Consume Boredom
TL;DR close your browser and stare into space for 30 seconds and skip this vapid, highly derivative post.
As a friend recently pointed out, much of life is literally scrolling. Consumption, one thumb flick at a time.
During my mindless scrolling routine this morning, my thoughts turned to this addiction: when did this consumption first start? I trace it back to the first week of my first internship in college. The head of the company gave the obligatory welcome lunch pep talk / let me give you advice speech. I still remember two things:
- Always get paid in cash, not equity — which seemed odd since they were a small public relations firm over a decade after the Dot Com crash, but okay? A bit weird, but hey, I still remember it.¹
- Read the front page of the NYT and WSJ (and Politico — this was a D.C. internship after all) every day. You cannot be successful otherwise.²
So I read those papers — every day from that summer onward. More information = more power. This heuristic fit neatly into success in an academic setting. Doing well in a liberal arts environment stems from synthesizing and distilling a lot of information.³ Reading the news puts more arrows in the quiver, as it were.
And it is enjoyable. Reading the news is entertaining. So after college, I got on the newsletter kick. Much better for someone to curate your inbox and provide that needed edge. Better information = better power.
Not long after, the podcast. Then the audiobook. Both game-changers in their own rights. Now the stimuli escaped solely the realm of the visual. I could run with a podcast. I could commute with an audiobook — 1.5x speed on the slow days.⁴ Heck, I could even optimize the slow chapter by scrolling newsletters at the same time. Multiple sources of information = multiple sources of power.
Fast forward (ha) to today and between email, newspapers, newsletters, podcasts, audiobooks, magazines, social media, YouTube, and Ted Talks my life is one big fire hose. More information = more power? I’m not so sure.
I enjoy being distracted. We all do. And we all know it, even if we don’t admit it. But I don’t think it makes me smarter. If we constantly seek to take in information, we don’t leave room for thinking, that synthesis of information, to go back to the liberal arts. If nothing else, a 90-minute blue book test in college made you create something. Anything. To produce, not consume.
And while this output exists for some in their jobs, that production is in response to external stimuli. It is reactionary and coming to stem the flow of information or respond to it. For most, it is not to create something new or to put ideas out in the world. So when it comes to creativity or breaking out of the constraints of absorbing more and more information, it does not work.
The idea of information overload is not new. Smart people work for smart companies that know how to grab our attention. Content creators make good content. Stuff is interesting.
But above all, we enjoy distractions. So what do we do?
The idea of distancing ourselves from screens — sit, meditate, do nothing — is not new either. We all know that this is what we are supposed to do, yet we struggle to do it. Boredom is boring. Much easier to read the “8 productivity hacks that will optimize your life” article than to sit and do nothing, which is #7 on the list. Or, whatever.
And for the four people who make it this far in the post, you also spend your time consuming stuff. Why else do you read a random Medium post if not to be distracted? I mean boredom has to be better than this.
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[1] Obviously crypto was not mainstream at this time and who knows maybe if he had relaxed this maxim and been paid in Bitcoin in the early days he could have been rich! Well, anyway.
[2] There are a lot of jokes to be made here but they aren’t noble (or is it nobel?), so I won’t touch it.
[3] Or at least convincing someone else that you are doing this. I mean how many 20 page papers can one professor really read on the impact of hard vs. soft money in electoral politics in the 20th century before s/he wants to renounce their worldly possessions and live on a commune? A couple of dozen max. So nail the intro, really stick the topic sentences, wrap it up neatly, and whatever you do, do not mess up the bibliography.
[4] Once, in a cowardly move, I tried to listen to James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain on 3x speed to finish 2/3 of the book in a day. I neglected my reading for bookclub that month. Needless to say, I did not contribute much to the conversation.
