My Semester Off – In Defense of Boredom by Lara Lowinski

In November of last year, I had to leave campus and temporarily stop my studies due to an unexpected health issue. This meant that I would have almost 6 months off; no class, no deadlines, no exams. To those who are in the midst of an academic crisis, this may sound like a dream, but no one prepares you for how strange and unfamiliar having nothing on your schedule feels. 

At the beginning of my leave of absence it felt like there was this huge mountain in front of me. How was I going to fill all this time I had on my hands in a way that was “productive”? There were endless possibilities, yet none sounded appealing. I could do anything I wanted. For some reason, unless I’m being forced to do something, I have little to no drive to do it.  This led me to contemplate: what do I actually enjoy spending my time doing? I realized that for the last seventeen years of my life, from kindergarten to high school, there was always something I had to do or a place where I needed to be. Even in the summer, the shadow of the next school year loomed just right around the corner.

For the first time in my life I was completely free of any kind of responsibility. Yet, I did not feel free at all, days felt like a never ending loop, each day resembled the last; I felt like I was being crushed under the weight of time. If you want to know how bad the boredom got, at some point I seriously contemplated starting my thesis, even though I'm still in my second year. This led me to wonder if it is even possible to experience real boredom anymore in our day and age where there is unlimited entertainment accessible everywhere. Surely, it is nowhere near as potent as the boredom people used to experience before the digital age; how else would the discipline of philosophy have emerged? 

Could there be a hidden value in boredom? When you strip away all distractions, what remains? Maybe it is exactly that silence, the silence we scroll, drink or smoke away that holds secrets more valuable than we could ever know. When nothing remains except this instance, this moment, and we are forced to confront the crushing silence of pure awareness, maybe we can get close to what it means to simply be. Whether you want to call it mindfulness or meditation, the practice of intentionally doing nothing is widespread in certain religions and cultures. Yet, in western societies, it is something that is looked down upon specifically in our fast-paced, productivity-driven world, that dictates every minute of our days to be filled with a task. 

Think about it: when was the last time you spent 30 minutes doing absolutely nothing, sleep excluded? It only takes one look around on the train to see that most of us are addicted to distractions and overstimulation. Whether it be by blasting music on our headphones, or scrolling on our social media feeds, most of us are unable, or simply afraid, to spend time in our own minds. Blaise Pascal, in his Pensées, famously argued that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

While Pascal may overstate the claim, I do think there is a real and growing problem in our inability to tolerate boredom. In an age of constant stimulation, even brief moments of silence feel uncomfortable. This is why I believe the practice of writing is so important: it is essentially a form of meditation as well, an act of slowing down, of sitting with one’s thoughts without distraction. In that sense, writing becomes one of the last remaining spaces where we can still learn how to be alone with our own minds, and perhaps begin to hear what we usually try to avoid. 

There is something freeing in the act of unloading your mind onto a blank sheet of paper, and creating something out of nothing. A lot of my time off I spent writing and it taught me a lot about myself and what is important to me. The lessons I have learned from facing silence head-on will stay with me for a long time. And when life becomes noisy again, I will return to what I have learned in the depths of my own consciousness. My advice to anyone reading this is take some time for yourself, away from all distractions, and see what blooms in the garden of your mind. Maybe silence is a song worth giving another listen to.