Boredom is the Gatekeeper

That first Monday of my holiday break, I made a promise to myself. No work emails, no side projects, not even glancing at my blog. This time was for family, for Netflix queues, for rereading dog-eared novels. One thing I was really looking forward to was learning something new, a new skill. Not for utility, but purely for curiosity. I wanted to learn about batteries. They power our world, yet they're a complete mystery to me. I only vaguely remember what I learned in high school decades ago. This would be the perfect subject for me.

I went straight to a website I had bookmarked years ago in a fit of intellectual ambition: BatteryUniversity.com. I started with the chemistry of lead acid batteries. I was ready to be enlightened. Twenty minutes later, I was three paragraphs in, my mind adrift. The text was dense, packed with terms like "lead-antimony" and "acid-starved." My finger twitched. Then I read this:

the sealed lead acid battery is designed with a low over-voltage potential to prohibit the battery from reaching its gas-generating potential during charge.

I thought, wouldn't this be easier to understand as a YouTube video? A nice animation? I clicked away. It seemed like I had just met the gatekeeper, and it had turned me away. I was bored.

We talk about boredom as if it's the absence of stimulation. Having nothing to do. But in our hyperconnected world, where information is constantly flowing and distractions are a finger tap away, true emptiness is rare. Modern boredom isn't having nothing to do. I had plenty of material to go over. Instead, it's the friction of deep focus. It's the resistance you feel when you move from consuming information to building those neural connections in your brain. Learning feels slow and hard, and it is ungratifying compared to dopamine-induced YouTube videos. Have you ever watched a pretty good video on YouTube and learned nothing from it?

This reaction to learning the hard way, masquerading as boredom, is the gatekeeper. And almost every important skill in life lives on the other side of that gate.

When I started working for an AI startup, I was fascinated by what we were able to accomplish with a team of just two engineers. It looked like magic to me at first. You feed the AI some customer's message, and it tells you exactly what this person needs. So, to be an effective employee, I decided to learn profoundly about the subject. Moving from just a consumer of an API to a model creator made the process look un-magical.

It started with spreadsheets where we cleaned data. There was a loss function that stubbornly refused to budge for hours. There was staring at a single Python error that said the tensor dimensions don't align. The boring part was the meticulous engineering upon which the magic is built. I find it fascinating now, but it was frustrating at the time, and I had to force myself to learn it.

Like most developers, video games inspired me to become a programmer. I wanted to code my own game from scratch. I remember playing Devil May Cry and thinking about how I would program those boss battles. But when I sat with a keyboard and the cursor on my terminal flashed before me, I struggled to move a gray box on the screen using SDL. For some reason, when I pressed arrow keys, the box jittered instead of following a straight line. I would spend the whole day reading OpenGL and SDL documentation only to fix a single bug.

Boredom was going through all this documentation, painfully, only to make small incremental progress.

When you start a business, the gatekeeper shows its face. It stares back at you when you open that blank document and write a single line of text in it: My idea. For indie developers, it's the feeling you get when you build the entire application and feel compelled to start over rather than ship what you've built. This boredom is the feeling of creation from nothing, which is always harder than passive consumption.

We've conflated "interesting" with "easy to consume." The most interesting things in the world, like building software, writing a book, mastering a craft, understanding a concept, are never easy to produce. Their initial stages are pure effort. Gamification tries to trick us past the gatekeeper with points and badges, but that's just putting a costume on it. The real work remains.

There is no way around it. You can't eliminate that feeling. Instead, you have to recognize it for what it is and push through.

When you feel that itchy tug toward a distracting tab, that's the gatekeeper shaking its keys. It's telling you that what you're doing is really hard, and it would be easier to just passively consume it. You might even enjoy the process without ever learning anything. Instead, whenever you feel it, set a timer for 25 minutes. Agree to wrestle with the battery chemistry, the Python error, or the empty page. Just for that short time span.

There is no dopamine hit waiting on the other side of boredom like you get from passive consumption. Instead, the focus, the struggle, the sustained attention, that's the process of learning. The gatekeeper ensures only those willing to engage in the hard, quiet work of thinking get to the good stuff.

I did not become a battery expert over the holidays. But at least I learned to recognize the gatekeeper's face. Now, when I feel that familiar, restless boredom descend as I'm trying to learn something hard, I smile a little. I know I'm at the threshold. And instead of turning back, I take a deep breath, set my timer to 25 minutes, and I power through the gate.

---