The Unhampered Purgatory of Boredom

The biggest problem that I can see with social media, or any other kind of media, especially any kind that can be passively consumed, is that it suppresses your thoughts. It suppresses your thoughts and rewards you for letting it by giving you hits of dopamine. You're left in a catatonic state, like a puppet hooked up to an IV being pumped full of dopamine... placid and thoughtless.

It's an easy fix for an un-still mind, but if you, like me, want to do things that require mindfulness, it's a trap. If you need your creative ideas, reasoning skills, and in depth thought processes, passive consumption of media will derail your progress faster than anything else. Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" was prescient.

I don't think that all media is bad. If we can learn something from it, either a new perspective, new ideologies, philosophies, or how to do something, there's value there. But in an ocean of media it's easy to drown. You have to be very precise and clear about your intentions and make sure not to overdo it.

Then you need time away from any kind of consumption. Time with just your thoughts and no other distractions, to allow your mind to slowly unravel what you've learned and been exposed to. Time enough for your mind to unconsciously savor the ideas, to pull them apart thread by thread down to their constituent parts. Then when it's ready, with a bit of conscious persuasion on your part, pick up the unraveled threads of various processed ideas and weave them into unique and novel ideas. This is where creativity is born, in the unhampered purgatory of boredom.

Your mind will swim with ideas, but you need to focus on the right ones and it will slowly coalesce the right ones into the right ideas. And once you have the right one, the next part is just as hard, acting on it. Allow the idea to consume you like an obsession, then allow that obsession to motivate and drive you, it will fuel the fire that gets the idea past being just an idea and into reality.

Constructive obsession, to me, cannot be wrong or wasteful. It will always bear fruit, in the worst case it will provide experience of having done something. In the best case scenario it will provide success beyond having realized something that started as a mere thought. Both are excellent outcomes, both are worthy endeavors.

If we are as mortal as it appears we are, then even one idea taken to obsession and then realization is worth the effort. And multiple ideas obsessed to realization is a life worth living.