i wanna be bored again
i've been thinking lately about my relationship with boredom, and in particular about how i didn't think i needed to define one. turns out when you ask the internet about this, it tells you that boredom is good for you, according to science, and then it offers some version of 'x things to do when you're bored', which immediately defeats the purpose. i understand how boredom is useful, i can easily think of things to do when i'm bored. the trouble is i'm not actually sure how to be bored. being a millennial from before the internet was commercially available in my part of the world hasn't kept me from being almost as constantly overstimulated online nowadays as gen z's (almost. i didn't actually have that hard of a time dropping most mainstream social media, but even without it i feel overstimulated more often than not.)
anyway, all this thinking got me into a silly-sounding exercise i'm going to try this coming week, where i set a timer for 15-30 minutes, do a low-stimulus activity and just let my mind wander. today i moved some loose jewelry beads from one bowl into another bowl for 15 minutes while staring at a wall (i did say 'silly-sounding'). tomorrow i'll do 20 minutes of... something i need to figure out first. there's a bit of creativity in coming up with pointless activities that keep you engaged-but-not-engaged for longer than a couple of minutes. i wrote down some observations from today's session (the main one being that i default to trying to make my mind wander, which, surprise, doesn't work) and hopefully i'll have something useful by saturday.