You know the moment. You're waiting for the kettle, or the elevator, or a page to load, or a friend who's running late. There's a gap — thirty seconds, maybe three — of nothing to do.
And your hand is in your pocket before you've even decided to reach for it.
Not because you need anything. There's no message you're waiting on, nothing urgent. It's closer to a flinch — a small, automatic recoil from the empty moment, like the quiet is something to be escaped rather than simply stood in. I do it constantly. I'd guess you do too.
Here's what caught me up short recently: I tried to remember the last time I was genuinely bored. Not "between tasks," not "scrolling because I'm avoiding something" — actually bored. No screen, no input, no stream of someone else's thoughts pouring into mine. Just me, and an unfilled stretch of time, and nothing to fill it with.
I couldn't remember. It might have been years.
And for most of my life, I'd have called that a win. Boredom was the enemy, right? The thing to be solved, optimized away, never tolerated. We finally killed it. We have, in our pockets, an infinite supply of things to never be bored with again.
I'm starting to think we lost something, and I didn't notice it leaving.
Boredom was never empty
Here's the reframe that's been sitting with me. I always thought of boredom as empty time — dead air, wasted minutes, the absence of anything happening.
But that's not what it was. Boredom was the one mode where your mind got to wander with no destination. Where it drifted, made odd connections, chewed on things in the background, daydreamed its way into ideas you weren't trying to have. It looked like nothing was happening. Underneath, a lot was.
Think about where your actual good ideas come from. Not the ones you grind out at a desk — the real ones, the ones that arrive sideways. They come in the shower. On a walk with no podcast. Staring out a train window. In the drifting minutes before sleep. "Shower thought" is a cliché precisely because it's true: insight shows up in the gaps, not in the grind. The gaps were when your brain finally had room to connect the dots it had been quietly collecting all day.
Boredom was the soil those ideas grew in. We just called it wasted time, because it didn't look productive — and so, the moment we had a way to eliminate it, we did.
We filled every gap, and barely noticed
What's strange is that nobody chose this. There was no moment where you decided, "I will never again sit in an empty minute." It just happened, gradually, one filled gap at a time.
The commute got filled. The waiting room got filled. The queue at the shop, the ad break, the walk from the car, the thirty seconds for the kettle — all of it, filled. There is now no idle moment in a normal day that has to stay idle, because there's always something within reach to pour into it. And because the filler is so good — endlessly novel, perfectly tuned — the reaching became automatic. You don't decide to fill the gap. The gap appears and the hand moves.
It got paved over so quietly that the loss never registered as a loss. You don't miss the shower thoughts you didn't have. You don't notice the ideas that didn't connect because the dots never got their idle time together. The mental space didn't get taken from you in some dramatic way you'd resent. It got nibbled, a moment at a time, until there was none left and you'd forgotten it was ever there.
And now there's a new filler, and it's the most seductive one yet
The feed was one thing. At least with a feed you still had to do a little of the work — scroll, choose, react, think something.
But there's a newer gap we've started filling, and it's a quieter, deeper one: not knowing.
You used to be allowed to not know things for a while. You'd hit a question and have to sit with it — turn it over on the walk home, stay puzzled through dinner, wake up still chewing on it. That unresolved state was uncomfortable, and it was also doing something. Sitting with a question is how you actually think about it. The puzzlement was the processing.
Now the answer is instant. You wonder something, you ask, it's there. Which is genuinely wonderful, and I use it all day. But it means the puzzlement never gets to happen anymore. The question and the answer have collapsed into the same second, and the thinking that used to live in the space between them has nowhere to occur.
And I notice this is the same shape as something I wrote about before — the way the struggle of solving a hard problem yourself was where the satisfaction lived, and removing the struggle quietly removed the joy. This is the twin of that. First we optimized away the friction of struggling. Now we're optimizing away the friction of not knowing, and of being unoccupied. We keep finding the uncomfortable mental states and smoothing them out — and it keeps turning out that the discomfort was load-bearing. The friction was where the good stuff lived.
What I think we actually lost
It's easy to make this about "attention spans," but I don't think that's quite it, and that framing lets us off too easy. The loss is more specific, and more human.
