The sunny side of boredom
If I get what I wish for, in 2026 I’ll have more unscheduled time than ever before. So naturally, I’m wondering how will it feel, after 50 years of continuous employment, to spend less time doing and more time being.
Will I be bored? Or—in effort to fix a problem I don’t (yet) have—will I make myself busier than ever?
I wish I could just wait and see, but instead I’m doing what I always do when I’m curious. Scouring the library for books with answers. Querying friends and strangers. Trying to figure things out.
And eventually—assuming the subject hasn’t become totally and utterly boring to me and everyone else—I write a blog. Which brings me to the subject at hand.
What is boredom, anyway? And why do we do everything we can to avoid it?
As a kid in Miami Beach, my summers were lonely. When my fancy friends went to sleep away camp, I had long hot days to fill. If I complained of being bored, my mother would say: Bored people are boring.
Clearly, she hadn’t read Nietzsche. According to him, creatives require a lot of boredom to achieve their best work. She could have told me that boredom would be good for my career.
Either way, the word boring predates Nietzsche by about 100 years, with the invention of the boring tool: a kind of drill that worked slowly and repetitively to make just one kind of hole. Over time, the word bore came to mean a tiresome person or task. And boredom—the tedious state that might result in mindlessly eating a whole bag of chips in one sitting, or drinking earlier and earlier in the day—became something to avoid.
In The Lost Art of Doing Nothing: How the Dutch Unwind with NIKSEN, authors Maartje Willems and Lona Aalders make a great case for embracing occasional boredom. To achieve this state, we need three things: time, a calm mind, and a good place. Also, when we have nothing do do, we should resist filling the void with activity. They say niksen is something we can learn to do and not feel guilty about.
In other words, niksen is the sunny side of boredom. It’s a comfortable, peaceful place where time is suspended. It’s a place where even someone like me—someone like you—can be lazy. For at least a while.
Instead of having nothing to do, we are choosing to do nothing.
But how do we get there? Here are a few suggestions, from the book and from my personal experience.
Redefine nothing. Moments (or hours) of inactivity don’t have to signal apathy, stagnation, or neglect of what’s important. Instead, we can think of doing nothing as a deliberate and subversive act. It’s an intentional reset.
Do nothing in a place where you like to be. Do you have a favorite window? Or a place at the shore? Grab a blanket and sit for awhile. Know that your books or your knitting will still be there. After some really pretty clouds float by.
Do nothing for as long as you want to. Remove your watch. Put away your phone. Be sure there are no clocks within sight. For niksen to work, we have to lose track of time. If you’re a lifelong clock watcher like me, this is the hardest part! But as the book says:
The clock keeps ticking,
but you don’t have to watch it.
Forget about it for a change.
So my readers, friends, and former lovers. The countdown is over. The ball has dropped. Here’s wishing niksen for you and for me.
May 2026 be the year we learn to do nothing for a while. And feel good about it.
