That unbearable, awkward moment of boredom

Has my life become so boring that I have lost the will to go out and instead I find myself more spiritually fulfilled by consuming knowledge rather than consuming vodka shots

As I’m sitting down to pen another one of these loveletters dedicated to the grit and hustle of the entrepreneurial life, I find myself at loss for words. I’ve been going through my head over and over again to try and figure out what I’ve been doing these past two weeks and for the life of me, I can’t quite figure out what that was. Between being deeply consumed by minial tasks like customer’s correspondence, applying for mentorship and investment programs, learning Illustrator, cooking, cleaning, excersising and reading, time has slipped through my fingers leaving me with no concrete memories, but a bitter feeling of defeat. Reflecting on it made me wonder, has my life become so boring that I have lost the will to go out and instead I find myself more spiritually fulfilled by consuming knowledge rather than consuming vodka shots?

Growing up, I’ve watched my mom and dad occupy their evenings with mindless TV and I always told myself, when I’m their age, I won’t do that and yet sometimes I catch myself doing the exact same thing even now. I tell myself that movies are how I learn about the world and different cultures, but sometimes mind numbing TV shows or shitty movies with bad acting can be equally as enticing as thought provoking documentaries. Has it happened to you? It happens to me all the time, when using entertainment to clear my mind, as in just hit play and forget about the contents of whatever it is I’ve been watching just few days later. And this usually is followed by a wave of so much quilt and questions like “What the fuck am I doing with my life" and “This is such a waste of my time” and “I have so many applications pending and endless to do lists and this is what you choose to do? Like really? Are you fucking kidding me?” . And it goes on and on until that bad show ends and I decide to turn my workaholic mode on and fill both my days and nights with endless work until my salad brain goes into an overdrive and so another vicous cycle of bad shows follows.

So I’ve been thinking lately why does it bother me so much whenever I’m not productive. Why can’t I just simply be? Though I gotta admit, these thoughts have been more present since I stumbled upon an article called “Is your phone killing your creativity?” written by Alan Ayoubi, aka my mentor in Illustrator, aka the founder of 92learns. Although I can’t share the entire piece, since it was send to me through email, I’ll share a snippet of it that actually ignited this train of thought.

Just today, I went down a rabbit hole.

It started with looking up an illustration called March of Progress, and somehow I ended up reading about the evolution of language. 

So I’m not pointing fingers at anyone but myself when I say this...

Whenever we have a moment of boredom, most of us pick up our phones and start scrolling.

Randomly jumping from app to app.

Video to video.
Reel to reel.

And if you are more of a reader, you’ll jump from one Wikipedia page to another.

This isn’t necessarily bad - if it weren't consuming all our free time.

We as creatives need one thing more than anything to develop ideas; BOREDOM.

The article goes on to show just how important boredom is to the creative process and yet how difficult it is to sit with your own thoughts for 15 minutes. And so I went on to a quest to find out exactly what’s making me anxious whenever I even try to do this. I’ve come to the conslusion that perhaps the reason why it bothers me so much is that I feel a little stuck at this moment. I feel like a chapter of my life is about to end and this is maybe why I don’t really feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be in life and that scares the shit of of me. Actually maybe not that precisely, but more so the thought that I might never get out of this stalemate position fills my entire being with panic and sends shivers down my spine.

The truth of the matter is that I know that I’m the only one who can change this and so when I don’t spend every waking minute doing something about it, I feel quilty. And that’s also one of the things that bothers me most than anything else, knowing that everything needs to be done by me, alone. I can’t delegate tasks here and it’s precicely this that makes the whole process so isolating, because it needs to be handled away from people which can sometimes feel extremely lonely. But then the mind needs its rest, so how can I ease into it without going into full on panic mode?

Enter, setting ground rules, which I only thought of just now actually, while working on this article. See, Substacking is good for me. I think?! So here I am setting up some ground rules in the hopes that when the time comes to reflect on their impact, they’ll at least decrease the level of quilty feelingl (if they work that is).

1. 15 minutes of absolutely doing nothing, or as Macedonians love to say “Let your brain graze”

2. Prepare only 4 applications per month are allowed

3. Write only 2 Substack articles per month

4. Read at least 1 article on Substack per day

5. Only 1 hour every 3rd day allowed for quilty pleasures like bad TV shows

6. Sunday activities allowed - hiking, walks to the park/around the lake, walks to farmer’s market, cleaning, reading and absolutely no thought whatsoever about work

7. Social media - check only Mondays and Fridays for 1 hour tops

Looks simple doesn’t it? Well, I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you deal with boredom. Does it bother you? Any suggestions that do the trick for you? Let me know in the comments.

I know time these days is a precious currency, so thank you for reading.

Hasta la vista until next Sunday lovelies,

with ❤️

from my Salad Brain 🧠