What Is This?
On boredom and life as process, not product.
For the week of Christmas, for the first time in years - not sure how many - I did not have a deadline.
Even when on “vacation” over the last few years I’ve never had a fully deadline-free week. Over the holiday there was work that could be done, there’s always work that could be done, but because I’d worked ahead on a couple of things, and because a couple of my usual outlets were on holiday hiatus, nobody was expecting me to deliver a piece of writing.
And so I didn’t.
It was kind of great. Mrs. Biblioracle and I were traveling to see family, so we were also without dog responsibilities, and one morning I opened my eyes in bed and the clock read 8:30am. There was not a thought in my head. Amazing.
Most mornings the thinking about what I’m working on or should be working on starts before I’m even wholly awake. The thoughts are too commonplace to feel like intrusions, but neither are they necessarily wholly welcome. They arrive as part of a larger burden, a problem to be solved.
But as the days without these companions mounted I started to feel a touch unsettled, and when it came time to get back to work because the deadlines had returned I struggled to string together any fully coherent ideas. The words were not right.
One of the shifts in understanding I seek for students is for them to realize that bad sentences are not (primarily) a writing skill issue, but rather a sign of not yet realized thinking. The language follows the thought and if we’re having a hard time getting something on the page, it’s usually because there is not sufficient fodder for that thought.
In my case, during the break, I’d simply, briefly, fallen out of practice of the thinking that provides fuel for the writing. That blissful period of not having a dog who wakes up with the sun eager to start the day denied me the 25 minutes outside in the air walking him where the notions visiting me during half-sleep form into something closer to full-fledged ideas.
I guess I missed my problems, which makes me think that perhaps my problems are something more like my purpose. I think I can think this because I’ve managed to forge a path where the problems I work on are almost exclusively of my own devising. How this happened is somewhat mysterious, given that it wasn’t something I set out to do with any intention. The intersection of my skills, my interests, and my personality - an inherent laziness combined with high curiosity - and the circumstances of my life and education have put me here. My week off from my deadlines helped me see how important my work is to my life as an organizing principle.
A reason to live, not to merely exist, but to experience.
As these notions formed into thought, suddenly everything I was encountering seemed to connect to this idea.
In the New York Times I read about a TikTok trend of people doing time-lapse videos of themselves trying to achieve “boredom.”
The goal is to do “nothing” for a set amount of time. The quest for boredom is an explicit rejection of a culture of always available stimulation via digital media. A therapist used as a source in the story called boredom a “creativity launching pad” which “allows for reflection, introspection, and daydreaming.”
These activities are the core of my day-to-day, even moment-to-moment work, but I must confess I’ve never seen them as a byproduct of boredom, but rather a manifestation of engagement. From as far back as I can remember if I was “bored,” meaning I thought there was nothing to do, my first impulse was to read, which was not just a cure for boredom, but a route to connection and thought.
Because of digital media, this is no longer my always my first impulse. I will indeed reach for my phone to check a score or play Spelling Bee in moments of non activity. Thankfully, because reading was so ingrained from such a young age, I retain the capacity for losing myself to a book without much struggle, but I do find myself sometimes having to remind myself to choose this depth over the fleeting distraction of whatever is on my phone.
For people who did not develop these capacities in their formative years, maybe filming themselves while trying to do nothing for six minutes at a time is a gateway to something beyond distraction.
But what if distraction isn’t the whole problem?
This is the question Joshua Rothman wrestles with at The New Yorker, asking “Can You Reclaim Your Mind?”
Rothman spent 2025 trying to remove digital distractions from his life. He quit social media, hobbled his smartphone with minder apps, and started writing everything in longhand or on a e-ink tablet. He listens to music on an old MP3 player and keeps his computer in another room. Sounds like a recipe for happiness, but Rothman writes “The bad distractions are mostly gone. The question is, Now what? At least in my case, taming technology hasn’t led directly to a reclaimed mind.”
Rothman is about a decade younger than me (46 to my 55) and expresses a certain amount of uncertainty now that he spends more time with his own thoughts. He wonders if some of this is tied up with culture of objectives and goals where it is our calling to achieve ends rather than experience means, to value the product over the process.
Here is where I recognize one of my other great strengths when it comes to an engaged work life, an almost total lack of external reward driven ambition. Grades never meant anything to me. The idea of being a columnist at The New Yorker holds appeal not because of the prestige but because I perceive it as a route to security, which would allow me to do my work more freely, but honestly, for the moment, what’s more free than this?
The question of whether or not you’re doing the “right” thing based on those external metrics can be a great, even overwhelming source of anxiety.
Rothman ends his piece with a series of inquiries:
What does it really mean to be in charge of your own mind? In many aspects of life, it’s easier to say what we don’t want than it is to say what we do. We don’t want to be screen-addled, apocalypse-minded nervous wrecks, incapable of reading for more than a quarter-hour at a time—fair enough. But who do we want to be? Maybe we just want to be people for whom that’s a live question. Reclaiming your mind might come down to reasserting your right to wonder what it’s for.
