When I was younger, boredom was a physical place. It was a heavy, endless Tuesday afternoon in the school holidays, where the hours stretched out like warm tar. I remember the exact texture of the carpet in my childhood living room because I spent a cumulative three weeks of my life lying face down on it, staring at the skirting boards, waiting for something—anything—to happen. There was a distinct, itchy discomfort to it, but looking back, it was a space where things grew. It was the friction that forced you to make up a bizarre game with a tennis ball, draft a terrible story in a notebook, or notice the dust motes dancing in a shaft of sunlight.
Now, we have effectively outlawed the empty space.
If there is a five-second gap in my day, I fill it. If I am waiting for the kettle to boil, I check my emails. If I am riding a lift, I scroll a feed. I listen to podcasts while brushing my teeth, play audiobooks while washing the dishes, and have a YouTube video running in the background while I attempt to decide what to cook for dinner. We have become so aggressively, desperately occupied that the mere threat of an unmapped minute feels like a personal failure.
The problem is that this constant stream of input is incredibly comfortable. It’s an intellectual weighted blanket. By keeping our minds perpetually occupied, we never have to face the slightly unsettling quiet of our own thoughts. We don’t have to wonder why we feel a bit anxious, or remember that awkward thing we said in 2018, or contemplate the vast, silent fragility of existence. We can just tap a screen and let someone else’s voice drown out the hum.
But I think we are paying a quiet, heavy price for this convenience.
When you never let your mind wander, you never give it a chance to arrive anywhere unexpected. Boredom used to be the catalyst for creativity, the moment where the brain, left to its own devices, started connecting random dots. Now, we don’t allow the dots to be random; we curate them with algorithmic precision. We are consuming so much of other people’s thoughts that we’ve run out of room to generate our own.
I noticed this recently when my phone battery died and I was without a charger. My initial reaction wasn't peaceful resignation; it was mild, bubbling panic. I sat on the wooden bench and realised I had absolutely no idea what to do with my eyes. I couldn't look at the other people around me because that felt intrusive, so I looked at the floor. I looked at the pigeons fighting over a discarded pastry. I looked at the way the afternoon light hit the brickwork of my surroundings.
It felt incredibly awkward at first. My brain was practically itching for a notification, a headline, a bit of trivia—anything to rescue it from the agonising reality of just sitting there.
But after ten minutes, the itch subsided, and something else took its place. A quietness. A slow, steady settling of the dust. I started observing the world around me not as a backdrop to my digital life, but as the actual main event.
I watched an elderly man struggle to open a packet of mints, his fingers moving with a deliberate, frustrating slowness that would have driven my digital brain mad, but was actually deeply human to witness. I noticed how beautiful the weathered green paint on the building pillars was, chipping away in layers like history. I actually felt present in my own body, rather than hovering three inches above it in a cloud of digital noise.
Maybe the goal isn't to throw our phones into the nearest canal and retreat to a cabin in the woods. That feels a bit dramatic, and frankly, I like my group chats and my curated playlists far too much.
But perhaps we need to learn how to tolerate the itch again. To let the kettle boil in silence, or walk to the corner shop without an earbud in. It will probably feel uncomfortable. It might even feel a little bit concerning. But I’m looking at my phone battery right now—currently sitting at a perfectly optimised eighty-four per cent—and for the first time in my life, I am actively rooting for it to die.