The Luxury of Boredom
Maria and I just endured the most fabulous week of doing absolutely nothing.
Day One:
We cooked big pots of food, drank more than we should, napped often, and went to bed at any hour we desired.
Day Two:
We cooked big pots of food, drank more than we should, napped often, and went to bed at any hour we desired.
Day Three:
We cooked big pots of food, drank more than we should, napped often, and went to bed at any hour we desired.
By Day Four, I felt something else quietly settling in. A strange sensation—rare for me, even rarer for Maria, and practically extinct among friends with standard fifty-hour workweeks. Add kids to the mix and you may not encounter this feeling again for twenty years or more.
What had overtaken me?
Was this the level beyond relaxation? Something deeper than cannabis bliss?
This long-forgotten vibe from childhood had returned. It’s called boredom.
Blissfully beautiful boredom. Welcome back. I’ve missed you dearly.
In high school, I was so bored in every class except art that my mind would drift straight out the window and into a universe of my own making. Doodling and drawing in my sketchbook during those lifted moments allowed me to capture and revisit those worlds later—and eventually forge them into my work. I’m convinced that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein out of boredom while trapped in a hotel in Geneva by relentless bad weather. You can only eat, drink, and talk for so long before someone has to invent something to do. It might as well be creative. Shelley was only twenty years old. One has to wonder: would a week of sunny weather have robbed us of this literary icon and all its subsequent adaptations?
Maria and I have created a small lounge just off our kitchen. There’s no desk, no screen, no clock—just comfortable chairs, moody light, and shelves of art books and magazines that naturally open to well-worn pages. Sketchbooks and pencils live there permanently so the barrier to entry stays low. It’s a place where ideas are allowed to drift in slowly—or not arrive at all. Boredom needs somewhere to land, and this room gives it permission to stay long enough to become something worth keeping.
Designate a nook in your home for boredom. Not for productivity, not for finishing anything, but for letting your mind loosen its grip. A chair, a lamp, a stack of books—nothing fancy, just comfortable enough to linger. Give yourself permission to sit there and do absolutely nothing until something quietly suggests itself. That’s often how the best ideas arrive. Maybe you’ll create the next Frankenstein. Or maybe you’ll draw a funny picture of your significant other. Or your cat. Either way, you’ll have made space for art to show up on its own terms.
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