Unlike the Pet Shop Boys, are you being boring and bored?

One of my favourite song lyrics is from the song Being Boring by the Pet Shop Boys. “We were never being boring, we were never feeling bored.” It conjures up pictures of people busy doing things that they enjoyed, and also tells us that there was no time to be bored.

At first glance this sounds idyllic, but is it achievable? I agree that we ideally want to be doing the stuff we love, but how much of our days are largely spent doing the boring mundane things. Reading and replying the emails, writing lists, searching for stuff on our PCs and devices, food shopping, ferrying kids around, commuting, sitting in unimportant meetings, the list goes on.

Your smartphone pacifier

Then there’s the “never feeling bored” lyric. Whilst this song was written at the beginning of the 1990s, I think the line resonates even more today than it did back then. Many of us don’t know what feeling bored is any more. As soon as there is a pause in our day (work breaks, lunchtime, queueing, waiting for someone, etc) out comes the magic smartphone to fill that space. It’s like a pacifier or dummy for adults and teenagers. We feel the need to fill the void with doing “something” so we feel we are making progress.

But do we need to? Is being bored, even for a few minutes, possibly a good thing? Maybe it could give us a chance to stop and think, to actually use our brains to look at the bigger picture. We could start to work stuff out for ourselves rather than relying on others and of course Google.

Boredom rewards?

So being bored might not actually be a boring thing to do. It could be fun and rewarding. So when you’re reaching for that smartphone during the TV adverts, whilst sat on the train, or simply walking down the street, take mental pause. Then ask yourself, what would it be like to just stop and do nothing for 5 minutes. The let your mind wander. Was it boring being in your own thoughts, or did any creative magic happen?

Let me know in the comments.