If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re bored or at least looking for something more interesting than another endless feed.

I hope that this is the last time you ever keep reading or scrolling when you're bored. Let's get started.

Why are you bored?

Boredom is an uncomfortable state of mind caused by a lack of interest, stimulation, or meaning in your current situation. It's a completely natural state of the mind and body, just like hunger, thirst or pain.

Since it's natural, boredom signals something just like the others:

• Hunger tells you to eat.
• Thirst tells you to drink.
• Pain tells you something may be injured.

Boredom tells you that your current activity is no longer engaging or meaningful.

The signal

Researchers assume most cognitively capped species don't experience boredom the same way we do. Many cognitively advanced animals appear to experience a form of boredom. For instance, if a dog is left alone for a while, it will chew furniture, bark, pace around, get unusually excited and bring you new toys, etc. Similar patterns have been observed in zoo and laboratory animals. Hence why it's always recommended to take your dog out for environmental enrichment. However, a single celled bacteria doesn't do much if left alone in a stable environment.

One plausible explanation is that evolution favored boredom because it encouraged animals to explore, learn and adapt. If a wolf thousands of years ago was perfectly content lying in the same place all day, it probably wouldn’t:

• explore new territory,
• discover food,
• learn new hunting strategies,
• investigate unusual sounds,
• or find a mate.

Natural selection would therefore favor a mechanism that says:

“You’ve been doing nothing useful for a while. Go explore.”

Us humans simply seem to have inherited and elaborated on an older motivational system by layering language, abstract thinking, long-term planning, and self-reflection on top of it. We'll come back to this elaboration in a bit.

Quenching boredom

Let's assume you are sitting alone at home with no one else to talk to or do anything with. There's no way to go outside right now. How could you relieve yourself from boredom?

Before social media

As a human being, you could:

• watch TV
• read books
• browse some forums
• play a PC game
• read the news

Unlike today’s endless feeds, older forms of entertainment naturally came to an end. The movie finished. The TV episode ended. You reached the last page of a book. Eventually, boredom returned and your mind had room to wander again.

After social media

You could:

• watch a documentary on YouTube
• listen to an audiobook
• browse Reddit endlessly
• play a mobile game
• go on Twitter or Instagram for news

This would help you quench boredom for 10+ hours straight. You never have to put down your phone, it's just app after app, all waiting for you patiently. You're never back to being bored. That’s the first time in human history we’ve been able to avoid boredom almost indefinitely.

As such, we can really be confident that we've progressed technology in the right direction once again, right? We're satisfying one of our most primal requirements, right? Like mass agriculture reducing food scarcity, right? Right??

Functions of boredom

To really confirm, let's pick up what we paused earlier. We ended "The Signal" section by noting that us humans elaborated on top of this ancient system by layering language, abstract thinking, long-term planning, and self-reflection on top. That means boredom doesn’t just help us find food anymore - it also helps us solve problems, reflect on our lives and imagine entirely new ideas.

Now think about it, aren't all these basically the core human experience? If not, is the only difference between dogs and ourselves the fact that we're less loving and genuine than them?

Building civilization

In order for a civilization to grow, there are multiple things that members have to do, like:

• short and long term planning
• research & innovation
• self-reflection & evaluation

You could argue that there are people whose day job it is to do the abovementioned stuff at a civilization scale and you'd be right.

But the point I'm making is that history is full of people who used periods of quiet thinking to do remarkable work. Whether it was scientists, inventors or artists, many of their best ideas emerged when their minds had the space to wander rather than react to constant distractions.

Boredom is what gave them that space to keep thinking.

Cultivating thoughts

Beyond pushing us to explore the world, boredom also pushes us inward. It gives us time to think about ourselves, question our decisions and connect ideas that would otherwise remain buried beneath constant stimulation. A person can never think about anything, let alone themselves, if they're always occupied and don't have the space to think.

Hence, being bored is crucial as it lets the mind explore new thoughts it has kept bottled for so long. When nothing else occupies the mind, it becomes free to think about yourself, your interests, maybe a new idea that you want to work on, etc.

