How to Reclaim Your Right to Be Bored

It’s time to reject the idea that we should be hustling, producing, and crushing it all the damn time

Photo: dickcraft/Getty Images

In Japanese art and design, the term yohaku no bi (余白の美 ) expresses the beauty of empty space. It’s employed across the arts from architecture, gardening, and the culinary arts to painting, literature, and cinema. Yohaku — empty space — is powerful for many reasons: it gives form to the solid through a void; it can be used to direct the eye and offers the eye a place to rest; it holds infinite possibility; and allows space for the viewer to interact and engage with the piece, to write themselves into the artwork, making it their own. In short, an empty space in every possible way enriches and enhances the content and experience of a painting, garden, meal, architecture, movie, book, or design.

Yet in our daily lives, our toxic ambition and fear of boredom suffocate us with content. Just as a piece of art needs yohaku, our lives need a little blankness. We need boredom.

Boredom is an in-between state. Productivity says move, move, move. Boredom comes after “I’m not engaged” but before you’ve decided what might be more engaging. It’s uncomfortable because it’s uncertain. It’s unclear. But it’s also an opportunity to recalibrate life toward your values, or simply to rest and restore. Boredom is the pause in between breaths. It is not the exhale of production. It is not the inhale of inspiration. It is the space between. The yohaku of our life.

“Only boring people get bored” is a shaming technique that does not allow us to be curious about our boredom. When we buy into that sentiment, we are more likely to engage in toxic ambition rather than question whether we are living a life connected to our values. We are more likely to reach for our phone to ameliorate the boredom or to get one email closer to Inbox Zero as we wait in line, and waste the opportunity to recalibrate. Information overload makes us stressed and anxious, and the sometimes necessary focus on the digital world not only overpowers our ability to notice the physical world around us, but it also leaves us disconnected from ourselves.

When we seek numbing activities with the intention to suppress feelings — drinking, binge-watching…