The Case for Boredom

The waiting room used to be a place where nothing happened. You sat. You waited. If you had brought a magazine, you read it; if not, you looked at the wall, or out the window, or at the other people looking at the wall. The mind wandered. You thought about things you had not meant to think about.

Now the waiting room is a place where you check your phone. The gap has been filled. The nothing has been replaced with something — usually something low-grade, a scroll through content you will not remember, a quick survey of messages that can wait. We have made boredom nearly impossible to achieve, and we have not noticed what we lost when we did.

What boredom does

Psychologists who study mind-wandering — the mental state that boredom produces — have found that it is associated with a distinctive pattern of neural activity called the default mode network. This network is active when you are not focused on an external task. For a long time, researchers assumed this meant it was idle. It is not.

The default mode network is associated with self-reflection, future planning, and creative insight. The shower thought — the sudden solution that arrives when you are not trying to solve anything — is the default mode network at work. So is the moment when you understand how you feel about something you have been confused about for weeks. Boredom is not empty time. It is time the mind uses in ways that focused attention cannot.

The cost of constant engagement

There is a growing body of evidence that chronic over-stimulation impairs this capacity.
People who spend more time on their phones report lower rates of creative ideation. Children given unstructured time perform better on measures of creative thinking than children whose time is fully scheduled. The correlation is not perfectly understood, but the direction is consistent.

We have built an attention economy that profits from filling every gap. The business model of most social platforms is predicated on colonizing the moments that used to be empty — the commute, the queue, the few minutes before sleep. They are very good at it. The gaps are almost gone.

A defense of emptiness

• I am not arguing for boredom as suffering. Boredom that goes on too long, that is inescapable, is miserable, and there is nothing romantic about it. What I am arguing for is the briefer, more ordinary kind — the five minutes in the waiting room, the walk without headphones, the dinner where you are not also looking at something else.

These small pockets of emptiness are not wasted time. They are the conditions under which the mind does some of its most important work. We gave them up gradually and without much thought. It may be worth asking what we got in return, and whether the trade was worth it.