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Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stonestreet. Well, according to Arthur Brooks, you need to be bored. In a short, straightforward YouTube mini talk, the Harvard professor and best selling author insists that far from being something to overcome, boredom is necessary for human flourishing. It is, in fact, a practice we need to cultivate. And the commitment we seem to have to avoid boredom at all costs is what is behind many of our worst habits, worst problems, and biggest anxieties. Now, to say that that kind of thinking runs against societal norms, quite the understatement. In fact, according to a Harvard study from 2014, most people would prefer even pain to boredom. Placed in a room with nothing to do for 15 minutes but push a button that delivers an electric shock, a big majority of the participants gave themselves shocks instead of thinking about nothing. In the video, Brooks first described how boredom works on our minds. Boredom is a tendency for us to not be occupied otherwise cognitively, and that switches over our thinking system to use a part of our brain that's called the default mode network. It sounds fancy. It's really not. The default mode network, he said, is a bunch of structures in your brain that switch on when you don't have anything else to think about. So you forgot your phone and you're sitting at a light, for example. That's when your default mode network goes on. End quote. In other words, boredom cannot just be explained by a desire we have, especially in modern Western culture, to be entertained. After all, movies, music, plays, games. These are often welcome respites for the weariness of work and stress. Instead, Brooks argues, it is essential for us to seek times of stillness, quiet, and even boredom for a much more profound reason. One of the reasons we have such an explosion of depression and anxiety in our society today is because people actually don't know the meaning of their lives, much less so in previous generations. Tons of data show this, and furthermore, we're not even looking. Why not? I'll tell you why not, he said. Because we figured out a way to eliminate boredom. We've been able almost completely to shut off the default mode network in our brains. How? The answer is the thing in your pocket with the screen, which you take out even when you're standing on the street corner waiting for the light to change. It's like, I might have to wait here for 15 seconds. Now, of course, before Brooks said any of this, plenty of biblical authors spoke out about silence and meditation. The psalms are full of calls to be silent, to wait on the Lord. In both the Old and New Testaments, we learn of God's people, even Christ himself, regularly seeking times of stillness and meditation. According to Isaiah, it is in rest and quietness that strength is found. Now to be clear, the meditation called for in the Bible and practiced by Christians is distinct, or at least should be distinct, from the emptying of the mind that characterizes Eastern religions and Eastern religious practice. You see, in biblical meditation, the heart and mind are to be full of truths that God has revealed to us about himself and his world. We are to think outward and upward in honor and awe of him, not inward into the void of our own empty souls. This can take the form of a weekly Sabbath day, rest from screens and buying. Perhaps it involves cultivating a habit of taking long walks in a world that was created in the first place to scream out to us the glory of God. But instead, especially in a world like ours, struggling so much with meaninglessness, the temptation is to perpetually distract ourselves, to avoid silence, to push away the questions we do not even want to face. As T.S. eliot warned decades ago, endless invention, endless experiment brings knowledge of motion, not of stillness. Constant noise and distraction will bring knowledge of speech, but not of silence, knowledge of words but ignorance of the word capital W. But boredom can be a tool that makes us think more deeply about the things that matter most. And silence can be a context for exercising the mind and the imagination in a way that scripture invites. It's more than just avoiding the noise of life. If Brooks is right, it's about cultivating a habit that we all need, especially in a culture like ours. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stonestreet with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co authored with Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you appreciate these daily commentaries bringing clarity to a confusing culture, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast that helps more people to find us. And for more resources or to share this commentary with others, go to BreakPoint.org