Going to record the “Sleeping with Celebrities” podcast today. This is a podcast hosted by the audio impresario John Moe who created the popular Wits radio show that aired on Minnesota Public Radio. In this new show, he invites guests on to talk about boring stuff with the goal of helping his listeners fall asleep. Previous guests have included Chris Gethard discussing “1,000 sodas,” Baratunde Thurston teaching how to make “perfect, clear ice,” Broti Gupta describing Cincinnati’s Kenwood Mall. I was excited to receive the invitation because I like all of the people mentioned above and I am also a fan of boring things.
Being bored is one of my favorite past times. Actually, I should rephrase that. It’s not that I enjoy being bored; it’s that I enjoy the kind of unstructured time from which boredom might arise. The fact is, I’m rarely bored in the sense that I rarely find myself anxious or antsy about not knowing what to do with myself. In fact, when I don’t know what to do, I pretty much always know what to do.
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For example, right now I am living in London with almost nothing required of me whatsoever. I have very little work to get done, no schedule to follow, nearly nothing in the way of social obligations. It’s almost entirely unstructured time.
Perhaps you think, “How nice to be able to go out and explore London.” That would be true if I had any desire to explore London. I do not. The neighborhoods in London look pretty much alike and there aren’t many sites I want to visit. In fact, the couple times we’ve gone to visit historical sites have coincided exactly with the couple of times I’ve been bored.
Instead, my days are filled with quiet, homebound activities. Reading, watching Homeland, going to the market for groceries, eating those groceries. Occasionally we meet friends for a meal. Tomorrow night we’re going to theatre (spelled in the British manner out of deference to HRH King Charles, long may he reign) to see Mark Rylance in some play or other. Sometimes in the late afternoon or early evening we pop over to the local for a pint. I’m not much of a drinker but nor am I a heretic and I don’t see how one gets through a summer in London without spending some time at a pub sipping a Neck Oil. All in all, my days are a lazy and languid blur. I do almost nothing and almost nothing gets done. It is, in a word, fantastic.
The only real anxiety I experience comes from the guilt I feel regarding my wife, who cannot endure this profound level of laziness. She needs to go out and do stuff. She needs to be out in the world accomplishing something. Yesterday, for example, we took the bus to Chelsea so that she could peruse some interior design stores for research; she’s an interior designer by trade. I accompanied her to keep her company and to get some steps in. The showrooms were, for me, underwhelming. “Is there anything you want to do?” she asked me.
“Not really,” I said. And it’s true.
Today she’s back out on the streets going God knows where and doing God knows what. I’m in the flat, having just returned from getting a haircut. Having done all of that, I can do no more. Except for John’s podcast in a couple hours, which I imagine will be not very taxing. After all, the goal is to lull people to sleep. I know how to do that. If you’re still reading, you might be dozing off yourself.
Boredom flies in the face of the Calvinist American ethos, which holds that idleness is sinfulness. If you don’t work, you don’t eat. I’m here to tell you that’s bull pucky. I haven’t done a lick of real work in months and I just enjoyed a fabulous chicken doner wrap from one of the thousand doner kebab places within a fifteen-minute walk of my flat. If anything, my lack of obligations just put seven pounds into that take-out shop owner’s hands, which, by the way, was a good deal; I’m stuffed, which leads to me being sleepy, which leads to one of my favorite boredom activities: the post-lunch nap. My boredom contributed to this nation’s GDP and for that I will not apologize.
I like to think of boredom as an excuse to clear the mind and let it wander to unexpected places. For example, for the last several days, when I get tired of Homeland I’ve been watching Scrabble commentary on YouTube. This is exactly what it sounds like. There are several good Scrabble commentators, my favorite of whom is a British “Scrabble grand master” named David Webb who plays Scrabble while wearing a full jacket and tie and is prone to starting every turn by murmuring, “Oh wooow…” The games are often slow and technical. His voice never climbs above a volume that the strictest librarian would find acceptable. It’s very, very good and, I suspect, very boring. At least it would be to most people His videos rarely get more than a couple thousand views. I’ve probably watched about two dozen.
I’ve also been doing a lot of reading. I picked up an omnibus of Joe Haldeman’s sci-fi Peace and War trilogy, which explore the effects of relativistic time on a soldier as he traverses various centuries. It may take me centuries to finish the trilogy’s seven hundred or so pages since I usually pick it up after lunch, which I’ve already explained, is already prime nap time. I get through a couple pages before nodding off with that old John Lennon song in my head:
People say I'm lazy
Dreaming my life away
Well they give me all kinds of advice
Designed to enlighten me
When I tell them that I'm doing fine watching shadows on the wall
"Don't you miss the big time boy, you're no longer on the ball?"
I don’t feel lazy and I don’t feel bored. I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round. And it’s pretty great. Ok, if I’m going to be fresh for Sleeping with Celebrities, I’ve got to squeeze in a nap. Afterwards, I’ll probably do nothing.
Great essay! I also love being bored. The early stages of the pandemic, before the insanity and cabin fever truly set in, were a delight of more time to read, catch up on TV/movies, talk with my family, and god forbid THINK. A true introvert's paradise.
It's a shame that whether it's America's Protestant Ethic or just good ole fashioned Capitalism that guilts us into feeling like we constantly need to be PrOdUcTiVe. At the risk of sounding like one of the crank paleo pop-psychology goons like Jordan Peterson, I think our hunter-gather forebears did a whole lot of NOTHING once the food was gathered and eaten.
Humans were not meant to be mindless automatons. We should embrace laziness, at least occasionally, to reclaim some of our humanity,
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