Boredom gets a bad rep. It’s associated with less happiness, a general sense of unease, and worst of all, moments of dissatisfaction. But I think that boring is often better than the exciting alternatives.
Boring is simple. I know this, because if it was complex, it would be like a puzzle. Puzzles create complexity and puzzles for the most part, are interesting precisely because of their complexity. So safely, we can assume simplicity is boring. Or at least related to being boring. But simplicity is a powerful concept. The simplest ideas are often the best and I think that boredom is the breeding ground for simple ideas.
Kids know this pretty well. Watch any kid play with others, and out of boredom will spawn the simplest ideas. Out of sheer nothingness, kids have an amazing ability to take simple ideas and turn them into some of the most exciting prospects with just their imagination. But it all starts from being bored.
“Let’s be firefighters!”
“I wanna play hide and go seek”
“Why does a dog have 4 legs?”
(real quotes from my niece and nephews)
In Childhoods of exceptional people, Henrik Karlsson talks about the role that boredom plays in helping to craft geniuses. He remarks that
This immersion in boredom is also a universal in the biographies of exceptional people. A common theme in the biographies is that the area of study which would eventually give them fame came to them almost like a wild hallucination induced by overdosing on boredom. They would be overcome by an obsession arising from within.
The problem is we have an inability to experience boredom. You can't be bored, when you're entertained, and in today's society, we're entertaining ourselves to death. The standard commentary about the ills of technology are often framed around capitalist ideas: diminished productivity or the attention economy. Yet, few consider the consequences of losing our capacity for boredom. What happens if we silently remove the space for our most creative people to flourish?
Betting on boring extends well beyond just the state of being bored; it's also a great way to find good ideas. Boring ideas or ideas that seem boring have the positive benefit of being uninteresting to other people. That makes it a pretty big advantage if you're trying to build something differentiated. Boring usually means unexplored, and unexplored territory is untapped potential.
Boring is even a useful strategy for investing. Whether or not markets are truly efficient, it’s safe to say that trying to hop on trends that everyone else already knows about is a losing battle. Instead, like Warren Buffet, and many other retail investors, picking stocks you have strong conviction in, and holding for the long term ends up being far more lucrative than trying to game the system yourself. This is a belief that’s easy to hold in theory, but hard to maintain in practice when the GME’s and NVDIA’s of the world make exciting interesting.
Remember how I said boring is loosely correlated with simplicity? The landscape of tools to do pretty much anything continue to grow in scope and complexity. Use Instacart to get your groceries. Use Airbnb to find your next stay. Use ChatGPT for the answer to your next question. We can solve problems in better ways than we did before. But fundamentally, we’re all trying to solve the same kinds of problems by reinventing the wheel. Those Myspace days where we played around with HTML in the browser were certainly simpler days. I would argue that the “boring” tools we made available to people then made some of best creative spaces on the internet.
In some ways, boredom is the breeding ground for creativity. It's the basis for more interesting ideas. Boredom lets your mind wander enough to consider lots of possibilities, until something captures your imagination. It often leads to unexpected connections and novel ideas. Boring is better, because it gives us the gift of unstructured thought, and like all gifts, its one you either use, or lose. So be okay with being bored, and if you found this particular piece boring, then hopefully i'm onto something.