Staying on the Bus
In chapter 11 of Four Thousand Weeks, titled 'Staying on the Bus,' Burkeman reframes patience as an active effort rather than passive submission to circumstance. 'Staying on the Bus' refers to a metaphor borrowed from the Finnish-American photographer Arno Minkkinen who used the Helsinki bus station to explain how originality only emerges through preseverence. At first, every bus starts from the same station, follows the same routes, and makes the same stops. In this phase, it doesn't seem like you're going anywhere new. It isn't until later that their paths diverge into their own distinct routes.
Burkeman uses this illustration to show how easy it is to abandon a project before it has time to develop its own unique signature. Whenever pursuing a new goal, the strongest impulse tends to be to abandon the route as soon as the excitement fades and the work becomes ordinary. Patience, in Burkeman's view, is the willingness to stay with something past the initial monotony. This is what gives rise to originality. Otherwise, you go back to the same station and try a new bus just to find that it begins the same way.
The Pain of Attention
But patience isn't just staying on that metaphorical bus accepting your seat. It requires what Burkeman calls "muscular attention" - a deliberate, effortful engagement. To show what this looks like in practice, he turns to art historian Jennifer Roberts and her "three-hour looking assigment." In her classes, students are asked to choose a single painting and simply sit with it for a full three hours without any distractions whatsoever (aside from using the bathroom). The point isn't to become an expert on the artwork but to slow down her students' attention to the tempo of the art.
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| A Cotton Office in New Orleans - Edgar Degas |
Burkeman attempts the assignment himself using a painting called "A Cotton Office in New Orleans" by Edgar Degas (above). He explains how the difficulty sets in almost immediately. Within minutes, the mind starts pushing back. He notices the impulse to speed things up, to scan the painting instead of truly looking at it, or to jump ahead to some imagined conclusion just to feel a sense of progress. The longer he sits, the more he becomes aware of the more subtle layers of resistance: the thought loops, the restless desire for stimulation, and a feeling that the moment is being "wasted" if it isn't productive or exciting.
As Burkeman keeps sitting with the painting, a shift in his perception starts to occur. The initial irritation fades and his attention begins to settle into a different rhythm. Once the urge to escape starts to dissolve, he notices aspects of the artwork that were invisble at first glance, such as the subtle direction of one figure's gaze, the uneven thickness of a brushstroke, and the way the light falls across a pile of cotton. Details that were once dismissed began to standout with a new clarity. He no longer felt trapped in the assignment, but rather drawn to the painter's world. The longer he remained, the more rewarding the experience became. Burkeman realizes that this depth of perception only emerges after the discomfort of boredom has been endured long enough for focus to recalibrate.
What Boredom Really Is
But this turning point raises a larger question: why is it so hard to reach this stage in the first place? During my presentation, I asked the class if they think that, when faced with boredom, the urge to immediately do something else is a natural impulse or a product of the fast-paced environment that we live in. The answers were mixed due to the inherent difficulty of finding objective causation from a subjective standpoint but I remember seeing a VSauce video years ago that discusses this very topic.
According to Michael Stevens, humans have been describing boredom-like states for centuries, long before smartphones, social media, or even industrialization. Ancient writers used terms like "acedia" to describe a restless dissatisfaction that seems nearly identical to what we experience today. This suggests that boredom is rooted in our biology rather than in any particular era. Stevens explains how boredom appears to be an evolved signal intended to nudge us away from situations where our attention is no longer rewarded. When the brain predicts that nothing important is going to happen, dopamine levels dip, and attention begins to drift. This drop is what creates the uncomfortable sensation we label as "boredom."
He also points out how boredom is tied to our evolutionary need for novelty. Early humans benefitted from seeking out new environments, opportunities, and resources, so our brains evolved to reward new stimuli and punish monotony. Our attention system was never designed to remain fixed on one static object for extended periods, which helps explain why Robert's three-hour looking assigment feels nearly impossible at first. The mind interprets the lack of change as a sign that there is nothing to gain, and it pushes us to move on.
A Society That Can't Sit Still
But, even if boredom is rooted in biology, it's difficult to ignore how modern life intensifies it. If boredom evolved as a signal to seek novelty, then a world filled with instant entertainment pushes that signal into overdrive. Our devices satisfy the craving for something new so quickly that slower experiences feel almost unbearable by comparison. A society unable to tolerate boredom becomes a society unable to tolerate the early, unglamorous stages of learning, creativity, or personal growth. If attention is a muscle, our culture has conditioned it for speed rather than endurance. The challenge, then, is not to eliminate the boredom but to learn how to embrace it. Whether this can happen collectively or only through individual effort isn't clear. But without some willingness to tolerate stillness, our capacity for depth, patience, and sustained meaning collapses, and we risk eroding the foundations for shared life.
"Boredom is the steak knife that trims the fat from our lives."
~Michael Stevens
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