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When was the last time you heard the silence, the stillness of an empty room? Quiet has become so unbearable that your hand reaches for the phone and puts a YouTube video on before you even realise.
Stillness has begun to scare us more than turmoil and sound. The room in our mind is brimming with information, old and new, so much that one would need to quietly open the door and wander through it to remember what lies within. The weight of our own lives, of each busy day, has become so heavy that, to relax, we now need to shut our minds off completely, scrolling through endless content without really absorbing any of it. Our attention has simply been trained to haul hay bales in the infinite field of social media.
Even everyday activities, such as walking or cooking, now have to be accompanied by some other form of stimulation, be it YouTube videos, educational podcasts, or old American sitcoms. This constant stimulation has become such a fundamental part of our days that we’ve lost the ability to live with our own thoughts. The noise, the lights, the videos, the endless information, the photos have drowned out our voice.
The room in our minds is perpetually filled with an infinite stream of content that we never understand or even really care about. It's simply our way of preventing the room from falling quiet and still, because if it did, our real thoughts would be revealed. The reason we can’t bear to be bored is that we can no longer stand our own thoughts. We are surrounded by so many distractions that we have forgotten completely what it means to be bored, to stare at a wall and feel the stillness of the room in our brain.
Boredom would force us to turn around and face ourselves, but we no longer know how to do that. So, how do you clean a room like that? Probably not by deleting every app, because that would simply mean avoiding the problem. To start with, let your own voice fill the room again. Let yourself be bored. Slowly things will come up. Boredom will give you the ability to understand your own thoughts. It will feel unbearable at first, and it won’t be easy. But boredom isn’t the enemy of a healthy mind; it’s what keeps us from drowning in the river of this fast-paced society.