Going into college, they tell you that time management will be a vital part of your higher education experience. What is meant by that statement is usually taken as juggling time between school, work, and friends, as well as the many other activities in which students partake. However, the most jarring and possibly the most salient is the time between these activities which, if we are being honest, takes up an equal, if not larger, part of day-to-day life. We often refer to this time as “down time.” Generally, this time occurs between classes, between study sessions, and between extracurriculars: times of productivity where we are “doing something,” but the language of this is where it is interesting because when we are not being productive, we describe this time as “doing nothing.” Sleep in between classes and someone asks you what you did, you say, “Pretty much nothing.”
When we are not doing something flourishing, people sometimes describe this time as dangerous, especially in a college setting since we students are so busy and every moment is regarded as preciously valuable in such a way that if find ourselves not doing something that is furthering our scholastic pathway, we become fearful and get somewhat of an anxiety kick that tells us that we must always be doing something productive. This is a feeling that almost everyone can relate to, however, what I would suggest is that it is not a fear of unproductivity that tells us to always be doing something, but instead a very real and constant fear that we have grown accustomed to since our days before formal education and that is the fear of boredom. This is why many of us have sat for hours in front of a television screen, almost mindlessly looking (not watching) at the scenes dotted before us and then the next day cannot confidently recall what we viewed or have gone down the rabbit hole of YouTube’s recommended videos for hours on end because these acts are not inherently productive but instead they are like white noise: constant. TV is, of course, the largest and most obvious example because it has been a large part of our culture for half a century or longer. We so automatically fall into a fear of boredom and then combat it with entertainments that are very often not entertaining largely because they are easy and “low-participatory.” This is not to say that this is bad or wrong, but it is without thought: a kind of default mode that we simply turn on when one of those anxiety kicks comes about.
The next question becomes is should we fear this constant? I believe any fear should be directed in the automatic way that we fall into fighting that boredom and less on the boredom itself because if you can get to a state wherein you find yourself not unanxious in boredom but actually comfortable in it, you will reach a point where instead of your leg bouncing up and down while your iPhone sits in your front-left pocket, you can just sit there and view people, possibly have interactions with them on a person-to-person basis or just sit in silence but the important thing to realize here is you can do these things not because they are better or more productive but because they will then be a choice instead of a knee-jerk reaction to boredom.
