You Should Sit With Boredom | The Ezra Klein Show

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]But, just tell me about how you understand patience.

[00:00:02]>> Uh, growing your capacity to hold discomfort. Do you think that that [music] as a general capacity has has weakened? And And I'm thinking of something you wrote that I think about a lot. You wrote, "Refraining is very much the method of [music] becoming a dharmic person. It's a practice of not immediately filling up space just because there's a gap." And we didn't used to have the ability to fill the space of every gap.

[00:00:25]>> Yeah. You know, you were sitting in traffic and there wasn't a lot to do.

[00:00:28]You were in line at the supermarket and there was nothing really to look at.

[00:00:31]Just the daily necessity of sitting with boredom even has dissolved. And I think it changes us.

[00:00:39]>> It's so true and and not for the better, I would say.

[00:00:42]Less in touch with the richness of the world. Sometimes with students, very often these days, I really encourage them to go to the grocery store offline, ride on the subway offline, be there fully for what's happening because you're not engrossed in a movie or or on a podcast or anything. Let's not Let's not get crazy here.

[00:01:05]>> [laughter] >> Uh, put you out of business as a I mean, the subway is such a great example. There's so much happening. I mean, sometimes things you wish weren't happening.

[00:01:15]>> One thing I've been trying to do for the last month or so is just do nothing on the subway and just Yeah. be aware of what's happening around me. And it's interesting because a lot of the times I don't really love what's happening around. It's a rich experience, but it's a boombox, it's the screeching of the brakes, just a lot going on and dropping the effort of trying to find exactly the right music or podcast or thing on my Kindle to distract myself in the right way. It's easier to stop. That That's been my big lesson from it. It's not so much that I love every moment on the subway, but I didn't quite notice how much energy I was expending trying to block it all out.

[00:01:51]>> call that a form of meditation. It's interesting because we didn't used to have all these devices. You know, I I grew up before television even, so.

[00:02:01]But now that we have the devices, it's very helpful actually to feel the contrast. If you didn't have anything that drew your attention away, it's not as quite as rich as the contrast between being caught up in your devices and and being on the subway with nothing happening. You know, you could say, "Well, that's when you get into being bored." But you could also say, "Plum, and maybe that's when you get into being alive."