Are You Bored Yet?
by Karen Maezen Miller
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 “I’m bored.”
Schoolchildren can be afflicted with it by the second day of summer; workers by the sixth month on the job; spouses by the seventh year of marriage; and readers by the tenth paragraph. Or before.
Are you bored yet? Nowadays, boredom is considered a scourge. We blame boredom for the death of curiosity, learning, productivity, innovation, and commitment. Boredom is the antecedent to all kinds of distractions, disengagements, overindulgences, and infidelities. The worst crime is being boring, the joke goes, but we all know that the real crimes are likely to come after. In the name of boredom, we overfill our minds, our bodies, our senses, and our time. We flee what fails to amuse. Boredom breeds contempt, and contempt breeds calamity.
If boredom is such a menace, let’s bring it out into the open. Can you show it to me? Like the other thoughts and feelings we use to torment ourselves, boredom is something we can’t locate except in our own deadly pronouncement: “I’m bored.” By the time we say it, we believe it, and believing is all it takes. This is where the story can get interesting.
When we’re bored, we go looking for something new. And let’s face it: we’re nearly always looking for something new. It doesn’t matter how much or how little we’ve got—how well we each manage our store of talents or prospects—we are somehow convinced that we haven’t yet got “it,” not enough to be completely satisfied or secure. We might think we need something as harmless as a cookie, a game, or a gadget—or another career, lover, or child. We might call what we want higher purpose, wisdom, passion, or simply a change of scenery.
Until we are at peace with ourselves, the quest continues. Until we know that there is nowhere else to go, and nothing more to get, we are trapped in delusion. We cannot resolve delusion with more delusion, but we try, and in the search we drive ourselves further away from reality and into raving madness. Fighting boredom is a full-time occupation.
What does it take to liberate ourselves from the chase? What if we could release the grasping mind that is always clawing after some precious new thing, even if it’s only a new fantasy? That would be excruciating, or so we fear. It’s the fear of letting go that afflicts us, but letting go is pain free.
–Karen Maezen Miller
Latest Community Insights  |
Are You Bored Yet?
What does “boredom” mean to you? Can you share a personal story of a time when you challenged your thought of boredom? How do you liberate yourself from the chase of the next new thing? |
| Manyam wrote: beautifully written, we are drowning in distractions and yet want more. To stop and do nothing seems scary, there is not a single second left in our tomorrow that we have not planned for in our minds… |
| Conrad P Pritscher wrote: I seem to operate so unconsciously that I am frequently unaware of boredom. At this moment I’m challenging the thought of boredom because I must often be bored since I am frequently looking for… |
| david doane wrote: Boredom means to me that I’m not doing what I want to be doing, be that because I or someone else isn’t allowing me to do what I want or because I don’t have the means, motivation, courage, or … |
| Jan Daddona wrote: An amazing insight with huge implications. Thank you for bringing it up. … |
| AJ wrote: To be without interest in the people, subject matter, project at hand is to be “bored”. My parents remedied “b” with work. If we verbalized “b”, we would find ourselves scrubbing the porc… |
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