We lost the ideas that only come in the gaps. If there's never an unfilled moment, there's never a shower thought. We may be quietly starving our own creativity — not because we got less creative, but because creativity needs idle, undirected time to do its work, and we deleted the idle time.
We lost being alone with our own minds. Boredom used to force a kind of self-contact — your own unmediated thoughts, with nothing in between. Fill every gap and you can get through an entire day without once being truly alone with your mind. There's a strange new loneliness in that: never lonely, because never without input, and also never actually with yourself.
We lost our tolerance for discomfort. The flinch toward the phone in the empty three seconds is really a shrinking ability to sit in any unstructured, uncomfortable moment. And that tolerance was quietly holding up a lot of other things — patience, deep focus, the capacity to stay with a hard problem long enough to crack it. You can't do deep work if you can't tolerate thirty seconds of nothing.
I don't have a fix, and I'm suspicious of anyone who does
This is the part where a post like this usually pivots to "so do a digital detox!" and gives you a five-step plan. I'm not going to, because I don't believe it, and I think you'd feel the hollowness of it.
The honest situation is harder than that. You can't really go back — the gaps are filled, the tools exist and they're genuinely useful, and "just be bored on purpose" turns out to be weirdly difficult, because you always know relief is one tap away. Boredom you could escape at any second isn't really boredom; it's a test of willpower, which is a different and more tiring thing. Manufactured idleness isn't the same as the real kind, the same way choosing a hard path when the easy one is right there isn't the same as having no choice.
And it isn't all bad. The filled commute, the instant answer, the never-dull waiting room — these are real conveniences, and I'm not going to pretend I'd hand them back. This isn't a lament for a better past.
It's just an honest noticing: we traded something we didn't know we needed for something obviously convenient, and we can't cleanly un-trade it. We got rid of boredom without ever asking what boredom was for.
So
Here's the only thing I'll offer, and it's small on purpose.
Next time you're waiting for the kettle, try not reaching. Just stand there in the empty thirty seconds and notice what your mind does when you take it off the leash. It'll feel uncomfortable — faintly itchy, like you're forgetting to do something. That discomfort is the thing. It's the muscle we stopped using, twitching because it hasn't been asked to work in years.
We didn't lose boredom. We evicted it — quietly, conveniently, one filled moment at a time. And it's only now, in the rare second the room goes quiet, that some of us are realizing boredom had been paying rent all along, on something we actually miss: the wandering, the connecting, the just-being-with-ourselves. We filled the room with noise and only noticed the furniture was gone once it got quiet enough to look.
I don't know how to get it back. But I think I want to try to be bored again, at least sometimes. On purpose. Badly. Starting with the kettle.
Honest question, and I'd love real answers: when's the last time you were truly bored — no phone, no screen, no AI, just an empty moment you didn't fill? I struggled to remember mine, and I don't think I'm the only one. What did you used to think about, back when there were still gaps to think in?
Top comments (52)
I think I do have some of those moments, especially when I'm in the garden. I can spend a long time just looking at the plants, flowers, trees, the moon or stars, or simply enjoying the rain without thinking about anything in particular. I hadn't really thought of those moments as “boredom” before, but maybe that's exactly the kind of empty space you're talking about.
That’s exactly it — and maybe “boredom” is just the wrong, unfair word for it. What you have in the garden is the good version: unfilled, undirected, not reaching for anything, letting the mind rest on the plants and the rain and the stars. Same empty space, but you’ve kept it — you just never called it boredom because it never felt like lack. Maybe that’s the whole point: the space was never the problem, only what we started cramming into it. You didn’t lose it. Hold onto it.
I agree with this so much. I really do think some of our most creative ideas happen in those moments when we're bored and our minds are just allowed to wander without constantly consuming something.
I heard someone say once that before they sit down to make music, they spend about 30 minutes doing absolutely nothing first. No phone, no music, no distractions, just sitting there and being bored. Their reasoning was that the boredom gives their brain room to start creating on its own. I have no idea how scientifically accurate that particular routine is, but it has always made sense to me.
Constant stimulation means our brains almost never get that quiet space anymore. There's always something to scroll, watch, listen to, read, or ask. I think we probably lose more than we realize when we never give our minds a chance to just wander.
