 31:00 - 31:30 specific tips that I've been practicing and exploring and that the research points to as ways that we can manage our boredom. It'll all be documented in the link in the description, so you don't even have to watch this. You can just click that and read through it briefly. But for those who want, let me talk you through it. Number one, look at it. I'm not going to go all new age on you, but I am going to say that the most effective, most powerful, subtle thing that you can do is recognize what it feels like to be bored. The next time you're bored, try to notice your mind going into a more existential mode.
• 31:30 - 32:00 You're thinking about the past and the future. At first, it's just going to feel like a jumble and a cloud of uncomfortable feeling. But with time, even if you just take a minute before you intervene and do anything, just to notice, you will refine that sense of being able to see the boredom. Oh, and you kind of have to do this without judging it, like without like getting down on yourself. Just like let it happen. Look at it. There's actually a ton of science around this very simple technique that is called mindfulness. It applies to all kinds of mental experiences, but it really applies to
• 32:00 - 32:30 this boredom situation. There's a million ways to formally practice this, like a million apps, Headspace, the Waking Up app with Sam Harris, a million YouTube videos, whatever. But you can also just informally try it out next time you're having an uncomfortable feeling. Try to look at it instead of avoid it. Number two, and this is also going to sound kind of newagy, but I promise it's also very useful, is work on accepting it. Meaning going through the process of instead of trying to avoid it, embracing it and saying this is what is happening right now. And even saying this is what helps for me is like
• 32:30 - 33:00 this is actually a good thing. This is my body telling me something about my life. I'm going to actually try to accept it instead of trying to resist it. The $64,000 question about boredom that everybody wants to know is what do I do about it? How do I eliminate it? And there are lots of different responses to that. I think the first one is to say you can't eliminate it. Boredom, if it's something that plays a role in your life, if it's functional, then you don't want to get rid of it, right? Because you want that function. Another way to put this is relax into it. Relaxation is kind of the opposite of boredom in some ways. Relaxation is
• 33:00 - 33:30 an acceptance of non-action. What I do is I kind of go back to these brain scans and I think of like the nostalgic like thinking about the past and the future and try to say like, oh, my brain is going through this like default mode network thing and that's kind of cool. I'm going to just relax into it instead of like judge myself that I'm like feeling it. Okay, so those are the first kind of micro actions that you can take inside of your mind next time you feel bored. And those sort of set the stage for managing your boredom. If you do those two, then you will be in a better place to engage with the rest of the
• 33:30 - 34:00 things on this list, which are things that are scientifically proven to help you fill this tank of meaning, which is core to us feeling regulated and good. So that leads us to engage in what the scientists call pro-social behavior, which means just hanging out with people. So much of human meaning comes from relationships, connection with others. Helping other people happens to be like a very potent fuel for this sense of meaning and purpose. And for the introverts out there, it doesn't have to be like a heart-to-heart
• 34:00 - 34:30 conversation with somebody. It can be like going to an event where there's a bunch of other people. Group rituals, festivals, sporting events, concerts, political rallies. These are a fast track to feeling some kind of collective meaning with your fellow human beings. I think other animals like dogs and cats and pets also can fulfill a version of this as well. We're going to put some links in this boredom guide of a platform where you can find different communities and meetups as well as this cool blog post of 99 ways to find IRL
• 34:30 - 35:00 community. Okay, the next one. Get creative. Humans are artistic creative beings and turns out that being creative, making stuff fills our tank. And as the science says, when we are bored, we are actually uniquely placed to be more creative, to think differently than we normally do. The literature talks a lot about like mastery and practice, like practicing piano every day. That's a little high effort for this. I'm more so thinking loweffort, lowcost, like highreward creativity. Cook something. Do some like basic crocheting or knitting, origami,
• 35:00 - 35:30 adult coloring books, mood boards, collages, fingerpainting. Like it doesn't have to be good. No one has to see it. But the act of making something is a source of meaning and a great way to like leverage your boredom for something creative. The next one is near and dear to my heart which is get curious. Curiosity and enthusiasm about something is a deep source of meaning for a lot of people. This is actually like the core for me besides my family. This is like where I get most of my
• 35:30 - 36:00 meaning in life. Nerding out about stuff. There's this quote from Andy Warhol. You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you. I mean, easier said than done, Andy, but like try to find things that light you up. Whether it's like obsessing over the specks of trains in Europe or looking into how ants build ant colonies, whatever, finding something that you can nerd out about and obsess over can be really good for meaning and a cure for boredom. Going down the old Wikipedia rabbit
• 36:00 - 36:30 hole works every time. If you cultivate this enough, you get access to like the inverse of boredom, which is called flow, where you are so deeply engrossed in what you are learning or doing that you kind of forget everything. It's like your attention and meaning are just on like turbo drive and you can kind of just go for hours. Okay, next one is going outside. This is again well documented in the literature. Wandering through a forest does wonders to our
• 36:30 - 37:00 sense of awe and perspective and meaning. You're also moving your body and uh you know going through a walk in nature. And often you can find activities that blend a bunch of these like if you go out bird watching or something with somebody else. You are doing the social thing. You are doing the nerd out about something thing and you're doing like the go on a walk in nature thing. Go to a painting class. You're doing mastery and practice but you're also doing creativity. you're also doing social. So anyway, all this is in the guide in the description. And I also want to kind of hear from all of
• 37:00 - 37:30 you like what does boredom feel like for you and what do you do when you are bored? I would love the comment section to turn into a discourse around the experience of boredom for for different people. So please do that. So I just want to finish by re-emphasizing what we started with, which is that boredom is not bad. It is a very natural cue that our body has given us to spur us to action to let us think about what is meaningful in our lives and to help us assess our story through life. And in this world where meaning is not made for
• 37:30 - 38:00 us like the old days and we have these phones that kind of sabotage our ability to sit with ourselves. Learning to sit with and accept boredom is a skill. It is one that you must practice if you want to leverage its benefits. So, I know that this story has been quite impactful for me and how I approach my board moments. And I hope it can do some version of the same for you. And I really look forward to hearing from all of you down in the comments. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next one.
• 38:00 - 38:30 [Music] [Music] [Music]