So it turns out that How to be Bored was the book that I thought How to do Nothing was going to be. I picked it up because of its title and because one of my keywords for the year is ‘balance’ and I like I expected, it was an interesting exploration into why we need to slow down and how we could do that.

How to be Bored is a short book broken into three sections:

1. The Problem: why we are overstimulated and why it’s an issue
2. Leisure: how we can be idle and benefit from it
3. Engagement: on the other side, the flow state and how work, relationships, and hobbies can help

A lot of what this book said resonated with me. In the first chapter, this caught my eye:

“We absorb large quantities of culture, which may be all to the good; but too often, we consume culture in the spirit of – well, consumerism. We do things in order to have done them, or simply to fill time with activity.”

I actually think that this is very true. I enjoy learning, but sometimes I wonder: when I watch a new Wondrium lecture or put a podcast on, is it really in the spirit of learning or to avoid the silence that free time brings? In the next chapter, Hoffman writes that

“because we are presented with ostensible options in all areas of life, we have a nagging sense that maybe we should be taking advantage of them.”

And that was a hard yes for me. I actually feel guilty on days when I don’t do much; I will actually tell my boyfriend that I feel bad for being unproductive because I only read a book or had a pocket of free time instead of being so busy that I feel overwhelmed. Somehow, I have internalised the idea that I must be busy all the time and that is honestly not very sustainable.

Plus, it helps to be comfortable with stillness. In Chapter 4, on introspection, the sentence: “The effort of self-knowledge is not only ennobling, but necessary to our happiness and health” caught my eye. I agree that we need to have a level of introspection and self-knowledge in order to make good decisions, and really, we need to be able to calm ourselves down and be still in order to introspect.

It’s actually a bit silly that I’ve not learnt to do this yet, because a lot of the Christian tradition is on learning to slow down – “be still and know that You are God” as the song says, or as the practice of lectio divino and daily devotion encourages. And, now that I’m thinking about it, Jesus commended Mary for sitting down and learning rather than rushing around like Martha.

But anyway, I digress. To be clear, the book doesn’t actually approach things from a Christian perspective, it’s just that I find that it overlaps a lot with what my faith says as well.

Back to the book, the last thing I wanted to talk about was the section on reading in Chapter 5 on Imaginative Exploration. I thought it was interesting that Hoffman makes a distinction between types of reading, or as she puts it: “the kind of segmented, bite-sized reading we do on the internet fragments and constricts the ‘space to think’, instead of expanding it; in a sense, it reduces or even rubbished our mental experience.” I remembered someone (probably on a podcast) countering the idea that reading is dying by saying that we read so much on the internet, but it’s also true that I find it very hard to read long-form essays on the internet and anything more than one thousand words probably ends up with me skimming the latter half. For books, I need either the paper copy or for me to read on a dedicated reader – it takes a really good book or a lack of reading options for me to read on my phone instead of browsing the internet.

Overall, I really enjoyed How to be Bored! Although it’s not very long, it’s a thoughtful exploration of why we need to slow down and the ways that we can do that. And if you want to explore the subject further, there’s a section at the end of the book called “Homework” which is just a list of recommended books – I’m definitely getting some reading inspiration from this!