“Boredom, you can go in one of two ways. You can go the internal route or the external route. The internal route is: I have to find a way to amuse myself or I'm going to go crazy. … Or you go the external route. I have to have a film, a video, some kind of online thing … I need external stimulation. The external stimulation deadens your senses, deadens your imagination. It gets you used to instant gratification.”
Two Percent with Michael Easter · Health & Longevity · November 2026
Context
Michael Easter read Greene's line that boredom signals an inability to connect meaningfully with the world. Greene, who had just described inventing war games in his childhood backyard, draws a line between boredom that builds imagination and boredom handed off to screens.
Transcript
…also into sports and I invented my own game, my own version of football where I had all these teams that I created. And in my backyard, my parents thought I was crazy and I would play the entire game in my mind using dice to sort of show what the play was. Boredom was a spur to like my imagination.
Yeah.
I had to think, I had to create things in my brain, in my head, that would make me feel excited and alive and get rid of this boredom. And in some ways, it spurred my imagination and it led to how I write books where I have to constantly imagine things. I have to imagine the life of this person that I'm trying to describe or the dinosaurs on the verge of becoming extinct. And so boredom, you can go in one of two ways. You can go the internal route or the external route. The internal route is: I have to find a way to amuse myself or I'm going to go crazy. I have to start playing the piano and getting to hear music on my own. It's going to amuse me. I'm going to have to invent a game. Or you go the external route. I have to have a film, a video, some kind of online thing, and whatever it is. I need external stimulation. The external stimulation deadens your senses, deadens your imagination. It gets you used to instant gratification. Everything has…
It's a more active use of boredom rather than passive. You're having to figure it out yourself rather than scrolling or pushing plate. What I think is interesting too is that I've noticed in my own work, cell phones take a lot of heat, screen time. And so when people will take, say, two hours off…
Yeah. Yeah.
So what is I think that adults are probably, as you just said, you sort of learn these patterns as a kid. So probably the older you are, the better set up you are to have more interesting ways to manage boredom. But what would your advice be for adults? I mean, I'm almost 40. So we had video games…
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