In Praise of Boredom: against Procrastination and Snake Oil Salesmen

The last day of the year is a time for exceptional reflection. I particularly experienced this while looking at my reading plans, which I set at 24 books per year, but ultimately ended up with 4,200 pages and 13 books. Add to that thousands more pages of unfinished, barely started books. The question is, where’s the limit to quantifying everything and setting goals, where’s perfection? What am I doing here and where am I heading?

Surely many of you experience déjà vu, sitting on the couch and launching various streaming services thinking “here we go again” - another 30 minutes wasted looking for something to watch in this endless universe of entertainment. Or as others call it, the land of crap.

And then, like a knight on a white horse, enters the productivity expert. This modern-day shaman will shamelessly announce that your couch potato lifestyle is wasting potential worthy of Beethoven. Because surely you could be a great composer, hacker, or some other oddity from internet ads. Anything but being that ordinary Joe from across the street.

Self-help culture is like some kind of intellectual self-gratification that leads to shopping mania among people who buy the most ridiculous gadgets, apps, thick books on how not to waste time - only to read and forget them, or even forget to read them at all. I once worked with a company that had a network of schools across Poland. These were courses funded for the unemployed, but also for skill enhancement. The company’s management told me straight up who their target customer was. It’s someone who most often emigrated from Poland for financial reasons, but wants to return after years abroad. To return, they take a series of courses, then hit the wall of Polish salaries, requirements, and the general atmosphere. This causes them to leave again, and after a year, they want to return again. They then take different courses, and the cycle continues. Such people can take several courses that are objectively worthless.

The culture of self-improvement, striving for perfection with the support of guidebooks, motivational books, or even personal development seminars. Development-themed podcasts and YouTube channels emerge. Coaching and mentoring… and finally, sophisticated time management workshops. All that’s missing is a course on how to use a watch.

Importantly, a person who puts themselves in the hands of snake oil salesmen and transfers all responsibility for promised successes to themselves, oversimplifying complex life problems… allows their soul to be vivisected. Just so they can probably proudly answer at the Christmas dinner table when asked “how are you doing” that they’ve just completed some course or gained another completely useless competency. And I’m not talking about the flood of dog groomers on Facebook or vegan wedding photographers doing full moon photo sessions.

What we once simply called laziness has been elegantly renamed “procrastination.” And voilà - a whole industry of apps, workshops, and coaches for managing this “putting things off” was born. If you don’t know what this word means, check Wikipedia… or put it off until later.

And I, on this last day of AD 2024, wish you something completely perverse - I wish you boredom. Yes, that terrible, dreadful boredom when you’re left alone with yourself, without Instagram and all those step counters that train you like Pavlov’s dogs. Because it’s in this boredom, in this apparent doing-nothing, when your brains aren’t bombarded with pseudo-scientific advice and gamified life tasks, that true creativity is born. Scientific research confirms this - the brain needs peace, not constant control and optimization. With this thought, I leave you in the last hours of the dying 2024.

Your Cenobite

• Marginalia