I’ve been thinking about creativity lately and I found that there is a Wall standing within each one of us. Before I get to The Wall, let me set some background.

When we take a break from doing things our mind does not rest. In fact, it becomes highly active, searching for the next thing to do. This manifests in a growing restlessness that feels uneasy the longer we sit still. Our mind quickly begins serving up options of things to do. Some take the flavor of hedonism (scroll on your phone, watch TV, eat something!), while others can be more productive (take out the trash, clean the bathroom). If we don’t engage in one of these actions, then sometimes the mind will begin its own form of activity, thinking. Thinking can dominate our experience with instances of rumination, anxiety, memories, or daydreaming. When we take a break, our mind begins searching for the next activity. We often default to quick, common actions to stay occupied. This phenomenon I sketched out here is much more well-known as boredom.

Boredom is often negatively viewed as for many of us it can be a mentally painful state. The lack of external stimulation forces our mind to starve and begin an internal turn to find food. This internal turn can make people very uncomfortable.

Aside: Resting doesn’t have to induce this feeling. There were probably many times you felt great pleasure in doing nothing. Consider how you define “doing nothing.” You’re likely still experiencing some form of stimulation. Laying on the beach may feel like nothing, but in fact, you are in a novel location, feeling the warm sun on your skin, hearing waves, or people, and are often in the presence of others. This is not what I mean by a boring state.

Before smartphones and the internet, boredom was a much more common experience. Think about how it would feel to sit in a waiting room without your phone. Or the feeling of coming home after work to an empty house with no internet, no phone, and no one there. With the internet, smartphones, and media algorithms, we have effectively eradicated the need to feel bored. There is always something stimulating you can watch, read, or play in your pocket at all times. Instead of sitting in a waiting room and experiencing that moment of inactivity, many of us reflexively reach for our phones to escape it. I’ve gone days, weeks, even months without experiencing true, sustained boredom. We have effectively solved boredom which was a feeling that used to dominate lives. “This is wonderful!” you might exclaim. What is our human objective if not to rid our society of the negative mental states and emotions that plague us?

I think we lose something important by eliminating boredom. I think we lose our interaction with The Wall which stands just beyond boredom. When we sit inactive we go through the sequence of steps I mentioned before. We think about the next things to do. If we resist, uneasiness arises in our minds as they begin to activate themselves by just thinking. In this moment it can feel truly unbearable, especially when we are so unfamiliar with it. As we continue to sit there with it, we approach closer and closer to The Wall: the place where our moment-to-moment self ends and our creative self begins. As you sit, and all you need to do is sit, suddenly you will feel yourself drawn to do things or you might begin to break out of your normal thought patterns. I remember a time when I first began to cross the wall again in my adult life. I was riding the New York City subway and purposely avoided looking at my phone or listening to any music. I just sat there aimlessly feeling all the uneasiness within me build. Soon, about 10-15 min later, I caught myself completely absorbed in new ideas and feeling a vivid imagination space I hadn’t felt in a long time. I had crossed The Wall. I could feel a new strength of my internal mind which conjured up stories, debates, and new creative desires. It felt so refreshing to find this great sense of creative entertainment from within. On this one short subway ride, I suddenly had a short story idea, a blog post idea, and a new way of thinking about a problem at work. These ideas would come packaged with a desire to create: to write, to think, to solve. Suddenly, in my next moment of downtime, I had three things I wanted to do.

My anecdote isn’t meant to make you believe that this phenomenon is easy to encounter or universally identical. When you try to sit inactive you probably won’t have the same experience as I did. And to be completely transparent, even with my same brain, I often struggle to cross The Wall. Some days the wall seems to be right on the other side of boredom, other times it takes longer, and some other times I don’t even think it’s there. The point is that I know it exists because I’ve felt it many times. What’s for certain is you won’t find it if you don’t look for it. I think this mindset is becoming increasingly difficult for most of us to summon. Even to the point where I think many people forget what is on the other side boredom. Now to caveat, I don’t think this means you should spend all your time seeking out boredom. Or anything like the advice that you should spend all your subway rides at rest. But, I do think we all need to re-adjust our feelings towards boredom. Like many things in life, every curse has its gift and I think boredom’s gift is to act as its own solution: To summon creative ideas and desires within each one of us. The typical and modern way we now try to “solve” boredom are impulses for familiar quick hits of dopamine that prevent us from ever encountering this true solution which rests beyond The Wall. So please, if you are convinced, try to spend some time seeking out The Wall. Don’t be discouraged if its hard, it is supposed to be. Sooner or later if you persist I know you will be convinced of the same truth as I have written about here. Perhaps the most frightening question isn’t whether The Wall exists, but whether we’ll be the last generation to remember what lies beyond it.