Boredom is the Ultimate Creative Aspiration
Settling into the creative luxury of nothingness.
Werner Herzog doesn’t comprehend irony and he has no gaydar. He tells an anecdote about this in his book of brilliant interviews with writer and filmmaker Paul Cronin, which he begrudgingly participated in due to a profound moral sense of providing factual accuracy.
In “A Guide For The Perplexed,” Herzog admits that it was many decades into his friendship with John Waters before he realized the flamboyant filmmaker was quite gay. At another point, he recalls several famous filmmaker friends, Harmony Korine among them, who would frequently call and prank poor Werner using constructed personalities, spinning up befuddling scenarios that the filmmaker would take very seriously.
As I read this, I thought about how interesting it would be to have a sort of blindness for conceptual context, an inability to leap into the comfortable pre-conceived framings that most of us hop to readily.
As the list of Warner's idiosyncrasies continue, he goes on to casually mention something absolutely mind-blowing: he doesn’t experience boredom.
“It’s not in my vocabulary,” he says. He's intensely interested in the detail he finds, not the packaged social conceptualization of things, and so he’s always searching and observing. For him, noticing and the act of inquiry with an environment, is ultimately better creative fodder than any kind of tidy social concept.
Story sits in detail. In bringing forward the real, or in shaping the imagined. Herzog says he can picture any kind of reality, but not the exposition around it. And he simply exists, he says, without boredom, because he spends most of his time noticing and thinking about what he's noticed. His life isn't about pattern making, he's not stitching together complex topics into a single sellable narrative, one devoid of its rugged edges, but instead he’s focused on the edges themselves.
He says he can do anything with his mind—create any scene, recall any beautiful interaction—or just sit contently with nothing at all. And it’s totally chill. In fact, he often sits staring out the window for hours a day, the way I watch “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” episodes that I’ve already seen half a dozen times.
Personally I don’t think that Herzog doesn’t experience boredom. It sounds more like he covets it. And somehow the angst and emptiness it brings most people provides him not pain but the divine. His mind wanders and draws out details as only he sees them. He walks through life as an obsessed narrator, not an ego with an agenda or as a charlatan pimping out theories and concepts that attempt to explain the exterior world.
Many have underscored the link between boredom and creativity. Susan Sontag viewed boredom as a form of attention that could unlock deeper creative thought. She juxtaposed this with Schopenhauer's view of boredom as one of life's twin evils, instead suggesting that it serves as a fertile state, a launchpad for creative energy and not something dreadful to be avoided.
I once had a wizardly-looking sage of a writing professor who led me and 10 others in a graduate-level creative writing workshop. I mentioned to her one day that I wanted a solitary writing and reading life like hers. She immediately shook her head and muttered the word "no" to herself like I'd just cast a curse.
“This life is too boring for you,” she said, leaving a long, labored gap, a silence between the first sentence and the next to make a point. “And you don’t see how lonely I am.”
The older I get, the more I confront my own discomfort and anxiety around boredom, and how terrible I am at simply existing.
Despite what our ping-addled brains might tell us, boredom is an essential survival tool that must be cultivated. And increasingly I realize it’s especially central to any creative life. You often have to be in a place of absence to see something emerge.
Michael Easter, a boredom expert who writes about the crisis of modern comfort, talks about the role boredom plays in fostering creativity. But instead of framing the conversation around the evils of phones and the internet—our cherished mind-numbers—he talks about the allure of nothingness, and how we need to reframe boredom from an evolutionary perspective.
Boredom developed to tell us what we need. It formed so that our ancestors would get off their perches and search for food when it was no longer viable to stand in their shit-strewn camps with grumbling bellies. And this instinct, this deeply felt anxiety around nothingness, was a catalyst for survival.
Today, that yearning is a catalyst for media consumption and mind-numbing.
Easter's theory includes a significant call-to-action: we should each crave boredom in our lives. And we should welcome the discomfort that comes along with it, pushing ourselves to have stim-free solo moments of complete and utter nothingness.
How terrifying. I am, after all, a harvester of perverse and interesting things, a hoarder of both physical and digital media; I even have an entire drawer of years-old to-do lists that I’m neither letting go of nor doing anything with. Why?
For me, the constant collection of mental agitators has felt like a kind of progress, like I'm collecting the runes that spell out the secrets of the good life, and I just need to find the time to fully absorb them. To discard these treasures feels like destroying a sacred text.
As an antidote, as a way of being okay with nothing, I've developed a simple new mantra: Be the narrator. Remove the need to understand. Try to see that I am here to observe and describe, and that the blank spaces between describing what I see are when the best noticing occurs, and the best noticing results in some of the best creative inquiry. I must take on the mindset of a waiting hunter sitting in the bush, silently observing signs of life that cross his path; and being open to discovery and amusement, too, because much of the time it will not be a deer you find, but instead a bird shitting on your shoulder.
The aspiration, for me, is to get to a point where I can think of nothingness the way I think about eating: as something I crave. I want to live life inside of a poem, the way Ada Lìmon or Sharon Olds might do. To get there, I'm cosplaying as the passive, observant narrator, the one who doesn't peddle in pre-conceived concepts and ideas. The one who permits both the nothingness and the light to seep in, and describes it.
For me the good life is making interesting things from vapor. To get there I’m willing myself to get by with less. To stoke the tingling, uncomfortable sensation of boredom. To become an observer. To not allow the lack of concept or understanding to form an anxiety. To be just a little bit weirder and quieter, more like old Werner, seeking out moments of nothingness, and describing them into something.