The Boredom Threshold

I recently sat through a couple hours of a civic meeting. When I left, more than half of the agenda items were untouched. No stranger to boring situations, I've observed that people reach a point when patient listening moves beyond their grasp. The exact point varies from person to person, but when the “boredom threshold” is achieved, some action must be taken. In said meeting, some found spam emails on their phones become strangely interesting, some brashly cleared their throats in a failed attempt to rush a speaker, some snored gently as consciousness itself became too great a chore, and others collected their papers and walked out the door.

When the boredom threshold is hit in life, action must be taken. We are compelled to break away from the usual “wake-shower-work/school-TV-sleep” routine and do something that actually gives us a bit of a buzz. Clearly everyone has a different threshold for this. “Adventure” for one person means jumping out of a perfectly good airplane, and for another it means an evening of watching NBC instead of the usual ABC. You weren’t designed to whittle your life away in abject boredom. There are too many great experiences in life for you to re-waste your time re-reading the Twilight Series.

When the boredom threshold light glows on our dashboard, it tells us we’ve been fueled with too much caution. If we don’t pop the hood and add some risk to our lives, our vehicle might just die on the side of the road from ennui. Part of our human engineering is this need to mix it up from time to time. Occasionally, you’ve just got to do something different. Picking  that “something different” is where things might get messy.

The boredom threshold dictates that your life needs to a shift from caution to risk, but here’s the tricky part: nowhere in your owner’s manual does it say that you need to do something “bad”. Clearly this is confusing, because frequent “boredom busters” include Vegas benders, imbibing too much cheap beer, and getting unprofessional with that girl in accounting. We muster up the energy to break from orbit, and then we fly to planet evil. Somehow, we get convinced that our break with the mundane requires a break with morality. It’s a lie.

When your boredom boils over, it’s time for a risk. Maybe you need to round up friends and family for the most epic croquet game ever. Maybe you need to convince a friend to jump out of a perfectly good airplane with you. Maybe you need to go cook a meal at a homeless shelter. Maybe you need to find a problem that no one else is solving and take the first step to solve it. Maybe your boredom threshold breach is your signal to kick in the gates of hell and do something good in this world.

Reached the boredom threshold yet? Go do something…good.