“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
— Søren Kierkegaard
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Bored Enough to Find Your Why
Some of the best conversations my wife, Rebecca, and I have are the ones where neither of us says a word. (Insert any joke here.)
We’ll take the side-by-side out on the trails around the cabin and disappear into the woods for an hour, winding along dirt paths with trees and water on both sides and whatever wildlife decides to cross in front of us. There isn’t much talking. For long stretches it’s the hum of the engine, gravel under the tires, the scenery going by, and our Boston Terrier between us.
And yet those rides produce so much. An idea for something I want to write. A question about work I didn’t know I was struggling with. A realization about one of the kids. Something one of us has been chewing on for weeks suddenly looks different, and eventually somebody breaks the silence with a thought that seems to have come from nowhere.
Except maybe it didn’t come from nowhere. Maybe it came from the quiet. The absence of noise from a world of distractions finally allowed something to break loose inside our heads, and I worry these moments aren’t happening enough for all of us anymore.
We’ve gotten really good at eliminating empty moments. The line at the store, the wait before a meeting, the red light, the walk across the parking lot. Now these moments come with a phone in hand or earbuds in. What used to be thirty seconds of staring out a window can be filled instantly, and our kids might not have ever known it any other way. Nearly half of American teens—46 percent—say they’re online almost constantly, and nearly all of them are online every day. Think about this: when’s the last time you used or heard the word “daydreaming”?
I’m not here to throw rocks at technology. It’s given us remarkable tools and I use them every day. But I also understand these tools change something, and one thing they’ve changed is our relationship with boredom. We no longer have to tolerate it. I think that might be costing us more than we notice.
Arthur Brooks makes a distinction I love—the difference between problems that are complicated and problems that are complex. Complicated problems can be brutally hard, but they can be solved. Building a jet engine, writing code, designing a bridge, finding the fastest way across town—given enough information and processing power, you can get to a solution. Our devices are really good at the complicated.
But the biggest questions in life aren’t complicated. They’re complex. Who am I becoming? What’s worth sacrificing for? Why am I doing what I’m doing, and why does any of it matter? They aren’t problems you solve and check off, they are questions you live with.
Brooks ties this to how the brain works, and the science is messier than our old “left brain, right brain” understanding. But the larger point holds. When the outside world quiets down, our brain gets to work on the inward journey—remembering where we’ve been, imagining where we’re going, turning our experiences into a story that makes sense. Sometimes when we look like we’re doing nothing, our brains are doing their most important work. Maybe we don’t stop listening to the outside world’s distractions long enough to hear what’s happening on the inside.
Researchers Frank Martela and Michael Steger describe meaning through three pieces: coherence, purpose, and significance. I think of them as life’s three big why questions.
Coherence is the “why has my life unfolded the way it has” question. It’s whether we can make sense of our own story, connect the pieces, understand where we’ve been and how it shaped us. It doesn’t mean pretending everything happens for a reason; some things will never fully make sense. It just means being able to read your own life.
Purpose is the “why am I doing what I’m doing” question, and it points somewhere—why I coach, why I lead, why this work, this goal, today. Purpose turns motion into direction.
Significance is the “why does my life matter” question, which has nothing to do with fame or followers or your name on a building. It’s the quiet belief that your being here matters, that somebody is better off because you showed up. Coherence helps us understand the story, purpose gives it direction, and significance says the story was worth telling.
We’ve swapped searching for searching online. The moment any uncertainty shows up, we reach into a pocket—Google it, ask AI, scroll until something catches. We have more answers at hand than any generation in history. But the most important questions still don’t come with a search bar, and no algorithm will tell you why you’re here.
Viktor Frankl spent his life exploring meaning after surviving what none of us can really imagine in Nazi death camps. He came out convinced that meaning is one of our deepest human needs—that people endured the unendurable when they still had something, or someone, to live for. Man’s Search for Meaning lands on a takeaway I firmly subscribe to: know your why. I still believe it completely. But maybe there’s a step that comes before finding your why. You have to make enough quiet to hear it. Frankl lived in a world with unimaginable suffering. We may be living in one with too much stimulation. Wildly different problems—but both come down to the same question. Can we still hear the deeper voice with everything else shouting for our attention?
This is important for those of us raising, teaching, coaching, and leading kids. We pour enormous energy into getting them ready for the complicated problems—learn the formula, master the app, study for the test, make the team, build the résumé. Are we preparing them for the questions no textbook or coach or parent or algorithm can answer: who they are, what they’re for, who needs what they’ve got, what’s worth giving a life to? If we help them fill every empty minute, when exactly will they wrestle with any of that?
Maybe part of the job is resisting our own instinct to fill the silence. Coaches are bad at this—I know I am. We ask a question and answer it ourselves two seconds later because the quiet feels like something broke. But the quiet isn’t the problem. Ask the question and let it sit. Let the ride home after a tough loss be quiet instead of a lecture. Leave the earbuds out on the walk. Put the phones away at dinner. Sit on the dock and look at the water.
Remaining practical, I don’t want to romanticize boredom. Chronic boredom isn’t good for us, and the research actually ties it to lower well-being and a weaker sense of meaning. But quiet and boredom aren’t the same thing. What we’re after are the moments when nothing is grabbing at our attention—room for our own thoughts and questions to surface.
That’s probably why Rebecca and I love those rides so much. The woods don’t tell us what to think. Nothing out there needs answering or optimizing or completing. For a while we’re not taking anything in—we’re just riding and looking and wondering, and somewhere between the trees and the trail our minds drift toward the things that actually matter. Meaning lives in the quiet we’ve gotten so good at avoiding.
And even in the quiet, you might not land on all the answers. I haven't, and I've been at this a while. But you'd better be looking. So protect the quiet, keep after the questions, and don't ever stop looking.
“Live the questions now.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Connecting this quote to the story. Meaning isn’t something we need to solve immediately, but something we discover by creating enough quiet to wrestle with life’s biggest questions and keep growing into their answers.
This week’s Chasing Influence tip: If you want people to find their why, give them enough quiet to hear it.