When you're often bored, there's a better chance that you become a more interesting person. You should try being bored once in a while. You'd be surprised how much your mind wanders and what all it cooks up.

My experience

I myself have been on both sides of this aisle and so I'll share two stories that might help. By both sides, I mean that I kept myself from being bored at different points in life, both due to different reasons: because I was busy and because I was addicted to my phone.

The hustler

I'm a very ambitious person and have been from my school days. In college, I always kept myself busy, because I believed that was the optimal path to landing the best outcomes after an engineering degree in such a bad economy.

At school, I built a humanoid robot that made the local news. Right after entering college, I won a competition in college. I was then cooking up the idea for something to build next. And it was during this time that I was involved in a motorbike accident and got my right clavicle fractured. As a result, I was bedridden for a couple of months. During the first two months, I couldn't lift my arm and so, was mostly phone-ridden too. Also my mom was always nearby and moms being moms, didn't allow me to move me arm to pick up the phone. So, all the building and working stopped.

During this time, my mind started wandering. I don't clearly remember what route it took but here's an abstract:

1. I evaluated my life and what all I had built till then.
2. Realized that a common pattern was that no one actually used what I built
3. Went into a state of desperation trying to fix it.
4. Started thinking about the tech that I myself use regularly
5. Figured out that you had to make something people want to use
6. Started hunting for real problems to solve.

After 4 years from then, I have built stuff that people want and did land a job at a good consumer apps startup right out of college. In retrospect, make something people want is the motto and working principle of Silicon Valley that I came to know about only recently.

If I didn't have a chance to self-reflect and think about myself then, there's a good chance that it might have been too late until I realized it.

The scroller

While reading the above story, you may get the impression that I've always been a grinding hustler. I haven't. I'm guilty of being a doom scroller myself. During my college days, I explored building all kinds of stuff and didn't shy away from hardware. This meant I had to always be tinkering with stuff.

But later on, I switched to working exclusively on software. And it was during this time that I felt the need to fill the time gap when the code compiled with something else. So, I started watching YouTube. At a certain point, I would simply binge whatever videos it suggested me and the algorithm was smart enough to show me exactly the kind of stuff I would click.

This continued for a year until one day, I opened YouTube and realized there was nothing left that genuinely interested me. That’s when it hit me: I wasn’t taking thinking breaks anymore. Earlier, I used to take short breaks and walk inside my room simply to get up from the chair. Now, I wasn't doing it as much. After that, I'd put my phone away and not open YT when working.

I managed to stop that but then, there was another phase where I used to switch between different social media apps just to fill the void. Once I realized that, it's when I started trying various screen time blockers and solutions.

Our solution

My cousin and myself both faced these issues with uncontrollable phone usage. We tried various solutions available, but if we consider them in a spectrum ranging from restrictive to ineffective, none really exist in the goldilocks zone. We want to be able to open apps any time during the day to get important stuff done but don't want to be lost in doom scrolling either. We made ourselves bored, sat and thought for a while.

Here's our solution:

1. Before you open an app, you state what you're opening it for and get a time window for doing that. (Eg: "Check DMs (1 min)" or "Scroll feed (10 mins)" in Instagram)
2. After the timer runs out, the app can't be opened for a while. We call this time cool-off period.
3. If you do want to open before the cool-off ends, then you'll have to negotiate with Hase, our AI companion, who'll decide whether to grant it.

This became Haserupt, and you're reading this blog post in Haserupt's website now!

Make yourself bored!

If I didn't bore you with my ranting yet, it's time we get you bored!

I believe that any person patient enough in today's world to sit and read a blog post, especially one as boring as this, has the intelligence to get bored and cook up amazing new stuff none of us have seen.

If you’ve made it this far, do yourself a small favour. The next time you instinctively reach for your phone because you’re bored, wait for just a minute instead. Let your mind wander. You might be surprised by where it goes. And if you want a helping hand in getting bored, try Haserupt! It's free and you can also use the code GETBORED to get 20% OFF the believer plan if you want to upgrade, as a thank you for reading my rant!