Why we feel bored easily?

The world is no more the place that is used to be, let us first cross off the first thing of the list while we are looking for the answers i.e. comparing our lives journey with that of our parents’. So in other words, taking lessons from people of our previous generations(Mom/Dad, Uncle/Aunty) will neither answer our questions nor solve our problems. Modern questions require modern soutions. The answer to this is very complicated, you might be wondering why don’t I have direct answers, but you have to understand these are complex mind numbing thoughts and processes which varies from person to person, not all people gets bored, there are people who are able to keep their mind working 24x7 until they fall deep asleep(less than 10% youth can do this nowadays), however the premise of this article is not for them but for the rest of the people(90%) who finds it difficult to cope up with their extra time and results in anxiety/depression/boredom. If you are among those 90 percent, please go ahead with this article, and the rest 10 percent can stop reading here(considering you already are engaged in some-other activity by now :P).

So let me break down the root cause of this issue into 5 points :

1. Instant Gratification : Our generation is completely surrounded by things which gives us instant gratification, i.e. you feel like watching a movie, you book the tickets through an app or rent a movie on prime/netlfix/hbomax and boom..the very next moment your are watching the movie…done. One doesn’t even have to wait for going to the movie hall(previous day) then checking out the list of ongoing movies and then waiting in queue and then booking it for the next day, so it was a 2 days activity. But today it is instantaneous. Many can argue that todays method is better as it is saving time which helps us to do more things and achieve more things, but what if we don’t have anything to keep our mind engaged for the next hours ? what will happen if we complete a 2 days task in just half a day ? what will the brain do exactly for the next 1.5 days? can it sit idle ? So when we ask such tough questions to ourselves we are narowing down the reason slowly to the question we raised at first — why we feel bored easily? Because simply to put, your brain is idle immediately after you have finished watching the movie and its is asking the question, what next to do ? Similarly the case happens when you want something to buy, you first think, then you search in amazon/flipkart(India)/BestBuy and the very next moment you order them and viola, the products gets delivered the same/next day. But when we need to work on any relationship…we give up easily, when we find maths problems hard…we go to the youtube and find the solution…immediately. So now our question should be how to curb this, should we go back to the time of our previous generations ? The answer is complicated : No we need to calm our mind, find peace and happiness in small things, we should not keep one big life target and say that, yes after acheiving that I will be happy, trust me, it will never happen, yes you will be happy for 1 month, but not the entire time(We will discuss this in point 4), to which we will come to out second point : Pattern recognition.
2. Pattern Recognition : As spoken by many great authors and historians, that every next generation will have higher IQ, higher potential of memory power, better ability of pattern recognition and better at problem-solving. This is what we called evolution and you and I both cannot negate this as this a natural phenomenon in Homo Sapiens. So this is in realtion to my first topic about gratification, humans have solved the problems that used to be perceived difficult and time-taking and now as we solve the probems, we can do more things in a given span of time. But did it actually help us? Yes and No. Yes, it helped us to do more/achieve things and hence today we are better at science/sports/arts etc. than our previous generations…today we have reached the Mars, which was almost unthinkable almost 50 years ago. No, it did not help us, because once the event has occurred, the very next moment we become sad/disappointed or keep thinking what to do next and we keep pushing our brain to find something which will give us that same level of satisfaction(dopamine shot),thus, not able to find the same satiation, it results in boredom/anxiety/anger. Small events trigger us and we react and end up hurting people around us or ourselves unintentionally. Human minds will always look for solutions which involves reaching to the conclusion with the shortest path, whenever we confront such situations, we should always discard the first solution that comes to mind and keep searching for alternatives, trust me the alternatives will be the way to go. Now, to solve this dilemma of pattern recognition, we have to practise one very important virtue in life : Patience! Since we have already solved time consuming problems from our daily lives, we should now inculcate age old habits like Reading Books/Newspaper/magazines in offline/online mode, workout for your body in the form of sports/gym/yoga, practise meditation, maintain a journal which will consists of two broad categories : Achievements book and Mistakes book. So you will be saying that my solution version is the same as found anywhere else, Yes and No. Yes, because these are the virtues through which we have had from the time Homo Sapiens came into existence, stone age people, hunted for days for 1 meal, so we cannot completely discard the fact that these methods which everybody suggest are wrong. No, because I will suggest to follow these steps but with the help of the current technologies you have in hand, read an e-book, write/maintain an e-journal, prepare a to-do list and keep your self organised using modern apps on your smartphones, go to some modern state-of-the-art gym/yoga classes, but please DO them religiously. The adaptation of the brain to inculcate patience will take time and you have to maintain it even all the way, it should be an integeral part of your life which will work for us in the long run for our own wellbeing. However our daily life was perturbed once COVID-19 hit us and all of this made more sense as we were locked inside home and our mind started off well(as we got break from our daily monotonous life) but what happened actually? which brings me to the next point of causing boredom is The Pandemic.
3. Pandemic : Covid-19 took our life to a stand still situation. At first we took enormous amount of time to even consider this pandemic as something “REAL”. Once we did make peace and we started wearing masks and carrying sanitisers, all of a sudden, health/cleanliness became an integral part of out lives, since we all are scared to die(offcourse). So now, let me tell you how the mind played during this pandemic, look at the below diagram, yes many will be familiar with this diagram(engineering background people), for others let me tell you this is a Stress vs Strain plot where you can see that line along A-B is where stress and strain are walking hand-in-hand, then through C-E until F, is curve flattens but tries to go up to some extent, F being the tipping point, beyond F, the curve goes down. That is what happened to our minds productivity with time during this pandemic. Replace Strain by Time parameter and Stress by Productivity and replay the plot in your mind.

