The Art of Doing Nothing: How Embracing Emptiness Can Make You Happier

It sounds strange, doesn't it? That we might need to learn how to be bored correctly. When we hear the word "boredom," familiar images pop into our heads: an endless work call where all you hear is corporate jargon, or a bus stuck in traffic for so long you've developed an emotional attachment to the driver. Boredom isn't just a lack of things to do; it's a profound state of being.

Usually, it arises when we have to do something we don’t want to, or when we can't do what we want. But there’s a third, more advanced option: when you have no idea what you want at all. This is when a higher level of boredom begins. It’s not just "nothing to do," it’s a feeling of having "nowhere to live." As the writer Andrei Platonov might say, it is "to suffer without suffering, to desire without desire, to think without having thoughts."

Our Fear of Emptiness

We dislike being bored so intensely that we'll do almost anything to avoid it. In one experiment, when people were asked to simply sit in silence for 15 minutes, a staggering 67% chose to give themselves a mild electric shock rather than be idle. This reveals the depth of our aversion to an unoccupied mind.

We think boredom is just a lack of stimuli, so we decide the cure is a series of new experiences. "I'll buy a new gaming console, go on vacation, or start learning Japanese, and then I'll definitely stop being bored." But reality often proves us wrong. After a couple of weeks, the language-learning app is forgotten, the console is a glorified dust collector, and you've brought your old companion, boredom, with you on that long-awaited trip.

Boredom often walks hand-in-hand with depression and anxiety. To drown it out, people grasp at anything. A bored air traffic controller on a quiet night shift turns on a crime thriller instead of monitoring the airspace, and a catastrophe occurs. A security guard, out of sheer tedium, handcuffs himself and loses the key, forcing him to call for help. At least he had some fun.

What happens when you're bored? Your mind scatters. You want to do one thing, then another, then something else. You feel anxious and can't sit still. Concentration becomes impossible. Maybe you've felt this: you turn on a game, play for five minutes, and switch it off—no fun. You try a podcast, listen for a few minutes, and again, it’s not right. You start a TV series, watch for five minutes, and that’s not it either.

The True Nature of Happiness

To understand this scattering, let's look for boredom's opposite. Is it joy? Happiness? Interest? All these states share one thing: the mind’s focus on a single point. Boredom, then, is when the mind rushes in all directions at once.

We often believe that happiness comes from objects. "I'll eat some good food, and then I'll be happy." "If I start earning more, I'll definitely be happy." Our experience seems to confirm this—I wanted sushi, I ate it, I felt good. But it doesn't really work that way.

Think about it: if happiness were truly in the sushi, you would be happy every single time you ate it. Happiness isn't an objective property of a thing. The temperature of water in a kettle is an objective property; if it's 90°C, it will burn you in the morning, noon, or night, regardless of your mood. But the joy you get from an object is not so reliable. You might desperately await the new season of a favorite show, only to turn it on and feel... bored. The anticipation of a holiday often brings more joy than the holiday itself.

This leads to a crucial truth: joy is not in the object, but in the state in which we experience it. Comparison is a notorious thief of joy. Imagine you land a good job after a long search—decent salary, nice office. You go home feeling proud and light. The next day, you see on social media that a friend got a job with twice the salary, working remotely from Bali. Suddenly, your joy dims, becoming almost shameful. Nothing about your situation has changed, except for your feeling. Comparison recoded happiness into failure in a single second.

But comparison isn't the only thief. Often, the problem is that we no longer truly experience things. We use them to escape. A TV series to distract ourselves. Food to suppress anxiety. We're trying to medicate ourselves with pleasure, but it doesn't work. True pleasure requires presence. Joy is only possible when you are inside the moment, living it, not just scrolling through your life like a playlist. When there is inner fatigue or a desire to escape, any pleasure is extinguished like a candle underwater.

Flow: The Antithesis of Boredom

Every time we are truly happy, our attention is completely absorbed. "I got a ticket to my favorite band's concert!" At that moment, all your focus is on that ticket, on the anticipation. When you're lost in a game or a good book, you don't think about the past or worry about the future. You are simply here. This state of absolute engagement is what makes these activities so pleasant. Your attention is focused. No distractions, no analysis. Just you and the moment.

