MY years as a kayak guide coincided exactly with the Great Recession. By 2009, tourists were canceling their trips in droves. I received their cancellation emails in a quiet shop on the water in San Diego, behind a desk stuffed with waivers for the two-hour trips I rarely led, topped with a display rack of sunglasses that were never purchased. Many days went by without any customers. I had nothing, really nothing, to do. The only indicator of time passing was the sun moving across the wall and the click of the mouse as I, alone with my boredom, discovered the Internet.
On an old desktop, I learned how to tell the Olsen twins apart (Mary-Kate has more of a bohemian witch vibe), puzzled over the identity of Crate Man on Metafilter and relived middle school on Tavi Gevinson’s blog. I dove into Wikipedia, surfacing periodically, triumphantly, with a fresh catch: Morita therapy, Viola Spolin, Emperor Norton, stellar parallax.
This was all new to me. The Internet’s formative years had been my college years, and I’d spent them in the woods. I wanted to be an explorer. Before kayaking, I’d worked as a hiking guide and climbing instructor. I could make fire using only two sticks and a piece of twine. But I could not have named a blog. Then everything changed. A whole world opened up to me in that quiet shop on the water.
One of the first things the Internet taught me was that I wasn’t alone in having nothing to do. Millions were paid to stand around, forced into inactivity by potential customers’ reluctance to spend, reminding ourselves that we were lucky just to be employed. Retail salespeople, tour guides and hotel clerks, waitresses and cooks and dishwashers and bartenders — we were everywhere, and we had a lot of time on our hands.
The do-nothing job didn’t begin or end with the recession. The service sector is one of the largest and fastest growing in the world, and even in the best of times, the level of activity for many of these jobs fluctuates with the seasons and the weather. And of course many service sector employees aren’t allowed to check their phones or listen to music, let alone surf the Internet all day.
Doing nothing is often boring, and boredom is often crazy-making. In a 2014 study, published in the journal Science, researchers reported that many people preferred self-administering electric shocks to doing nothing.
Yet, astoundingly, others actively seek boredom out. “You have to sit around so much doing nothing,” Gertrude Stein wrote on developing creative genius. F. Scott Fitzgerald thought boredom was necessary for writing: “You’ve got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.” The poet Mary Ruefle speaks of “the vital necessity of wasting time, of loafing and doing nothing.” Two recent studies lend scholarly weight to such claims: People who have been bored demonstrate increased creativity, and are better at associative thinking than those who have just been relaxing.
For every Whitman loafing at his ease, there’s someone else deeply depressed by the specter of empty time. Boredom seems to result in creativity only when given the right conditions. Yet at the same time, creative thinking is what makes boredom tolerable: A factory employee dreams up home redecorations on the assembly line, a salmon fisherwoman plans the evening menu while hauling nets, a medical salesman decides in a meeting to start raising bees.
So what turns doing nothing into creative fuel? While there are no conclusive studies on this, therapists and psychoanalysts I’ve interviewed tend to agree that the best way to really use boredom is to allow our bored minds to wander freely and to pay close attention to where they go, like watching a Ouija board supply answers under our own fingertips.
For me, alone in a kayak shop in 2009, that Ouija board was the Internet.
I didn’t get inspiration for brilliant essays, like the writer Roxane Gay, or test ideas for pioneering projects, like the artist Nina Katchadourian. I didn’t learn a language or invent an app or write a theorem. Perhaps I would have, friends who advocate for unplugging tell me, if I’d just looked away from the screen. And they might be right. But hey, one man’s cesspool of distractions is another man’s muse. Sometimes boredom serves as empty ground on which to build new ideas, while other times it acts as a guide to our true desires. You have to wait and see; above all, boredom is the master of the long con.
It took two years, but eventually I realized that kayak guiding — the little I was doing of it, anyway — had become far less enjoyable than exploring the Internet. From my early Olsen twin revelations, I moved on to Emperor Norton (not a real emperor at all, I learned; he declared himself emperor of the United States in 1859) and then further afield: The zigzag was the oldest human engraving; Frederick William I of Prussia was obsessed with giants; in the 18th century, unmarried women sat on bread ovens to make themselves seem more attractive. There was so much to know. And it was all at my fingertips.
In 2010 I left San Diego and moved to New York, where I eventually found work as a researcher. Research, like the path I took to it, is all about delayed gratification. My days are spent spelunking in online archives or tracking down sources in the library stacks. The work is often objectively tedious but rarely feels that way, because I know what’s coming: Those crackling jolts of discovery I once believed could be found only in the wilderness are now achieved when my sleuthing uncovers elusive, idea-shaping information. In a roundabout way, having nothing to do turned me into the explorer I’d always hoped to be.
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NY Times
