Boredom Does Not Make You Creative
It seems people really want to believe that boredom will make you creative. But can it really do that? To answer this we first should start with a definition of boredom and perhaps even one of creativity.
Boredom first:
I have leaned on a Tolstoy quote from Anna Karenina — boredom: the desire for desires — a lot in the recent past. It captures a lot about the state of boredom. First, that it is a motivational state. When you’re bored you want something. This differentiates boredom very clearly from apathy. When feeling apathetic, by definition you couldn’t give a sh*t about anything. But the other thing Tolstoy so succinctly captures is that you’re not just motivated to do anything at all — you want something worthwhile, a desire. He didn’t write “boredom: the desire to be merely occupied” or “boredom: the desire to be acting”; no, he highlighted that what we want is something we deem worth wanting.
So at this point you might be thinking, “Sure, so that’s how boredom makes you creative right? Creativity is worthwhile, isn’t it?” My contention is NOT that creative outlets do not represent viable responses to being bored. Of course they do. I often pick up my guitar when I’m bored and more often than not it helps — I belt out a few songs I already know, learn or write a new one or just tinker around doing nothing in particular but exercising my fingers and enjoying the randomness of it. My contention is not that I chose to do something creative because I was bored. My contention is that being bored did not give me any scintilla of creative skill — practice and learning did that for me.
So perhaps now you’re thinking that this rant is really just about the media portrayal of the link between boredom and creativity? Get over yourself, no one really believes that boredom makes you creative do they? Well at least one study seems to want to make that claim. People coming out of church were asked to read or transcribe names and phone numbers from a telephone book and then did a standard test of creativity. Here the people showing higher levels of creativity were selectively chosen as those who also reported daydreaming. So we can’t tell whether boredom begets daydreaming which in turn begets creativity [i]. And even if it does beget creativity, we don’t know if that means that it makes you creative. This study was done on a convenience sample — people leaving a church service. No baseline was taken, so we can’t know whether sampling error alone could account for the results.
Even the TED talk linked to in the first sentence here gets the logic wrong. Zomorodi wants to say that a greater attachment to our devices deprives us of the time and space to engage in other things. And in doing so, this attachment might rob us of practice in simply coming up with ideas. This may be true (and certainly the really great work from Jon Elhai’s group highlights problems of attachment to our smartphones, boredom prominent among them — a topic for yet another blog). But divesting ourselves of our attachment and welcoming boredom again won’t make us creative. It merely gives us the space to do other things. I do think that attachment to devices (and particularly social media traps like SnapChat) have the potential to create a false sense of engagement. You’re doing something — so technically you’re engaged. But what you’re doing is not really satisfying your needs. It doesn’t reach the heights Tolstoy suggests boredom implores us to reach — playing Candy Crush hardly represents a desire. It’s just a time killer. But my point is that to be creative you will need to cultivate creative pursuits — cultivating boredom won’t do it for you.
I said we might need a definition of creativity to tackle this problem and I’ve avoided giving one throughout. I think I’ll keep avoiding it (boredom prone people are good procrastinators it turns out — there are some good definitions here for those who are curious). Creativity is not my area of expertise, it is complex and so I will likely hack it up if I try to define it here. From a functional point of view though I think creativity in at least one sense serves as a problem solving device. Again, this distinguishes it from boredom. Boredom tells you that you need to be doing something different. But it never tells you what that something is. By logic alone then boredom — the feeling that we are disengaged from the world, a feeling we do not like and want to eradicate — can’t help us problem solve in creative ways.
[i] This is the title of a computational modeling paper — that “Boredom begets creativity.” Hate the title, love the paper. The model does not show that boredom begets creativity at all. Instead, it proposes boredom as a solution to the dark room problem; that is, if the brain is a predictive coding machine then a viable option for us is to curl up in a ball in the corner of a dark room — this is a maximally predictable environment. Clearly, we don’t do that and the authors of this horribly titled paper show that boredom is a drive that keeps us out of the dark room (along with a pleasure seeking principle).