Dear Younger Me: Get Bored More Often by Khushi

Dear Younger Me: Get Bored More Often by Khushi - July 2025 Scholarship Essay

If I could give my past self one piece of advice, it would be this: get bored more often.

Yes, you read that right. Boredom—the dreaded, yawning stretch of time where nothing “productive” happens. The moments you used to fill with background noise, endless scrolling, and multitasking. The pauses you thought you had to escape. That boredom? Lean into it.

You see, I used to treat boredom like failure. If I wasn’t doing something impressive, useful, or educational, I thought I was wasting time. I lived in a loop of constant stimulation—chasing productivity in the morning, cramming in content at night. Podcasts while walking. Videos while eating. Notifications while thinking. There was always something buzzing, dinging, loading.

But here’s what I didn’t realize until much later: boredom is not the enemy—it is a door.

Some of my most surprising thoughts, ideas, and turning points didn’t happen during tightly scheduled hours or frenzied note-taking. They happened in silence. In the blank spaces. In walks without AirPods. In those moments when my mind wandered far enough away from the noise to actually hear itself.

When I finally gave myself permission to be still, strange things happened. I wrote the first sentence of an essay I did not know I wanted to write. I solved a problem in my project not by Googling, but by staring at the ceiling for twenty minutes. I remembered things—important things—like why I started chasing certain goals in the first place.

My younger self would have scoffed. “Be bored? What good does that do?”

But now I know: Boredom is not emptiness. It is potential.

It is where creativity tiptoes in without asking for a schedule. It’s where your brain decompresses, rewires, and starts making connections it never had time to notice. It’s where you discover not just what you can do, but what you want to do, when no one’s watching.

If I could speak to my past self, I’d say: Stop trying to fill every silence. Let the silence talk back.

Don’t rush to escape the blank page. Stare at it. Get uncomfortable. Get bored. That’s where something original begins.

The world will always push you to stay busy. But growth doesn’t always look like movement. Sometimes it looks like a pause.

So yes, younger me get bored. Not all the time, but often enough to hear your own mind before the world tells it what to think.

Because in those moments of nothing, you’ll find the beginning of everything that matters.