The nature of happiness is this simple: it is the one-pointedness of the mind.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this state "flow"—a moment when anxiety, self-criticism, and the sense of time disappear. Boredom is anti-flow. The mind flails, grabbing at any thought, and finding no anchor, it begins to make an aggressive, internal noise. This is the feeling of emptiness we mistake for unhappiness. Our phones and news feeds are crutches for attention. They don't provide quality focus but create the illusion of a busy mind, just so we don't have to face our own boredom.

Training the Wandering Mind

So, how do we find this focus? We've forgotten how to simply be. We can't do a task for long without checking our phone. We can't walk down the street without listening to a podcast. We can't eat without watching something. We are constantly searching for a way to distract ourselves from our own minds because they are full of disordered thoughts. This is the root of our everyday suffering.

Flow is when the mind is completely focused, when there is no inner struggle. You don't think; you just act. True happiness isn't the absence of problems, but the absence of inner division. Depression and anxiety are often forms of this same fractured attention—a mind that lacks one-pointedness.

The path to happiness, then, is learning to focus. This isn't about forceful concentration but a gentle, natural return of attention to one thing.

1. Embrace Stillness. The first step is to simply sit with the chaos. When you sit down to meditate, or even just to be quiet, your mind resists. It throws boredom, irritation, and doubt at you. But what's happening is that, for the first time, you are seeing the true nature of your mind. All that noise was always there; the silence just makes you aware of it. Start with one minute of silence. Don't try to clear your mind; just observe it. Your task is not to run from boredom, but to feel it, to endure it. Count your breaths: inhale for four, exhale for six. This is like a repetition at a gym for your mind. You are building a mental muscle.
2. Learn to Tolerate Boredom. This is even more irritating than meditation, but it is vital. Sit down and slowly scan the objects in your room as if you've never seen them before. Let your eyes linger on a lamp, a cup, a stain on the wall. At the same time, notice your breathing and how your body feels. The purpose is to break the habit of constant stimulation. If you're feeling brave, try traveling on an empty tank. Go somewhere on a train or bus without a phone, a book, or headphones. Just sit. Just be. It sounds awful, but what are you really losing? The better you can tolerate boredom, the happier you will become.

The Message in the Monotony

When the brain isn't overstimulated, it begins to wander into corners where strange and brilliant ideas lie. Boredom can be a powerful catalyst for creativity. Remember the lockdowns? It was a mass test of endurance against boredom. But it was then that people started baking bread, making art, and learning new skills. In that silence, many heard a new thought: "Maybe it's time to stop scrolling and start living."

Boredom is a signal that your one-pointed happiness has gone off course. It reminds you of unfulfilled desires and unrealized dreams. When you hear this siren, there are two paths. The first is to become a master of observation and simply watch these thoughts without clinging to them. This is tempting but very difficult.

The second is to do something. This doesn't contradict what was said before. Achieving a goal in itself doesn't bring lasting happiness. But an achieved goal is like a pebble being removed from the shoe of your consciousness. You can walk again without being distracted by the prickly rhythm of "I should."

If happiness is inner order, boredom is the wail of a siren. You can either learn not to react to it, or you can do something so that the siren is no longer needed. The ultimate goal is peace—a mind that is not at war with itself. And that peace is the most authentic happiness there is.

References

• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.
  This foundational book introduces the concept of "flow," a state of complete absorption in an activity. Csikszentmihalyi explains that these optimal experiences are the key to genuine happiness, occurring when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. This directly supports the article's core argument that happiness is found in a focused, one-pointed mind, the direct opposite of a bored, scattered one.
• Eastwood, J. D., Frischen, A., Fenske, M. J., & Smilek, D. (2012). The unengaged mind: Defining boredom in terms of attention. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(5), 482–495.
  This academic paper provides a framework for understanding boredom as a problem of attention. The authors argue that boredom arises when we are unable to successfully engage our attention with internal or external information. This aligns perfectly with the article's description of boredom as a state where the "mind rushes in all directions" and cannot find a point of focus.
• Wilson, T. D., Reinhard, D. A., Westgate, E. C., Gilbert, D. T., Ellerbeck, N., Hahn, C., ... & Shaked, A. (2014). Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind. Science, 345(6192), 75–77.
  This is the study referenced in the article where participants preferred to administer mild electric shocks to themselves rather than sit alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. It provides powerful empirical evidence for the article's claim that people have a profound aversion to being idle and will go to great lengths to escape the state of an unoccupied mind, which we call boredom.