Stress-Strain curve from Engineering Mechanics Class

The significance of this plot is, during the pandemic, we thought our minds have become more productive as we are working from home and spending quality time with our family and we can work from the comfort of our home etc. Yes we were doing fine until some of us reached the breaking point and all of a sudden we felt like caged zoo animals. But homo sapiens are after-all adaptive, right, then what caused this to happen ? The answer lies in the above two points. I hope you can see that how solving one set of human problems give rise to the other set of human problems. So what causes this happiness and sadness and how can we find a middle ground to this ? this brings me to the nex topic , sensations.

4. Sensations : Yes you heard that right, any situation that arises needs a solution however one cannot keep on looking for answers with someones else’s help(friend/therapist), because whatever makes us sad or happy is basically the sensation of hormones which are short lived. Its like your favorite movie is on tv , you watch it , you felt happy, then again before going to bed you feel very dull and reach out to a freind for some comfort talks. So this happens because as soon as the sensation is over, the dopamine shot and adrenaline rush produced in our body is finished, we then return to our normal phase of life which is definitely ‘boring’, one cannot pursue this sensations for ever. Good food, sex, socialising with people, getting successful in career, everything you feel will NOT give you unlimited satisfaction in life and if someone convinces you the oppsite then it is nothing but a myth. We are expecting to be happy from it, but you cannot pursue them every single time. Lets take another example, you wanted a car(childhood desire), after you got you first job, you have your (once dreamt) car now, you are very happy now and you feel fortunate, but this happiness lasted for how long ? 1 year ? 2 years ? No, it dint even last 6 weeks, the moment you sat inside the car, for the first week it was awesome, but then on you started looking out for better cars and you plan to buy them in next 2 years may be. So this happy-car-buying experience did not last long enough as you might have thought, at first it did make you happy but not for 1 year, it did for 1 month(max), then what? Therefore, we cannot keep these big onetime goals and think achieving them will give us ultimate joy and satisfaction, but instead the constant journey of numerous life goals makes us happy and sad, both at the same time like waking up early morning for a walk/gym, kissing your loved ones, hugging your parents, being optimistic and helping others, solve problems, be a better citizen/daughter-son/better-half, maintaining your health on regular basis, making small trips, checking off your bucket list one after the other, working and doing what you love are some of the many short day-to-day goals which should be enough to keep you happy. But this leads to the final point of this article is peer-pressure.

5. Peer Pressure : We are social beings and we are always driven mostly of what others think of us rather what our true self-worth is. This creates two states in our minds, the one that we are in reality and the other is what others perceive about us. The difference between the two creates the problem which disbalances the state of mind. In practise the difference should be Zero, but in real world, people carry this two personalities with them which ultimately causes mood swings — sad/depressed every alternate moment when their peer-approval goes down. The peer-approval is a geography based societal thing whose eligibilty criteria is dependant on status, money, power, skin-color, religion, caste, creed, gender etc. We take this sets of peeple and form small hypothetical groups with whom we mostly mix and hang out, called Friends. In this world, we seem to be highly dependant on such folks on our day to day activities. But once some of this folks achieve something and we fail to do so at that given point of time, there comes the virtual peer-approval ratings that we start giving to ourselves which leads to rejection/dejection in life. This is probably the most intensifying cause of boredom and sadness. So, how do we overcome this ? Few rules of thumb has to be followed : a) This is your journey, your sets of shoes which you are wearing, your sets of problems, upbringing, parents, house and so many other factors which are unique to you and you only. Do not compare it with your peers journey. b) If your peer disapproves of something of you and you feel bad about it, its mainly because you are did not make peace with yourself and you did not fully accept what you really are. c) The power to control your life is in your own hands, do not put that button into your peers hands, they might drive you as they feels benefited from time to time.

These are tough things to do, easier said than done, but remember, if you are not in control of your own life, your happiness, boredom, sadness indices will drive you to a unimaginable stage of your life. So before its too late, lets all pledge to build a better version of ourselves each day.

Conclusion : Life is short, enjoy every bit of it, the problems that are causing us to become bored easily are not just because of who we are, but because what evolution is doing to us slowly. However evolution cannot be stopped, our minds will eventually adapt to this fast paced paranoia of instant gratification, peer-pressure, pandemic ridden world. Inculcating old school methods and slowing down our mind will not only help us to achieve more but also to be more productive unequivocally. This will reduce unintentional stresses and help us live a happy/sad life. Yes, happiness and sadness are the two sides of the same coin. Both are required to keep us grounded in life and live healthy and prosperous life.