Structured Boredom
• 2 min
I’ve been running a lot recently. We’re right next to a beautiful park in sunny Los Angeles and the lack of friction to get outside has definitely been a big contributing factor. But another factor is that I always have something interesting to listen to while I’m running. With Apple Watch helping me keep my running heart rate in zone-2, I’m able to keep just enough attention on an audiobook (recently, it’s been the excellent book by Dan Wang - Breakneck) or a podcast.
On a recent run, however, I just decided to run without plugging in my headphones for the first round of the park. Within two minutes, a flurry of thoughts started entering my mind – it felt like a faucet that was jammed had suddenly been opened after a long time. These thoughts were also very different from the time I dedicate to structure strategy doc thinking at work. These were thoughts that seemed idle inside my brain somewhere but needed white space to truly come out.
This experience made me wonder – what exactly are we running from? We treat this whitespace / boredom like a problem to be solved with the next podcast episode or quick refresh on email. And perhaps we have good reason to be scared. I was reminded of a passage I read from Endurance - a story about Ernest Shackleton and his crew, trapped in the Antarctic surrounded with ice. With nothing to do and nowhere to go, the “monotony of life” became excruciating for the crew. Theirs was a terrifying, purposeless whitespace and they did anything like religiously playing poker patience just to “kill time.”
But what if there’s a difference between the forced idleness similar to what Shackleton’s men experienced when trapped on the ice and structured whitespace? Writer Neil Gaiman on the Tim Ferris podcast shared a rule for when he’s writing - he can either sit and write, or sit and do absolutely nothing. He can’t check his phone, read a book, or do anything else. He creates an environment where boredom is the only alternative to the work he wants to do. “Writing is actually more interesting than doing nothing.” He used boredom strategically.
My brief, headphone-free run was this small dose of Gaiman’s structured nothing. For a brief run, I made my own thoughts the most interesting thing to listen to. It seems the secret isn’t just to find unlimited whitespace, but to create a container for it. Maybe the goal isn’t to kill time, but to create the conditions where time can bring the best ideas to life.