Boredom and Curiosity
I am being assailed by boredom.
Being bored appears to be my lot in life. The curse of ADHD, I suppose. Others afflicted by this malady have told me that they feel constant boredom, and yet until very recently I didn’t really understand, because the only times I could remember consciously feeling bored were in class or at church and those are extenuating circumstances. No, these people told me of being bored while at home. “While at home?” I would say. “Why, at home, you can do anything! How could you possibly be bored?”
But on some level, I think I always understood.
I was bored when I first started working at my job, but I passed it off as being stressed about whether I was meeting expectations (I was). I was bored while I was putting off important life tasks, but I thought that was about anticipated boredom, not present boredom. I was bored every time I struggled to go to sleep on time, but I called that akrasia, or lack of discipline, or any other name under the sun, since I didn’t experience the boredom and instead entertained myself until I was so tired that sleep came to me peacefully and naturally, as if I had always wanted to put down my distractions and go to bed. But it was boredom the whole time. I couldn’t recognize it, because I was avoiding it, but it was boredom nonetheless.
Boredom is a pervasive kind of dukkha. It lurks behind every entertaining activity, threatening you with the promise of cessation, reminding you that whatever it is you’re doing will eventually end. It pushes you to extremes, seeking relief in any sensation, not even just desirous ones but sensation in general. I keep thinking about the studies in which people prefer electric shocks over sitting idly in a room with nothing but their thoughts. Is idle boredom really that bad? Is idle curiosity really so powerful?
I am beginning to suspect that curiosity is simply the other side of boredom. The habits that alleviate my boredom—scrolling, writing, hanging out with people—all feel like curiosity. Take hoarding-type scrolling: I have a queue of articles, YouTube videos, and books that is thousands of pieces of content long, but I don’t look to the queue when I’m bored, because even though I don’t know the precise contents of the articles in my queue, I feel like I know roughly what they will be about and thus don’t feel like I’m discovering a genuinely novel piece of information. Instead I look to the feed so I can experience the feeling of having found something truly new to me. Writing is similar: even when I am finishing a piece, much of my joy stems from discovering what I will change, rediscovering what I wrote and how I now disagree with it, thinking about the novel and uncertain reactions I will get once I post. No wonder I post so often. And friends are the greatest source of surprise on this planet. No wonder my social battery is so voracious, so insatiable.
I always loved my natural tendency towards curiosity. I always hated my natural aversion towards boredom. I sat with my thoughts, and I told myself I would accept whatever I found, and I realized that they were one and the same. And now I am bored.
But I am also now aware of how much of my other suffering (and action in general) is driven by boredom. Now I can deal with the problem at the root, instead of searching for increasingly exotic stimuli and information in which to drown my consciousness. Trying to meditate or wait out a fit of boredom feels like holding my breath during one of those stupid action movie scenes in which the main character stays underwater for like 5 minutes straight. It feels like ignoring a knock at the door, or refusing to look at the shadowy figure in the corner of my eye, or turning away from a yell in the street. But trying to act afterwards feels like taking off my shoes after a long day and remembering what feet are supposed to feel like.
Reader, this too is an attempt to escape boredom. It’s time for us to end this diversion and return to The Desert of The Real. I would say that I must now figure out what I will do next, but I think I will instead do nothing, at least for a while. I can only wonder what you will do.
Boredom, you interminable mistress! For how much longer must I embrace you?
There’s an article that I read on this platform several months ago, maybe more, that talked about a lot of this, about how ADHD may actually be a form of extreme novelty-seeking or curiosity. The article was written by a researcher and it seemed like the idea being put forth was active hypothesis within the field, though I make no claims about its overall plausibility. (Awais Aftab has pointed out that ADHD might simply be another way of describing low trait conscientiousness; this hypothesis seems like it would suggest that, instead or in addition to low conscientiousness, ADHD is marked by very high openness to experience.). Part of the argument was that high novelty-seeking would be advantageous for hunter-gatherers (evo psych just-so story, so beware). IIRC this hypothesis also seems to be quite consistent with the pattern of behaviour you see in ADHD people as well, where there’s a constant desire for stimulation that results in frequent task switching, difficulties persisting with single tasks that require sustained focus and not a lot of variation in the character of the task, having a surfeit of energy and constantly being in motion, etc.
But I take your broader point that there is a sense in which this might be descriptive of all human experience and ADHD people might simply be a somewhat more extreme version of this. It is certainly true that a lot of people whom I wouldn’t describe as ADHDers seem to be voraciously learners and outliers in terms of curiosity. I wouldn’t, for example, describe Tyler Cowen, Dana Gioia, Nabeel Qureshi, Celine Nguyen, or Henry Oliver as ADHDers.