Wander & Wonder

The video You Need to Be Bored. Here’s Why recently showed up in my YouTube feed, and the message felt very relevant to me. This is a short video posted by the Harvard Business Review, featuring Arthur Brooks, a Harvard professor who teaches about purpose and well-being. I had never heard of him before, but I liked how simply he explained something we all experience. He said boredom is not a problem to fix but something we actually need. When we let ourselves be bored, our minds start sorting through things we usually push aside. He mentioned a study where people were asked to sit quietly for 15 minutes without doing anything. They were given the option to press a button that delivered a small electric shock, and most people chose to shock themselves rather than sit still. Shocking, right? (No pun intended.) But it really shows how uncomfortable we have become with being bored!

It’s true that whenever there is even a short pause in my day, I reach for my phone without thinking. It happens while waiting in line, sitting on the bus, or walking somewhere. I do not even have a purpose for picking it up, but once I do, I check my emails and inevitably end up scrolling through social media. The more I do it, the harder it feels to just be present when I try not to. My brain immediately searches for stimulation. But when I resist that urge, even for a few minutes, I start noticing small things: thoughts, ideas, or just the world around me. Today, for example, I looked up at the sky and saw a huge V formation of geese flying overhead. It was so impressive to see, and I would have missed it completely if I had been staring at my phone.

There is definitely a pressure to always be productive; the idea that if you are not doing something, you are being lazy or wasting your time. It is true that there is always more to do, and so many things we could be working on or improving. But maybe that is part of the problem. We fill every moment with tasks or distractions, and then wonder why we feel drained or unmotivated.

Being bored feels wrong because we associate it with being unproductive, but Brooks reminds us that it is actually where creativity and insight often begin. When we are constantly moving from one thing to the next, our minds never get the chance to form new ideas, make new connections, and understand what matters to us.

Brooks ends the video with a simple piece of advice: make time to be bored on purpose. Try setting aside a few minutes every day without your phone or any distractions, and just sit, walk, or do nothing. He calls it “scheduling boredom.” Though I may not actually write “be bored” on my to-do list, I will start by noticing the urge to go on my phone and try to refocus my attention on whatever activity I am currently doing, even if that activity is a little bit more boring!