On Boredom
“Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.” — Zen proverb
There was once a time when small, boring gaps in the day were unavoidable.
If you were waiting for something, you had to just sit tight and wait. There was no doomscroll to save us from the banality of idle time.
Today, this idle time is in short supply. We automatically fill any and all empty space in our attention before we even have a chance to notice it.
What are we avoiding?
Why is it that the second we have a dull moment, we obsessively reach for our phones?
I get it, boredom is uncomfortable… In an age where we all have on-demand access to distraction entertainment — why would we allow ourselves to be bored?
Here are two good reasons I want to bring to your attention…
Boredom & Memory
Our lives unfold as raw experience, but experience alone is not memory.
Memory forms later — in the dull, quiet moments when nothing is happening.
Boredom is the processing phase of memory. It’s what enables our raw, objective experience to become narrative — to become part of who we are.
Without boredom, our experiences don’t fully convert into memory. They remain informational, not autobiographical.
Our life feels less like a story and more like a sequence of events.
Without boredom, it’s as though our lives are being written in invisible ink. We make marks on the page, but we can’t go back later to read what was written.
The result is a common and unsettling feeling that time is somehow speeding up.
Time obviously isn’t moving any faster… it’s worse than that.
Our sense of time is being drowned out by endless stimulation and interruption, never given the chance to consolidate.
Boredom & Change
Boredom is also an important signal.
When something no longer feels meaningful, boredom steps in to break the pattern.
It’s uncomfortable for a reason. It pushes you to seek something new. It applies pressure to get you unstuck. To question your routines and start experimenting.
I feel like a come back to this everytime I write something here, but it all comes back to this central Zen concept that nothing is permanent. Clinging only leads to stagnation and suffering. Movement always requires some form of release.
Boredom is the fuel for that release. It’s the catalyst that helps us snap out of our delusion of permanence and forces us to accept and move with the inevitability of change.
The Practice
If you’ve read this far, I have a simple challenge for you:
Stop trying to eliminate boredom.
Let it do its job.
Notice those moments when you instinctively reach for your phone or TV remote.
Allow boredom to make you feel uncomfortable. Let it pressure you. Let it push you to explore, experiment, and change.
See where it takes you.
You are close to something important here, and then you pull back from it.
The framing of boredom as a tool for memory consolidation and a catalyst for change is accurate as far as it goes. But you are still treating boredom as something the ego can deploy. Boredom put to work. Discomfort managed into productivity. That is the same logic as the doomscroll you are critiquing, just slower.
The Zen proverb you opened with says something more radical than your argument delivers. Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself. That is not a metaphor about giving your nervous system time to consolidate experience. That is a description of what happens when the one who thinks they are steering finally goes quiet. The grass does not decide to grow. It grows because that is what the process does. The sitting quietly is not a strategy. It is the cessation of the pretence that you were ever in charge of the movement.
What you are calling boredom is the receiver going quiet. The ordinary noise of the ego drops below its usual threshold and something underneath becomes briefly audible. Not emptiness waiting to be filled. The silence that was always there. I wrote in my book, Beyond the Edge of Illusion, describing the ego as operating like a film projector, glueing discrete fragments of perception into the illusion of continuous movement at roughly 32 frames per second. Boredom is what happens when the projector slows, and you catch a glimpse of the gaps between the frames.
That is not uncomfortable pressure that forces change. That is the momentary faltering of the illusion of continuous selfhood. Those are not the same thing, and collapsing them misses what the quiet is actually offering.
You are reaching toward the threshold. The piece knows there is something there. But naming boredom as fuel for release still puts the ego in the driver's seat, just with a more philosophical steering wheel. The tradition asks something harder: stay in the stillness long enough to see that the one who finds it uncomfortable is the construction, not the ground.
That is the step the piece does not take. It is worth taking.
I look forward to being bored. ❤️