How To Never Be Bored

Are you easily bored? You don’t need to be. Boredom isn’t something that descends on you from on high. It is the result of your own activities and approach to living.

Have you ever watched a movie or television program that tries to convey the speed of light to you. When I was in school I saw one. I can’t remember it’s name or the narrator, but I remember the imagery. You were on a train. As it started it slowly lumbered into motion, wheels straining to turn, the track inching by beneath you. As each second passed the train got a little faster, working it’s way to human walking speed, then the speed of a galloping horse, then the speed of a car. Each second it got a little faster, reaching the speed of a jet, then a rocket, then going so fast that it was just a blur of bluish-white light.

The scene outside the train mirrored this increase. At first it hardly moved, then gradually went by faster and faster until by the time the train was moving at the speed of light, outside all you could see was light. You couldn’t pick out any details because before you could focus on something, it was past you and your perceptions could never catch up to your actual location.

Time is like that for people. When you are young you have little experience. You’re just getting started. Each moment seems to last forever. As you get older, though, times seems to move faster. The older you get the faster it goes, until by the time you reach old age the days flash by and you wake up one morning wondering where the years have gone. I think one of the reasons for this is a psychological compression of time. As you get older, each minute of time, each new moment of experience, becomes a smaller proportion of all the time that you have already experienced. A day to a ten year old is a much larger proportion of life than a day for an eighty year old.

When you are young, everything is new. You focus in the present, because you have nothing to which to compare each new experience. As you age, your store of experience grows. You spend more and more time comparing what happens in the now to what has happened in the past. Most of this is done unconsciously, but the result is more and more of your time is actually spent living in your memories, and not in what is happening right now.

One of the negative effects of this process is boredom. Obviously, you don’t have to be old to be bored. Sometimes children are the most easily bored. They aren’t in control of their own minds enough to be able to stop the boredom, though, and you are.

You have to make an effort to pay attention to what is happening right now. When you find yourself slipping into boredom, stop! Take a deep breath and look around you. Realize that this is happening right now. Don’t compare it to the past. Don’t extrapolate to the future. Just pay attention to what is going on around you right now. I promise you, that if you do this successfully you won’t be bored any more.

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