Thoughts

We’ve built a world where boredom is increasingly difficult to experience.

There’s always something. A notification. A podcast. A message. A game. A feed. A video chosen specifically because an algorithm thinks we won’t be able to resist watching it.

Even the tiny gaps have been filled.

Waiting for a bus. Sitting on the toilet. Standing in a queue. Walking somewhere alone. Waiting for someone to arrive. Ten minutes before a meeting.

These used to be moments in which, quite literally, nothing happened.

Now we reach for our phones.

And I wonder whether we’ve underestimated what was happening when nothing was happening.

Boredom Was Doing Something

Boredom has a terrible reputation.

We associate it with wasted time, laziness and a lack of imagination. Being bored feels like a problem that needs solving.

But boredom isn’t really an activity. It’s a state created by the absence of activity.

And that absence leaves your brain with somewhere to go.

You stare out of a window. You replay a conversation. You notice something. You have a stupid idea. The stupid idea turns into an interesting idea. You remember something you meant to do. You think through a problem without consciously deciding to think about it.

Your mind wanders.

That phrase itself is interesting: mind wandering. We talk about it as though the mind has wandered away from where it’s supposed to be.

Maybe wandering is sometimes exactly what it’s supposed to be doing.

Then We Eliminated the Gaps

The smartphone didn’t invent distraction.

We had television, magazines, newspapers, radio, Game Boys, Walkmans and plenty of other ways of avoiding our own thoughts.

But there was friction.

You couldn’t carry an effectively infinite amount of entertainment in your pocket, personalised to your interests and refreshed every few seconds.

That changed something fundamental.

We haven’t simply gained another form of entertainment. We’ve created a way to immediately terminate boredom whenever it begins.

Feel the slightest discomfort?

Phone.

And because the reward is immediate, the behaviour becomes almost automatic. Sometimes I find myself holding my phone without remembering making a decision to pick it up.

The gaps disappear.

And Then Mindfulness Arrived

At roughly the same time that our lives became saturated with digital stimulation, Western culture became fascinated with mindfulness.

Meditation apps appeared. Companies introduced mindfulness programmes. Podcasts told us to be present. We bought books about slowing down.

For a while, mindfulness seemed to be everywhere.

Which creates an interesting contradiction.

We constructed an environment that made it extraordinarily difficult to sit quietly with our own thoughts — and then created an entire industry teaching us how to sit quietly with our own thoughts.

Perhaps those things aren’t unrelated.

Mindfulness is obviously much older than the smartphone, and its traditions run vastly deeper than the modern wellness industry. But its extraordinary mainstream appeal may say something about the environment in which we suddenly found ourselves.

We were trying to deliberately recreate a mental state that everyday life used to give us accidentally.

Mindfulness Seems Quieter Now

There’s another part of this that interests me.

We don’t seem to talk about mindfulness quite as much anymore.

It hasn’t disappeared. Meditation apps still exist, people still practise it, and mindfulness has become embedded in therapy, workplaces and wellbeing culture.

But the cultural moment feels like it has passed.

For a while, mindfulness was almost unavoidable. Now the conversation has moved towards digital detoxes, dopamine, screen time, attention spans and increasingly extreme attempts to disconnect.

Maybe mindfulness didn’t solve the underlying problem.

Because meditation asks us to carve twenty minutes of stillness out of a day that we’ve otherwise engineered to eliminate it.

Perhaps we don’t only need more intentional stillness.

Perhaps we need more unintentional nothing.

You Don’t Have to Optimise Boredom

There’s an obvious danger here.

The moment we decide boredom is beneficial, we’ll inevitably try to optimise it.

Someone will develop a boredom routine.

Ten minutes of evidence-based boredom before breakfast. A subscription service will track your boredom streak. Your watch will congratulate you.

Which rather misses the point.

Boredom doesn’t need to become another item on the list of things we’re supposed to be doing correctly.

It might be enough simply to stop eliminating it every time it appears.

Don’t take the phone to the toilet.

Wait for the bus without headphones occasionally.

Leave the phone in your pocket when someone you’re meeting is five minutes late.

Sit in the garden without deciding what you’re going to do there.

Look out of a train window.

These aren’t mindfulness exercises.

They’re barely exercises at all.

Let Your Brain Get Bored

I don’t think phones are evil. I don’t want to give mine up, and I’m certainly not going to stop consuming ridiculous amounts of information.

But I’m becoming suspicious of the assumption that every empty moment needs filling.

There was something useful hidden inside all those boring journeys, waiting rooms, Sunday afternoons and stretches of nothing much happening.

We removed them because we could.

And then, perhaps, we started noticing that something was missing.

Maybe we don’t need another technique for being present.

Maybe, occasionally, we just need to be bored.