Nobody is bored anymore. This is a genuinely new development in human history, and we haven’t thought carefully enough about what it means.
For most of human existence, boredom was a regular visitor. The agricultural pause between planting and harvest. The long winter evenings before electric light. The wait — for the wagon, the letter, the weather to turn. This unstructured time was uncomfortable and also, it turns out, generative in ways we are only beginning to understand.
What Boredom Does
Neuroscience research on the “default mode network” — the brain’s activity during wakeful rest, mind-wandering, and boredom — reveals something striking: this is not downtime in the sense of reduced activity. The brain is highly active during boredom, just differently active. It’s processing, consolidating, making connections across different domains of experience.
The cognitive scientist Sandi Mann, who has studied boredom extensively, found that people generate more creative ideas after doing a boring task than after doing an engaging one. The boring task seems to loosen the mind from its current preoccupations and allow it to wander — and the wandering mind is, it turns out, a connecting mind.
The Replacement
We have replaced boredom with stimulation. The smartphone is the primary instrument of this replacement, but it didn’t start there — television, radio, the penny press all served similar functions. What’s different now is the ubiquity and the efficiency. There is no moment, no matter how brief, that cannot be filled with content. Waiting for the elevator: content. Sitting at a red light: content. Lying in bed before sleep: content.
In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone. — Rollo May
I’m not making a sentimental argument for discomfort. Boredom is genuinely unpleasant. The mind resists it. What I’m suggesting is that this resistance, and the discomfort we’re trying to escape, might be serving a function — might be the sensation of the mind preparing to do something it can’t do while occupied.
Build some boredom into your life. Not the passive boredom of scrolling — that’s stimulation wearing boredom’s clothes. I mean the genuine article: sitting without input, walking without a podcast, waiting without reaching for the phone. See what your mind does when you stop managing it so tightly. The results may surprise you.
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