Jay Shetty

And someone has been very carefully, very profitably taking it away from you.

Welcome to something I call the sacred void.

Now, before we dive in, I want to talk about what boredom actually is.

Scientists got this wrong for a hundred years.

So here's the truth.

I need to start by rehabilitating boredom's reputation because it has been absolutely destroyed.

For most of the 20th century, psychologists treated boredom as a deficiency state, a signal that something was missing, stimulation, purpose, motivation.

The implicit assumption was that a healthy, engaged, well-adjusted person shouldn't experience boredom.

If you were bored, something was wrong with you.

You lacked discipline or ambition or the right attitude.

Teachers told students to stop being bored.

Parents loaded children's schedules to prevent boredom from ever arising.

The entire architecture of modern productivity culture was built on the premise that idle time is wasted time.

This was one of the great intellectual errors of the modern era.

In the last 20 years, a small group of researchers, most of them working in obscurity, many of them initially laughed at by their colleagues, began to look at boredom with fresh eyes.

And what they found completely inverted everything we thought we knew.

The first revelation was definitional.

What is boredom actually?

Psychologist Sandy Mann at the University of Central Lancashire spent years researching this and arrived at a definition that stopped me cold when I read it.

She found that boredom is not the absence of stimulation.