You’re Not Happy Because You’re Not Bored

I remember the first time that I read digital minimalism and tried to detox from technology for a week.

I sat in my living room in my apartment, feeling the discomfort of boredom pull me down into the couch.

I didn’t know what I was “supposed” to be doing in my free time. I couldn’t figure out what was fulfilling for me to do.

One day, a year later, I was driving in the car on a long road trip from Oregon to Utah and I experienced it. The “other” side of boredom.

When you are in a car, traveling on those lonesome highways in the western United States, there’s nothing to entertain you. Much of it is long, open and boring roads. There’s not even billboards to keep you mildly entertained.

You can try audio books, but after fourteen or fifteen hours, nothing really “fixes” the boredom any more. I started to notice a strange “acceptance” happening after so many hours.

I stopped trying to “fix” the boredom. And I had reached the other side of it and found some sort of odd “peace” with it.

There was nothing to do and I was OK. I had reached the “other” side of boredom.

Trying out boredom for a change

It didn’t occur to me that I should try to experience this in other times of my life until years later.

There’s less incentive to. We have something that will trigger new synapses and dopamine hits at our every waking hour immediately available to us 24/7.

But for those of us asking, “what do we do” when we step away from technology: we experience the “other side” of boredom.

The “other side” of boredom is when we are the most alive. Which means facing our painful emotions, acknowledging our discomfort.

But then noticing things around us that we never noticed before.

Life can explode around us. We taste our food. We watch the sun rise in it’s entirety and feel happiness just from existing.

Our dopamine addled brain asks: “But why would we experience those things when we could be scrolling on Tik Tok, or watching a youtube video?”

Once you start to experience the “other side” of boredom you can start to see the moments that are being robbed from us. Those moments that are extraordinary just because we are alive.

But what if it’s uncomfortable?

Most of my behaviors, I started to notice, were related to me avoiding something.

I was bored. I was angry at something and would try to justify my feelings by finding a similar example on Reddit. I was sad and looking for comfort.

But even if I found something similar to what I was looking for, the feelings didn’t go away.

The most miraculous thing happened when I stopped trying to escape those feelings and instead “leaned in” to them.

A large majority of the time, they would fade away. I was able to nurture those feelings within myself and in some sort of strange self-soothing, they would disappear.

This is one of the strangest things about discomfort. We are SO resistant to it. But if you lean into feeling uncomfortable, the majority of the time it fades away.

This is one of the closest things to a superpower that I’ve found in my life. Because once you know you can overcome being emotionally uncomfortable, you can stop avoiding things just because they are hard—when you know you need to.

That means living your life according to what your goals are. What’s important to you?

Stop giving up your life just to avoid small moments of discomfort.