Among my various mild mental maladies is a sincerely ingrained fear of boredom. There’s two severity layers to the fear:

• Anxiety of being idled and potentially missing out on some form of consumption or recreation
• Severe anxiety of being forced to be minimally stimulated and attentive without being able to disengage for long periods of time

While the latter is just something I’ve come to work around in life, the former is a trained response. I know for a fact I didn’t have it before the age of 12 and at some point between my teenage years and my adult life, I lost the ability to be comfortably bored. I think at some point as my responsibilities grew and my sanctioned free time shrunk, I came to associate idleness with some opportunity cost.

This was an absolutely moronic thing to as some assumed truth and in this post I will simmer on this tremendous blunder.

The Setup

With the idea of opportunity-cost in place, I was primed to internalize further silly assumptions and prioritizations. I started optimizing quiet time away for consumption of pre-curated media instead of letting my environment and experiences just organically present me with whatever the world has made due for me.

I also started excusing trading money for time whenever I could justify a convenience as letting me “focus on what matters.” This one was particularly seedy too, cause there was absolutely no way every time-saving purchase ever is in service of what truly matters in life. (hi honey! 👋). Frankly, I’m just giving my money away to optimize the life out of my living!

I’ve basically had to relearn that a finite amount of time is not just a limited resource, but also a guarantee that there is time to be spent regardless of whether I want it or not. In otherwords, yes my time on this Earth is limited, but it is also my time on this Earth to spend.

The Algorithm

I could blame social media for most of my modern damage, but for me, that honestly came at the butt-end of my slip into boredom-aversion. I think in my case it started with early forums and memes. I might blame early Spotify too, though the UI back then really made it feel like a curated library of music you were building with music you didn’t pay for. Hell, can I take it all the way back to my first weeks chatting with strangers on Omegle? (Let’s go gambling!)

Regardless of the order of exposure, or the evolution of the medium, the pattern I’ve identified across them is basically “browsing.” There’s some truth to algorithms presenting you with canned suggestions robbing you of your ability to make decisions. But beyond that, at least in my case, what I think boiled my brain down was the decision fatigue. The steady bombardment of a million repeated binary decisions to make. “This song?” “This meme?” “This post?” “This discussion?” “This video?”

At some point, I’m no longer processing a suggestion at a time as individual thoughts. I’m instead aggregating the noise into a conversation where I’m developing my tastes alongside a glutinous salesman abusing my dopamine delivery with the relentless pestering only automation can provide.

The Point

I look at the time slots that make up my day, and they’re frankly puny. “Early afternoon” is a time slot in of itself for me now. That is so absurd! I’d previously look at an entire afternoon and mull briefly over whether I’d spend it grinding out programming study, or Minecraft projects, or Melee tech practice, or rollerblading laps around the neighborhood. The whole afternoon. “Early afternoon” was an approximate time something could happen, not a slot of time during which I’d consider what to do!

The constantly available ability to not be bored, to context switch, to multitask has conditioned me into evaluating life in time slots that border on useless. Scheduling my actions with the granularity of potty breaks. That is nowhere near the time necessary to do the very kind of action I valued deeply enough to try and prioritize.

The folly of it all is that I failed to realize the value of boredom. I mistook boredom and idling as the cost of failing to seize an opportunity instead of realizing they were the very means and method for exercising the opportunity. The fear of the opportunity cost has begotten the loss of the opportunity. Honestly hilarious!