Can you try to remember the last time you were bored? Not the kind of bored where you pull out your phone. Not the kind where you put on a podcast while you wash dishes. But the real form of boredom. The kind where you were sitting somewhere with nothing to do and no screen to fill the silence, and time moved the way it used to — slowly, strangely, almost geologically.
Currently, it is increasingly difficult to access that state. And we may be paying a cost we don’t fully understand, yet.
In 2024, the average American spent more than seven hours a day looking at a screen. For adults under thirty-five, that number is higher. The content available to fill those hours is, by any historical measure, incomprehensible in its volume and variety. On any given afternoon, a person with a smartphone has access to more music, film, conversation, games, news, social interaction, and random information than any human being who has ever lived.
The era of genuine, enforced boredom, the kind that used to descend during long car rides, waiting rooms, quiet Sunday afternoons, is essentially over.
This is framed, almost universally, as progress.
But psychologists who study creativity, cognition, and mental health are raising a different question: what are we losing when we lose boredom?
What Boredom Actually Does
There is a long history of great things being born in boredom. Newton was watching the apple fall. Darwin on the Beagle with weeks of empty ocean around him. Archimedes in the bath.
Against contrary beliefs, an average human brain is not necessarily idle; it is working.
Neuroscience has given us a better understanding of why. The default mode network is a set of brain regions that activate when we are not focused on any specific external task, and is usually associated with some of the most sophisticated cognitive processes humans engage in: self-reflection, imagination, perspective-taking, and the construction of narrative meaning. When we are bored, the default mode network lights up. We daydream. We make unexpected connections. We process emotional experiences that we have been too busy to integrate. We, in a literal neurological sense, become more ourselves.
Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman, researchers at the University of Central Lancashire, conducted studies in which participants were made to perform boring tasks like copying phone numbers from a directory, for instance, before attempting creative tasks. The bored participants consistently outperformed the non-bored control groups. The monotony, it appeared, was doing something productive in the background, loosening up associative thinking and opening channels that more stimulating conditions had kept closed.
Attention as a Moral Category
There is a philosophical argument lurking underneath the cognitive science. The writer and philosopher Simone Weil wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Iris Murdoch, in her moral philosophy, argued that the capacity to pay sustained, non-self-interested attention to something outside yourself – to really see a person, an idea, a work of art is the foundation of ethical life. Attention is not just a cognitive resource. It is a relational one.
When attention is fragmented, when the nervous system is trained to expect stimulation at intervals of seconds rather than minutes, the capacity for the kind of deep, patient, generous attention Weil and Murdoch wrote about is genuinely compromised. The implications extend beyond creativity and productivity. They extend into relationships, into civic life, into the basic human capacity to sit with something difficult long enough to understand it.
We are in the early stages of understanding what it means to be the first species in history to have outsourced the management of our own mental states to commercial technology. The honest answer is that we do not yet fully know what we are losing. But the boredom data is a clue.
In Praise of the Empty Afternoon
This is not a call to smash your phone. It is a call for something more modest and more difficult: the deliberate cultivation of empty time. Not productive empty time, not mindfulness practice with an app guiding you through it, but genuinely unstructured, unprogrammed, purposeless time. The time during which you are allowed to be bored.
In Philadelphia, there are still places that invite this: the long benches of the Reading Terminal Market on a slow afternoon, the banks of the Schuylkill, a window seat at a coffee shop with no obligation to produce anything. The practice of simply being somewhere, without reaching for stimulation, is increasingly countercultural. It is also, the science suggests, deeply necessary.
Creativity needs silence to incubate. The self needs stillness to cohere. And the mind, given even a brief reprieve from the constant incoming fire of content, will often do something remarkable: it will wander back to what actually matters. Boredom is not a problem to be solved. It is a doorway. We keep bricking it up and then wondering why we feel so stuck.
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