If there’s one thing that this summer has taught me, it’s to relish boredom. It’s in scarce supply for us all in term-time, but often abundant during the holidays, when we transition from being constantly surrounded with college friends to suddenly facing a lot more time alone.
Inevitably, some of this time is spent glued to our phone, maintaining friendships by means of texts or phone calls, and, if you’re anything like me, doomscrolling through Instagram reels. The reels I encounter on my for-you page generally fall into two categories: mindless memes that I send to my friends, and influencers vlogging their enviable daily lives. I’ve willingly endured hundreds, if not thousands, of videos of people who maximise each minute of their day. If it’s not work, it’s working out (why is everyone running marathons these days?), creating a small business, or having exotic adventures abroad.
What Instagram is telling me, implicitly, is that I’m simply not doing enough with my time. I often talk to friends about the strange phenomenon of managing to schedule a different activity for every single hour in Oxford, while at home sometimes my entire day is based around baking or going to the dentist. It’s so easy to become consumed by the need to maximise productivity – after all, time is precious, so why not be as effective as possible in everything you do? This emphasis on efficiency has long ruled the workplace, but now it influences our leisure time too. I remember my college dad once expounding to me his theory that since everyone in Oxford is academically intelligent, students feel the need to compete in their leisure and extracurricular activities too.
In my view, this isn’t healthy. Friendly competition in some arenas is not necessarily a bad thing, but competition is not akin to leisure. Perpetually striving to improve yourself in every way possible is not relaxing, and neither is constantly being plugged in, through your phone, to what everyone else is doing, all the while feeling guilty because you’re sitting, watching it on your phone. Amidst the bustle of term, finding moments which are unscheduled and untimetabled is of tantamount importance for our mental wellbeing, and as such they should be treated as a luxury. Ask yourself what will really help you to relax, find the means to do it, and then revel in the enjoyment of having this time to yourself. Self-care is not defined by others – the clue’s in the name.
The solution, then, is to disconnect. I mean this literally – turn your phone off. Stop filling your head with the noise of other people’s thoughts and let your own thoughts fill it instead. This conscious inactivity and unplugging from the online world was my mission over the summer, and while my practice is still far from perfect (I really don’t like looking at my screen time statistics), my mental health has drastically improved. I’ve been walking outside without a playlist or podcast to keep me entertained. I’ve been cooking, alone or with loved ones. I’ve been playing board games. None of these activities have necessarily made me richer or more productive, but they’ve made me much happier.
Consequently, over the summer I felt a shift inside of myself. When I have been for walks, I have felt my imagination and creativity stimulated by the joy of letting my mind go anywhere it wants to, and I have formulated new ideas as I gaze across fields dappled with sunlight and skies swelling with clouds. This is what it feels like to savour boredom, and savour it we must – during term time, boredom becomes a luxury. Even amidst the activity of college life, though, I implore you to seek out these scant moments of boredom and, taking the time to be truly alone, distant from corporeal and digital friends, to relish them, letting your mind wander wherever it may.
