On the Idle Mind

The Serene Mind

Our today’s world is troubled, with motion and constant events occupying our mind. Through the internet, we read the latest news, passively take part in the personal events of other people, and have not much room to just shut the brain off. We take it for granted that every free minute of our lives, every queue in a supermarket, every train ride, every commercial break can be filled with feeding our desire to not have to listen to our own thoughts. Humans like to muffle their mind, and that’s understandable. We woke up in this world, struggling to understand every single part of the machinery, with hardware capable of detecting patterns that would help us to survive. They say that man is a social animal, that it is part of our nature to take interest in the life of others, but that’s only partly true. Through the industrialization, we forgot what this capability was really useful for: to survive. The social aspect of our primate ancestors was never meant to be out of pure passion for our companions, but for the pure, egoist necessity of survival. We shared our food, warned against predators, and supported each other, not out of benevolence, but for our own interest and to profit from it. We expected a return of revenue, that others would share their food if we are not able to hunt any longer, that we got higher chances to survive an attack if we are a group, and that others would care for us as well. In a fact, this was like a long-term interest, like investing in stocks, sacrificing a small amount of our time and effort to get a possible larger payout in the future when needed. Today, we don’t really need this investment any longer, and our minds are depleting over the ancient machinery that is telling us it would be necessary to follow every event of our society, know about all the things our friends do on their vacation, and take part in every single current topic of interest. For what benefit? The algorithm knows we’re still cave dwellers with ancient hardware, and they make use of that. It’s no wonder that people favor gossip and the latest breaking news over reading a hard book or contemplating with just your thoughts. And this is not new to our times, and fault to the internet only. Even ancient thinkers realized this flaw, almost uncannily parallel to the observations I just described. Seneca wrote in “De Brevitate Vitae” (On the Shortness of Life) about exactly this. He wrote that life isn’t really short; we are just wasting a lot of time on things that don’t contribute to us. In his time, people obsessed over gladiator fights, political rumors, and other people’s affairs. Today, we have manifold more distractions from a serene mind, where we are not able to just wait in a queue without our phones, just read a boring book, or take a walk without headphones. But we can actually turn this into our advantage, making boredom a tool to break our minds from this ancient machinery and actually ascending as human beings.

Being Bored is Good

Seneca distinguished between “being busy” and actually living. In his words, people who are constantly occupied with external noise reach the end of their lives and realize they never truly lived at all. So how can we break this pattern of our ancient minds? With boredom. After humans developed to not being occupied the whole day with hunting, mating, and securing their settlement, they got confronted with boredom for the first time. Boredom probably led to some of the greatest inventions of humankind. After some breakthroughs in agriculture and livestock farming, we had time to discover writing systems, music, and build cities. From the beginning of time, we could not accept a serene mind and tried to occupy our high-capable machinery of the brain with tasks that brought us benefits. But, with time, those benefits turned against us. Fast forward to the 21st century, and instead of inventing new architecture, legal systems, methods of farming, or poetry, we binge watch Netflix, look at staged vacation photos from people we did not talk to for ten years, and play repetitive video games, all to muffle our minds, which seek to be put to use. Being bored is no longer a trigger to create something useful, but to grab the next best filler for our attention, while eating something or doing chores. Friedrich Nietzsche advocated to walk in nature and actually challenge yourself with boredom, since it leads to great ideas when just given the time. He wrote, “Do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement.” Just think about all the ideas you could have come up with instead of clicking on the Reddit icon again, milliseconds after you just closed the app. Take a walk, without headphones, even without a phone, and just try not to think. The best ideas don’t even come from trying to get them, they just pop off. And taking walks in nature offers the best way to get there. The school of Aristotle was called “Peripatetics”, which just means walking around. You don’t even need to have a specific topic at hand. Just get bored and without a way for your mind to escape with social media, see how it slowly calms down and funny thoughts keep popping up out of nowhere. Depending on how much you fried your neurons already, you might still think about all the stuff you scrolled through for the last couple days. “That news was really scary, I wonder how the current situation is.” “My Amazon order should arrive today.” “Did he really mean it that way, or was he just irritated?”

