There are many myths about boredom that need busting.

Boredom won't make you creative.

Boredom is not (at least chronically) good for you.

Everybody knows the story of Phineas Gage. The fascinating and gory tale of the railroad worker who miraculously survived a three-foot eight-inch iron bar shooting through his skull. The story is so ubiquitous that it is hard to choose which of the multitude of YouTube videos that chronicle his fate would be best to watch.[1]

For me, Gage is a good starting point for understanding how myths are made and why they might be problematic, which will eventually lead me to debunking some modern myths around boredom that really get under my skin.

Gage’s story hardly bears summarizing. We have all seen the sepia photographs of the aftermath. What is remarkable to me about his story is the sheer amount of myth-making it has engendered.

The initial, and it should be said, widely differing impressions of Gage’s case, came from his treating physician, John Harlow, and his surgeon, Henry Bigelow. Harlow’s version won the day. We learn from Harlow that shortly after his injury, Gage began acting in a childish manner, not fit for polite society. From there things just get wilder (and more divorced from the truth). Gage apparently struggled to maintain employment (not true, he held several jobs, some of which would have required a high level of responsibility). He had poor relations with his wife and children (not true – he didn’t have either as far as we can tell). Truth did not seem to matter to the myth makers, for them Gage was clearly “no longer Gage”. [2]

And for me, the myth fit with some very personal experiences I was having just as I was being indoctrinated into Gage’s tales of woe. My brother had crashed his car and suffered a traumatic brain injury. As he recovered, he began telling me about how often he now felt crushing boredom. Boredom for things he knew he loved before his brain injury. Gage and my brother had both had their frontal lobes damaged. The myth would take off for me because it connected, however tenuously, with my brother’s reality.

Why not just add to the Gage myth that he found himself bored all the time. Clearly, he couldn’t maintain employment or good relationships because his injury had made him bored, unable to effectively engage with the world around him! (Never let the truth get in the way of a good story as the saying goes.)

Why does this matter? Myths are just a specific kind of story and stories shape the way we think about things. For Gage’s story it shaped the way we began to think about the frontal lobes, that they were somehow, the seat of our personalities — damage them and you change the essence of who we are. The Gage myth, because of its sensational nature, worked really well to get me interested in the brain, which ultimately led me down the career path that has been very good to me and anything but boring.

But myth-making can also lead us down the garden path in ways that are misguided and at best may mean we waste our time and at worst may guide choices that are simply not good for us. I think there are some boredom myths that do just that.

In this blog, I aim to bring you discussions of cutting-edge research on boredom to highlight what I think is a fascinating phenomenon while also trying to debunk what in my view, can be harmful myths about ennui. What are some of the biggies?

Myth #1: Boredom is just laziness.

Born of the adage “Only boring people get bored,” this one is a moralizing myth. Somehow, if you get bored there must be something wrong with you. But boredom is functional and not unique to humans. It signals that what we’re doing now is not working for us in whatever way and we should explore the world for something better.

This myth also conflates boredom with apathy — a bored person is no different than a couch potato. But that misses the point of boredom. Boredom is a motivational state, not an apathetic one.

Myth #2: Boredom can make you creative.

We love this myth. It has spawned a few very popular TED talks, countless news articles and I think a popular, but misguided hope. That inviting more boredom into your life will somehow make you more creative. We hear it from people we look up to as creative geniuses. Hendrix once told a fellow guitarist that he was bored with old styles of playing, which spurred him to develop his unique sound.

But boredom didn’t make Hendrix a guitar virtuoso — practice and exploration did. Just hoping that more boredom will spark creativity undersells creativity and oversells boredom! Sure, boredom is a push to explore for new things to do, but it won’t choose for you what that new thing might be or how to effectively engage with it — that’s up to you.

Put another way, if you want to believe that boredom can magically turn you into a creative genius then you also have to believe that it could turn you into a problem gambler, a vandal, or even a killer.

Myth #3: Boredom is good for us.

The creativity myth is a subset of the broader claim that boredom can be good for us, and that somehow this generation has lost the ability to live with boredom (this spins off into the kinds of hyperbolic claims that the internet and social media are ruining our brains!). It’s worth pointing out that this contrasts with Myth #1 — how is it that boredom can be good for us if it is only boring people who succumb to it?

When people claim that we need more boredom in our lives, from the admonition that our children no longer know how to deal with it, to the performatively ludicrous displays of rawdogging boredom (see my next post), I think they are really saying that what we need is some down time. And I couldn’t agree more. We need to disconnect from our devices, leave the seedier, cesspool parts of social media alone, and just give ourselves time to recharge.

The thing is, more boredom in your life won’t achieve that for you. It’ll just mean that you’re more bored, more often and we know that is a recipe for a wide range of negative outcomes.

Like Gage’s story, these myths have at least one use — they’ve got us talking about them. For Gage that meant rethinking our conception of a part of the brain that up until that point had been dubbed the “silent lobes”. Damage the frontal cortex and many patients can still walk and talk just as they did before — clearly, it’s superfluous. Gage, myths and all, helped change that thinking.

For boredom, the myths have done something similar. Boredom is having a moment in our culture and in our scientific endeavours. It is no longer simply a part of the furniture of life, but something worth considering for the role it plays in our daily lives.

Our task now is to dig a little deeper in order to understand more clearly what boredom is and what kinds of actions it demands of us. To sort through the myths to get to the truths about ennui.

[1] In a recent YouTube search, the first 11 videos on Gage had an average of close to 2.3 million views (but to be fair, they ranged from 199 to 21 million!).

[2] Malcolm MacMillan has done a superb job dismantling much of Gage’s mythology in his book An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage (2000) and in this article Macmillan, M. (2004). Phineas Gage: A case for all reasons. In Classic cases in Neuropsychology (pp. 236-254). Psychology Press.

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