“Mo-o-o-m, da-a-ad, I’m bo-o-o-ored!” – which parent hasn’t heard the whining and complaints of children who have nothing to do? The first reaction, usually, is annoyance. “Come on, find something to do! Play!” But then the voice of conscience wakes up, and a persistent feeling of guilt arises before the “abandoned” child of perpetually busy parents. You want to do something urgently to fix the unbearable situation of the little one. And you scratch your head in search of an answer to “what could keep the offspring busy”.

Don’t rush. Boredom is not an enemy at all, it is as necessary to our children as air, the sooner they encounter it, the better they will be adapted to this constant companion of our lives. Once upon a time, I also rushed to occupy my son’s time with something useful and interesting. But now I am convinced: children simply need to be bored.

Not a Boring Garden

But why do children get bored at all? It would seem, run, jump, play – there’s so much unknown, unexplored, undiscovered around. We all were children and remember well: that boredom is like a shadow, it’s been with us since birth. Quiet hour – torture for those who no longer want to sleep. “It was very boring, I couldn’t fall asleep until the last ten minutes,” recalls my ten-year-old from kindergarten. “What were you doing?” – I ask. “Poking my finger into the wall and… my nose.”

Children get bored for various reasons. For example, it’s boring when they’re used to structured activities (ballet, drawing, music, judo) and experience a kind of “withdrawal” in their free moments. Such children need boredom vaccinations.

The second option is children whose parents are incredibly busy and they lack parental attention, care, and simply communication. Their whining “it’s boring” is a request for love, and the boredom of such children is best dispelled by joint activities: going to the park, reading, and building something together.

And finally, “digital gen children”, who have ready-made entertainment in the form of iPads, phones and game consoles are always at hand. Digital devices with internet access are created precisely so that we never, under any circumstances, get bored anywhere. But even these super-powerful boredom tablets don’t always help. And they also ruin eyesight and make you stick to them.

Anatomy of Boredom

Philosophers tend to consider boredom a modern phenomenon. Of course, people have always been bored, but the mass scale of boredom has only emerged in modern times. For example, until 1852, there was no word “boredom” in the English language. I didn’t hesitate and looked in the dictionary for an exact definition: “Boredom is a passive emotional state characterised by decreased activity, lack of interest in the surrounding world, people”.

Psychologically, boredom is what arises when we tire of doing nothing and feel that we should be productive. Something itches in the soul from the fact that we are unproductive, boredom is a signal of anxiety.

Psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel formulated it differently: boredom arises when we cannot do what we want to do or must do what we do not want to do.

When a person is bored, processes of inhibition predominate in the cortex of the brain. Boredom is a kind of brain reboot, a door to meditation, a rest from eternal chatter and bustle.

Cure for Boredom

Everyone fights boredom differently. Since boredom is associated with a thirst for experiences, the main recipe is, in fact, experiences. The entire entertainment industry is aimed at satisfying this experiential hunger. Everything in our world has long been assessed on the “boring” – “interesting” scale.

Poet Joseph Brodsky offers a completely different way. Instead of dissipating, driving away boredom, you can surrender to it when it overwhelms you, immerse yourself in it, and reach its very bottom. After all, boredom speaks the language of time, it is about teaching our children the most valuable lesson – the lesson of the infinity of time and our insignificance against this background.

I also agree with Bertrand Russell, who believed that a generation that cannot bear boredom is a generation of dwarfs. In my opinion, our children should learn what free time is and what can be done with it. How to occupy it, how to spend it, how to distribute it, how to choose suitable activities. If they don’t learn to do this in childhood, then when?

Unstructured time is often the only way to explore the inner world in our age of speed and instant messaging. Unstructured time is the beginning of creativity. Dive into your childhood: the door to the entrance slams shut and here you are standing in the middle of an empty yard in bewilderment. Heat, the buzzing of flies, even the sun feels bored to shine. You poke the asphalt with the toe of your shoe, inspect the bricks of an old house, peer into corners, and wander. And suddenly amid this viscous emptiness, vacuum, ideas arise: “I’ll go for a bike ride”, “I’ll pick tomatoes”, and “I’ll build a hut”. These sticky minutes – hours – are a kind of challenge to the growing person. A push towards finding their calling, exploring their inclinations and talents, activities that captivate completely, truly, without compromises.

Only in the silence of boredom can one often start thinking and perceiving the world holistically, right-brained, and introvertedly. Boredom can become a magnifying glass, a lens, with the help of this tool, you suddenly see patterns on the wallpaper, dust particles swirling around the room, and hear the ticking of clocks.

So the next time you hear a child’s “I’M BO-O-O-ORED!”, confidently send them on a journey to the land of Boredomia, to tear boredom apart. Let them, even for a little while – among all these skates, drawings, ballet classes, Xboxes, and iPads – spit on the ceiling, kick a ball, and lounge around doing nothing. After all, if we believe Heidegger, to experience boredom means to be human.”

Storykate