Ever felt something similar? Pack up, walk out of the house and forget to tell anybody. Leave the phone plugged into a charger, in one of the rooms upstairs. Take a deep breath, the first step, then the second step and let the road lead me somewhere new, somewhere else.

Sounds tempting, right? But also very impractical.

So I compromised. If I can’t really disappear for good, I will disappear for a little bit at a time.

Last Saturday I put my laptop away, switched my phone off and decided to stay away from both until Monday.

Sunday was slow. Meditation. A long walk in a local park. Coffee at a new-for-me roasters. Cooking. Journalling. Reviewing January goals, setting February ones. And reading. I read 200 pages of Sociopath and noticed that I didn’t remember the last time I was able to read more than 25 pages in a day.

More or less at six o’clock I felt bored. I welcomed this feeling.

The social scientist and happiness expert, Arthur Brooks, mentioned in one of his interviews, how humans experience a hunger for meaning because we don’t get bored often enough.

"The truth of the matter is that if a lot of people would be bored right now doing some other thing like working out or walking or driving, and that would actually be really, really good for their brains. So the first thing that I recommend to people who have a sense of pointlessness in their life is not move to Ireland, which some people will do. It's like I need a big change or break up with their beloved or just go quit their job, is they need to start being bored more and more systematically."

It looks like I can’t just disappear but also that I don’t really need or want to. All I need is a bit more boredom. From now on, I challenge myself to screen-free Sundays.

Whatever you’re doing today, I hope you get bored.