Rothman’s reflections dovetailed with the most recent episode of Ezra Klein’s podcast, a conversation with Stephen Batchelor, an author and Buddhist monk who has written several books about the intersection of philosophy and zen meditation as ways to better exist in the contemporary world.
Klein opens the conversation by invoking the central question of a meditation practice which is the subject of one of Batchelor’s books, co-written with his wife Martine, who is also a practitioner. The meditation consists of asking the question “What is this?” over and over as a way to give rise to “doubt” in order to see what kind of understanding may follow.
Batchelor did this for 10-12 hours a day between the ages of 27 and 31, a practice which would strain the capacity of TikTok audiences, but the kind of thing that the vertical video producers in the article about boredom claim to be striving for.
I am not a practitioner of meditation and cannot claim any deep understanding of Buddhism or mindfulness, though what Klein and Batchelor discuss makes a lot of inherent sense to me as a route to simultaneously wrapping one’s mind around the mystery of life and consciousness and then accepting that these things are going to forever be inherently mysterious.
The goal is something they call “nonreactivity” where you (in the words of Klein) “dwell in that sense of not knowing, of questioning, because questioning itself is a nonreactive state of mind, at least in the context of, say, wonder.” Klein has written often and perceptively about his anxiety and the attractions of this state to someone as clearly driven and successful as Klein are obvious.
This is a state of “nirvana,” which sounds “grandiose,” according to Batchelor, but also, “it’s something we already all know.” You might get it while running or hiking or swimming or cooking or, dare I say it, writing.
Batchelor says, “The problem with reactivity is not that it causes you suffering, although it often does, but that it actually inhibits you from experiencing the wonder of life itself.”
This, then, really is what the boredom-nauts are perhaps seeking…wonder.
I can’t help but think that at least some of the enthusiasm for generative AI is wrapped up in this desire for wonder without the type of seeking and contemplation that the pursuit of boredom or confronting questions like “What is this?” requires. The technology is self-evidently amazing, and surely diving in headfirst will help us transcend the limits of our human meat sacks. This is the promise, at least. The unfortunate rub is that this brand of wonder has become inextricably entwined with a larger social ethos around optimization that significantly animates the tech sector.
But as I’ve written previously. I am firmly against optimization.
Perhaps because I am a reader or a writer or simply remain fundamentally curious about humans this desire for optimization never made sense to me. How would we even know what that is? Life is a process…an experience. Why should we expect anything otherwise? I expressed this sentiment in the concluding line of Chapter 4 of More Than Words, remarking on ChatGPT, “Why have we declared this a marvel when there’s an infinite supply of greater marvels all around us?”
I’ll leave it there for this week, but there’s much more to say on this front. Maybe that will be one of my projects for 2026.
Links
This week at the Chicago Tribune I made a reading resolution to do more “browsing” in 2026.
In last week’s newsletter I also included a link for people to download free e-book versions of a mini-collection of my short stories, The Circus Elephants Look Sad Because They Are : And Other Fables. Here’s that link again.
Unsolicited Press, itself an independent publisher provided a list of 25 publishers redefining American literature. I’m pleased to say both that many of these publishers are familiar to me and there’s others I hadn’t heard of.
I endorse every word of this from Erica Lucast Stonestreet, “Why Learn to Write?”
From back in December, the New York Times ran down some of the best book covers of 2025.
Recommendations
As far as I can tell, the recommendations queue is empty, which means less of a wait if you want to get them in. (Instructions at the link below.)
In lieu of a recommendation for a reader, I’m going to recommend a book that I was hoping to loop into the main newsletter content above, but to do so would’ve opened another thread, taking it beyond what is sensible for a single installment: All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly. In the book they talk about the importance of “rituals,” which is something I want to think more about in the coming months.
From the beginning I pledged that the main newsletter content of The Biblioracle Recommends would be free for all readers and paid subscriptions would run entirely on a patronage model. This has - to be frank - hindered the potential for growth in paid subscriptions, a tradeoff I make freely, but I’ve also been trying to find ways to give paid subscribers more stuff without taking anything away from free subscribers.
Here’s something I came up with. I had so much fun pulling together my mini-book of short stories, I decided to do another book, a collection of all of the main newsletter content for the year 2025 that deals with books and reading (as opposed to AI, culture, or politics, my other subjects). It’s got 22 pieces and totals over 34,000 words, and I think makes a nice little companion to have hand when you’re offline and want some writing about reading.
At the bottom, below my sign-off I’m going to put my first paywall, and after that paywall will be a link to where you can download the device-appropriate files for an e-reader format. Unfortunately, this means comments are also restricted to paid subscribers only which is a drag that Substack should change. If you have anything you’d like to express to me or anyone else, send me a message and I’ll post it myself.
My hope is to do some additional books over the course of the year, including my previously published novel The Funny Man (which is out of print, so I own the rights), and even a previously unpublished novel. Who knows, maybe I’ll publish books by other people too? Wouldn’t it be great to be a publisher?
For now, enjoy The Biblioracle Recommends: Books and Reading Newsletters of 2025, below the paywall.
Thanks, as always for reading, and see you next week.
JW
The Biblioracle.