Blog: What If Boredom Is Exactly What Your Mind Needs?

Healthy Body and Mind
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Join the conversation & let us know your thoughts.

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@urszula: You made me think of the mailbox at my house here in the USA.

The U.S. Postal Service delivers residential mail Monday through Saturday.

  • I may get no mail on any given day.
  • I may get a handful of mail on any given day.
  • I may get a lot of mail on any given day.

But, there are two constants:

  1. I can get mail only once per day.
  2. Mail delivery to me on my carrier’s route happens within the same one-to-two-hour time-slot (depending on the weather) every day when he does have mail for me.

So, I can check my mailbox for mail only once per day, Monday through Saturday – an activity that matches the minimalism that you describe.

The two most basic features of cellphones – calls and text messages – do not work that way.

  • Those who call or text-message us typically have something much more urgent to share than what they would put in postal mail.
  • We can get a call or text message at any time of day or night.
  • We can get multiple calls and text messages on any given day, including Sunday.
  • We often want to know when someone is calling us – hence the purpose of ringtones.
  • We often want to know when we have missed a call – hence the purpose of missed-call indicators such as tally badges or dots.
  • We often want to know when we have missed a call AND the caller has left a voicemail message – hence the purpose of a voicemail message-waiting indicator (MWI).
  • We often want to know when someone has text-messaged us – hence the purpose of an unread-messages indicator and perhaps a notification sound (depending on whether we like to “batch-process” new text messages).

Many cellphone makers fully support these “We often want to know” scenarios for calls and text messages. I dare say that many of us on this Mudita Forum want the Kompakt to do so, too.

  • We see any cellphone’s full support for these “We often want to know” scenarios as congruent with minimalism, with being restored by quiet moments, and with intentional boredom.
  • We see a cellphone’s LACK of full support for these “We often want to know” scenarios as anxiety-producing – because we and the people who communicate with us do not see cellphones as if they were mailboxes that should be checked only once per day, six days per week.

I look forward to seeing soon that the Kompakt is in the “full support” category. Meanwhile, I appreciate why others have abandoned the Kompakt or, like me, have switched back to a “full support” cellphone until that day.

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Having peace and finding pleasure in life is my preference over boredom - I cannot say I have ever intentionally been bored, but finding the time to do nothing is good. Wasting time isn’t the same as doing nothing, I can be bored whilst being very busy, boredom to me means that I wish I had something better to do.

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Yes, notifications are not always annoyances and some cannot be missed or ignored. A response delayed could result in harm or loss sometimes, its my duty at times to be available, I need to know when someone attempts to reach out to me, I have family and friends and we are all in this together, I have responsibilities and the phone I need to depend on as a trusted companion, a tool that I use to address my responsibilities. The phone is a parachute and a cushion, it can be a life saver.

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@kirkmahoneyphd I think since the advent of digital technology (specifically smartphones) there’s a certain amount of FOMO that’s been introduced into all of our lives.

I remember “back in the day” (the 90s) I was not concerned with “missing out.”
I know that the feeling itself is older than smartphones. I get that humans have always worried about exclusion, status, and being left out of social experiences, but, personally, I think what changed with handheld digital technology was the scale, speed, and intensity of the experience.

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I find the job to be particularly distracting. It seems that especially jobs like programming, that would benefit from time and space for deep thinking, require one to constantly appear busy. This faking of productivity isn’t only not productive, it prevents the productivity that would come from space for deep thinking.

Furthermore, this constant performance can cause stress, anxiety and depression, further reducing productivity.

I’ve yet to see a job posting that states: we do hammock driven developement. :slight_smile:

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