Your Life Is Won or Lost Based on Whether You Use Boredom to Your Advantage

Or let boredom use and abuse you with a whip like a slave

Image Credit-Midjourney

Life is full of virgins.

Not in a sexual sense but in the sense that most people aren’t willing to try stuff. They refuse to take risks. They won’t consider a different point of view. They refuse to change. So their body ages but their “self” stays the same age.

It’s why there are a lot of children living in adult bodies.

One of the biggest reasons people lose in life comes down to how they use boredom. For some of us, we’ve accidentally learned to harness boredom. We don’t talk about it because a lot of us don’t even realize we do it.

Here’s a completely different perspective on boredom that’ll upgrade your life.

Boredom is a luxury

A friend of mine lives in Africa.

His family is poor. He’s lived through famines. He’s someone I admire. When I asked him about boredom he laughed.

“Only rich kids complain about boredom. In my village we have enough work to keep us busy for a decade. No time for boredom or you’ll starve.”

In one way he’s making a joke, but in another way he’s bang on.

Being bored shows a lack of gratitude. There are people battling cancer who’d love to have zero worries in the world and experience boredom.

Consumerism needs you to be a bored ape

Society isn’t trying to get rid of boredom.

Why? Corporations need you to be bored so they can sell you magic pills to cure it – entertainment, sports, video games, mindless apps, etc.

Boredom has an even darker side.

I grew up around many drug addicts. One pattern I noticed is they all say they used drugs to try and cure their boredom. They wanted a thrill because they were bored.

A sniff of coke gave them a high. It also ruined their life. When I think about my own bad habits, they always get the best of me if I get too bored.

Boredom isn’t scary, but how we try to cure it is. It’s a slippery slope that can lead to an unescapable hell if you’re not careful.

Romanticising boredom is a deadly cop out

Boredom is a sign you’re living a life designed by someone else.

You took the traditional path. You listened too much to past, pre-internet generations. You took the default career path to nowhere to climb a corporate ladder leaning against the wrong wall.

There’s nothing worse than someone that brags about being bored. This same person lives for the weekends and they can’t stop thinking about their next escapism holiday because that’s honestly all they live for at this point in life.

Boredom is a big red blinking siren that’s trying to tell you to wake the f*ck up. And if you ignore the alert it’s the equivalent of hitting the snooze button on life for an eternity.

Boredom isn’t cool. It’s the highest form of mediocrity imaginable.

The feeling of boredom is mislabeled

The depth of experiences we can have as humans is vast.

We live in a world that has 100K pixel clarity. Life is fascinating if you actually choose to live it.

When people say they’re bored what they’re masking is a deep dissatisfaction for life itself. When what you do in life is so painfully useless, comfortable and lacks any sort of challenge, we wrongly call it boredom.

What we should call it is failure. Or a lack of goals. Or no passion.

Your boredom holds your unrealized potential

Netflix won’t make you feel better. It’s a sugar pill. It’s a fake placebo.

“Real pleasure comes from overcoming challenges, feeling confidence in your abilities, gaining fluency in skills, and experiencing the power this brings.

You develop patience. Boredom no longer signals the need for distraction, but rather the need for new challenges to conquer.” – Robert Greene

The cure for boredom is progress.

Not huge progress either. Just tiny 1%-better-each-day forms of progress. As an example, last week I felt a bit bored writing. Medium feels more stale than my daughter’s 2 week old sandwiches at the back of the couch.

So…I thought about how I could use this temporary boredom in my writing to harness it. The answer was lying right in front of my eyes. For the last 2 years I’ve wanted to start an Instagram profile.

This week I finally did.

Now, instead of boredom, I have a new excitement for writing. It’s a new challenge. A new way of writing.

It’s more visual. I don’t know anyone on Instagram. I have no idea how to use the platform. I don’t know if I’m doing it right. I’m a pig rolling in mud and sh*t, and it feels incredible.

Boredom unlocked my potential. The next level of the writing video game has now been discovered. The truth is you can play real video games and waste your life away… or you can treat real pursuits in life like a video game and level up.

In the process you’ll go from being a bored ape manipulated by news/politics and whatever culture war is going on, into becoming a beast in your field of obsession.

Boredom is trying to help your hidden potential get unleashed. Most people try to numb the feeling instead of harnessing it. Sad.

Here’s how to hack your boredom to make it work in your favor

Time to become an outlier. You might even join the top 1%.

1. The best antidote to boredom in history

If you’re bored just follow your curiosity.

What are you curious about? What can you not stop thinking about? What’s a childhood activity you’ve given up?

My answer to this is music. I was a musician until my mid-20s. I haven’t touched it for a decade. Last week my daughter got a toy drum kit on loan from the toy library. She handed me the drumsticks. I felt a wave of emotion.

I used to be one of the best drummers in the world (no exaggeration). Picking up those drumsticks again awakened a giant inside of me. Now I want to spend boring moments on the weekend showing my daughter the drums.

The cure to a boring life is right under your eyes.

2. Play this game on hard mode

Thinking of every pursuit in life as a video game is one of the best mental models.

Most people will play video games like Fortnite. A cooler video game to play in life is entrepreneurship. Starting a business makes everything in life better. Plus if it works to even a tiny degree, you end up with money.

Money is a resource that you can reinvest into your obsession to make it even better. I like the game of money because it’s tangible, whereas a lot of people play games to win fake prizes like points or participation trophies.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes (as they say). Play games of obsession, like entrepreneurship, and become a different person you’ll be proud of.

3. Stop letting yourself off the hook

People let deadly boredom run their lives because they’re not hard enough on themselves.

A mediocre life is your responsibility. If the job sucks, it’s on you. If money is always a problem, it’s on you. If every friendship or romantic relationship turns into painful loneliness, it’s on you.

The good news is when you’re to blame you can solve it. It’s how you take back control. Try being a little harder on yourself.

More discipline. A series of daily habits that are non-negotiable. An exercise routine for more energy. Less junk food that clogs up your body and steals your energy.

As long as you label bad things “self-care” you’ll keep letting the devil win.

4. Make this powerful choice

When boredom strikes we have two options:

• Distraction

• Building

Option one leads you to become a destroyer. To be angry. To leave nasty comments. To talk smack about successful people. To engage in mindless activities like scrolling social media at 11 PM.

Option two leads to a beautiful life. One where you solve other people’s problems. Where you become an inspiration. Where you start a movement. Where you create something new you can be proud of.

Whenever you’re bored label the feeling with either “I’m going to embrace distraction” or “I’m going to build.” I recommend the latter.

Final Thought

It sounds cliche as f*ck, but what you do when boredom strikes or when you have some time before or after work can either make you or destroy you.

No one tells us this though. The distraction economy doesn’t want you to know this secret because then they can’t profit off you. I have nothing to lose so I’ll tell you.

Remember: The cure for boredom is progress.

Tell me which of these ideas you loved the most and why in the comments.

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