By: Maddie Schmidt
The other morning, I woke up to the sound of my roommate walking in and out of our room as she was getting ready for class. Confused, I checked my phone to see why my alarm hadn’t gone off, only to discover that my phone had died overnight. Upon further investigation, I realized that my charger had not been fully plugged into the wall.
Frustrated, I reinserted my phone charger and began to get ready for my day. I usually listen to music or a podcast while I get ready or do chores, but that morning I had to get ready in silence.
I thought that the silence would be boring—that I would be itching to grab my AirPods after a few minutes. However, I found that I actually enjoyed the silence. It provided room for me to listen to my own thoughts while I was getting ready, instead of just tuning out while listening to something else.
Recently, I have found that it has been harder for me to come up with ideas, whether it be a topic for an essay I need to write for class or just something to write about in my journal. My creativity has felt stagnant, and it has been taking me a long time to come up with something original to talk or write about.
The other morning, though, when I chose to get ready in silence, ideas began to spark. I thought of a topic for an essay I needed to write, and I remembered something that I wanted to jot down in my journal. I even thought about how I could turn that journal entry into some sort of poem or short story. All of these ideas surfaced in just 20 short minutes of silence.
I realized that I have been unintentionally letting other people do my thinking for me. If I choose to fill all my moments of silence with listening to music or to someone else talk on a podcast or TV show, then I am not allowing myself the opportunity for my own creativity to flow through my mind. I am simply absorbing and critiquing other people’s ideas, not thinking critically about my own.
Generally, my first reaction to silence is boredom, so I turn to entertainment because it is right at my fingertips. But if I am never bored, then how will I ever be motivated to create anything of my own? I realized that constantly satisfying my craving for entertainment has stunted my own creativity, and as a result, I have allowed myself to become somewhat robotic in how I approach my day-to-day life.
Once I realized how avoiding boredom has shaped my critical thinking habits, I began to ponder the implications of this problem in society. My generation (Gen Z) constantly has headphones in our ears and all the entertainment we could ever desire in our back pockets. On the surface, this doesn’t seem like such a horrible thing. We have access to all kinds of information and nearly unlimited possibilities at our disposal. However, what kind of problems might arise if we are all so tuned in to the media that we forget about our ability to be creative?
If our generation lets the trend of passive consumption take over, society itself will
eventually experience a decline in problem-solving skills, and we will forget how to adapt to our
dynamic environment. Overall, we will become a less productive society that succumbs to conformity instead of encouraging original thinking.
For a long time, I just thought that I wasn’t good at the brainstorming process of activities like projects and writing. However, I wonder if I simply haven’t given myself the space to practice coming up with my own ideas. I think that many of us would find that we are more creative and better at problem solving and brainstorming if we would sometimes sit in silence and let our brains do what they were made for. I think the solution to stunted creativity and lack of inspiration is to let ourselves sit in silence—to experience boredom.