Calm occupations

Instead of frying your brain with binge-watching the latest show, while doomscrolling on your phone, and stuffing fast food from time to time, you can also take calm occupations. Being bored is one thing, but that is only a tool to bring up ideas, clear your mind, and think more structured. The end goal is to produce something. To put your ideas down, create something interesting, and bring value from thin air, out of your mind. It does not mean to be bored all the time and spend the whole weekend walking through the woods or sitting in a chair and staring at a wall (bonus points if you are actually able to do this), but it means to use the breaks between occupations, like standing in the grocery queue or waiting for your train, with boredom to calm your mind. Use that time not for external stimuli that keep your inner chatter busy, but structure your thoughts and bring order into the chaos. Then, when you don’t have need to be bored any longer, use this clear mind to put something of value out in the world. Write into a notebook, a diary, maybe. Learn an instrument. Or just read something challenging. Reading is actually, in my opinion, not such external stimuli, since you are engaged with it and actively involved in the complex structures the author wants you to take in. The main challenge is clear: reduce external stimuli, increase internal output. The two sides of this method are: First, being bored instead of numbing your mind, such that you realize what you actually want to think about, not what the algorithm wants you to think about. Adding dedicated boredom time, such as walks in nature with no hardware, except your brain, to come up with ideas. Second, using the time when there is no need to be bored to produce some valuable output, learn something, read something, produce something. All of this will lead to reduced stress, more creativity, no guilty feelings, and a bunch of little outputs that you can be proud of, that you produced them from pure will.

What you can do right now

Go for a walk. No headphones, and bring a notebook. At least one hour, preferably in the woods. Don’t try to think about anything. No million dollar idea that you want to pop up, no work task that you still have to do. Just try to observe your surroundings, and walk, walk, walk. If there are any interesting ideas coming up, put them down in your notebook. Don’t try to search for information online or expand on it yet, just write it down for later. Actively tell yourself that this thought was interesting but will be saved for later, continuing your walk. At the end of the walk, you will probably have put down some ideas. Great, now for the active part. Back home, take the topics you wrote down and expand on them. Write about them, scribble concepts down, do some research, and work out your thoughts. You will probably feel like a Renaissance man, like da Vinci, that’s the point. And if you get stuck, be bored again. Put down the pencil and don’t hook to your phone, but think deeply about how to expand on that idea. Again, at least one hour of just putting the thoughts you came up with to paper. If you are willing to progress more, read a book. Another full hour of something valuable that might seem boring when thinking about reading it.: Aristotle, Seneca, Nietzsche. My recommendation is the “Discourses” by Epictetus. It’s composed of short essays on everyday topics, and perfect to get into reading ancient lectures. Carry your notebook with you at all times to put down ideas that come up in the grocery queue or when waiting for your train. Combine all these, and slowly build a framework of deep thinking, with boredom to trigger spontaneous great thoughts, and time to produce something, even if it’s of no real value on the first iteration. Finally, meditation is a big point here as well. It’s probably the most obvious when it comes to boredom, as most people find it hard to get into it. Meditation is probably the most powerful technique for this stack since you will train your mind to actually notice such thoughts. The idea of meditation is not to numb your mind and think about nothing or to contemplate on some topic, but to notice when thoughts come up. With meditation, you will train to better understand your mind. During meditation, there will always be some thoughts to come up, that’s normal. Try to gently sweep them aside and recognize them, don’t ignore them, but put them aside. This will train your mind to better listen to your upcoming thoughts when being bored. You will be able to better categorize them, rate their importance, and put them to use. With all of this, you will build a framework where you will benefit from boredom, rather than being numbed down from the algorithms. In summary: Take boredom walks, write out your thoughts, read old books, meditate.

This text was written by a real human, not AI.