For about six months I have been trying, in a quiet and slightly experimental way, to be bored more often. Not bored in the depressive sense. Bored in the older sense — the kind of empty-handed, slightly restless attention you used to have when you were waiting for a kettle to boil, or for a friend who was running late, or for the bus, in the years before any of us had a phone.
Boredom, as a texture of ordinary time, has more or less disappeared from my life. I think it has disappeared from most lives. Not because we've cured it, but because we've insulated against it so completely that the gaps where it used to live no longer exist. The five-minute wait at the dentist's office. The walk from one room to another. The first quiet stretch of a long train ride. All of those used to contain a small amount of unfilled attention. They don't, now, unless I deliberately make them.
I am trying to make some of them, again. It is harder than I expected. It is also, I think, more important than I'd been willing to admit.
The reason I started
I noticed, sometime last summer, that I had not had a thought in a while. Not no thoughts at all — I'd been thinking about deadlines, groceries, what to do about a friend's birthday. I mean a particular kind of thought. The kind that arrives unbidden, that wasn't a response to a question, that doesn't have a clear cause. The kind of thought that used to come to me in the shower or in line at the post office, the kind I'd written entire essays starting from. Those thoughts had thinned out, and then they'd more or less stopped.
It took me a while to connect this to the phone. I was, technically, a "moderate" user. I didn't scroll for hours. I didn't have most social apps. But I had filled, with screens, every interstitial moment in my day. The shower was the only place that didn't have a screen in it, and that's exactly where I noticed the thinking still happening, in the small remaining preserve.
I realized I had stopped being bored. And in stopping being bored, I had stopped having a particular kind of thought that boredom had been generating, all those years, behind my back.
What boredom actually is
Boredom is not the absence of stimulation. Boredom is the presence of attention without an object. You are awake, you are looking, but nothing in front of you is asking for the looking. The mind, which has nowhere external to land, lands inside.
What it finds in there, given a few minutes of unstructured time, is whatever has been queued up in the background. A small worry you've been ignoring. A half-formed sentence from a conversation last week. The plot of the book you're reading, suddenly making more sense than it did. An idea about a project you weren't even sure you were still working on.
This is, I think, the actual cost of phones in interstitial time. Not the wasted minutes, exactly — there were always wasted minutes. The cost is that the queue never gets processed. The mind never gets the unstructured fifteen seconds in which the queued-up thought finally surfaces. Instead, every time it would have surfaced, you reach for the screen, and you fill the queue with someone else's thoughts instead.
Boredom is not the absence of stimulation. Boredom is the presence of attention without an object. The mind, which has nowhere external to land, lands inside.
How I'm practicing it, badly
I am not very good at this yet. I want to be honest about that. I have been at it for about six months, and the urge to fill any gap of more than maybe ninety seconds is still very, very loud.
What I do, in practice, is something like this. When I'm waiting for something — water to boil, a download, a person who is late — I leave my phone wherever it is, and I just stand there. Or sit there. Or look out the window, if there's a window. The first thirty seconds are uncomfortable in a way I'd forgotten was possible. There's a small itch, a sense of something I should be checking, and a low frustration that it's not being checked.
Around forty-five seconds the itch starts to settle. Around a minute, it's mostly gone, replaced by a kind of attention that doesn't quite have a target. Around two minutes — sometimes three or four — a thought arrives. Almost always one I'd been keeping at arm's length without realizing it.
I wrote four essays this autumn that started in those two-minute gaps. I wouldn't have had any of them otherwise.
What this isn't
I am not arguing that screens are bad. I'm not arguing for a digital detox. I'm not arguing that everyone needs to relearn boredom or that something has been lost from civilization. The cultural-criticism version of this essay is a little tired, and I don't fully trust it.
What I am arguing is much smaller and more personal. There is a particular cognitive function — call it idling, call it daydreaming, call it the mind's background thread — that requires unstructured time to operate. If you fill all of your unstructured time, that function stops running. You can live like that. Most people now do. But you lose access to a category of thought you used to have without trying.
For me, the cost of that loss became visible only after I'd been losing it for years. Getting it back is slow, and not glamorous, and a lot of the practice consists of being mildly uncomfortable in line at the grocery store. But the thoughts have started coming back, in their old, unbidden way. That seems worth a little discomfort in a queue.
A few small permissions
I'll try to keep this from sounding like a method. It isn't one. But:
- You don't have to be bored all day. Five or ten minutes, scattered through the day, is a lot.
- Boredom on a walk is the easiest version. Walking with no podcast, no music, no nothing — even just for fifteen minutes — gives you most of the benefit, in my experience, of much harder forms of stillness.
- You will not, immediately, have brilliant thoughts. The first week or two of letting yourself be bored, your mind will mostly run inventories of small anxieties. This passes. The interesting stuff comes later.
- The phone-being-elsewhere matters more than the phone-being-not-checked. If the phone is in your hand, your hand will eventually solve the problem on its behalf.
What I keep noticing is that boredom, the way I'm using the word, isn't unpleasant once you've sat in it for a few minutes. It's neutral, and then it's a kind of soft attention, and then sometimes, on a good day, it's the best thinking I do all week. I had forgotten that. I think a lot of us have. It's quietly worth getting back.