That musician’s 30-minutes-of-nothing ritual is the whole essay as a practice — deliberately manufacturing boredom before creating, because they understand the emptiness isn’t wasted, it’s the runway. And whether or not it’s scientifically rigorous, it matches something everyone’s felt: the ideas don’t come when you’re consuming, they come in the quiet right after you stop. They’re treating boredom as a tool instead of a problem, which is exactly the inversion the piece is reaching for. You put the cost perfectly — we almost never get that quiet space now, and we probably lose more than we realize by never letting the mind just wander.
I decided not to use smartphone as a regular phone for a while. Being a developer, I do need smartphones, but I don't carry them most of the time.
It's been almost a year since I started using a button phone. Most of the time, my button phone is all I take when I go outside. And, sometimes I even don't take the button phone.
Initially, there was a little discomfort. But human mind is the most extraordinary gift we've been given. To be honest, I don't get bored without the smartphone anymore. Often, there is a lot in my mind to keep itself occupied. And then there are times when my mind is calm, especially when I'm walking in the woods, watching birds with my binoculars.
So I don't think I ever truly get bored without constant presence of technology. Instead, I feel the freedom from constant supply of junks that "smartphones" and social media deliver. I don't regret a thing! 🥰🫠
A year on a button phone, often leaving even that behind — that’s not a hack or a detox challenge, it’s just a different life, and the fact that you don’t regret a thing is the whole proof. What strikes me most is that you didn’t end up bored, which is exactly the point I was circling: boredom was never the risk. When the junk supply is cut off, the mind doesn’t starve — it fills the space itself, with whatever was already in there waiting. “A lot in my mind to keep itself occupied,” and then the calm in the woods with the binoculars. That’s the thing we traded away and called it progress.
The small discomfort at the start that faded is the tell, too — that was just the muscle remembering how to work. You pushed through the itch I only described, and came out the other side into the freedom. Genuinely glad you wrote this; it’s the living version of the essay, and a quietly radical one. 🙏
I went through this last year. Stressful times at work, couldn't focus, too much context switching. Learned to meditate and build a plan for each day at work. Learned to put the phone down for long periods. Also started carrying a small notebook (pocket size) for whenever I tried to pull out my phone from my pocket to kill boredom, I would pull out the notebook and write down what I was doing. Tried journaling, but it ended up being like writing a diary and didn't stick. Got back into reading big fantasy books intead of browsing my phone.
We have too many distractions in our lives. It's hard to just be in the present. That's what I learned through meditation and exploration into Buddhism. The more modern, and stripped down version of it, is called 'mindfulness' but I hate anything trendy and like to avoid that word. I just say being present.
The notebook-instead-of-phone swap is clever — you redirected the reaching reflex instead of fighting it. And your real point lands: the problem was never boredom, it’s that we’ve lost the ability to just be present.
This swap works perfectly because it satisfies the fidgeting habit immediately.
Context switching is the ultimate silent killer of developer productivity.
Great article!
thanks
I experience many such moments where I do nothing. The last time I did this was like 30 minutes back. I sit idle and stare at the wall, with an empty mind. Sometimes, quietly watching a spider crawling up the wall.
That’s the whole essay, already lived — you never lost it. Watching a spider cross a wall with an empty mind is exactly the thing most of us traded away. Hold onto it.
Obsession with efficiency kills not only momentum, but the joy of the process itself.
What works for me - I don’t take phone on walks and barely touch it at home. I’ve trained myself to associate my desk with social platforms and work, and everything else with real life. When I’m not at desk, the time is mine.
“Obsession with efficiency kills not only momentum, but the joy of the process itself” — that’s the line, and it connects straight to something I keep circling: when every moment has to produce, the moments stop being livable. And your fix is the smartest I’ve heard in this whole thread — not willpower, geography. Binding the phone and social platforms to the desk, and everything else to real life, means you’re not fighting the urge a hundred times a day; you’ve made the environment decide for you. The desk is for that; away from the desk, the time is yours. That’s a boundary that actually holds, because it doesn’t rely on you resisting in the moment. Stealing this.
This my favourite topic of our busy world. It's true, I don't remember a time when I was completely bored, although I have become increasingly concious of this. The worst is it's potential to destroy relationships. It's become too easy to sit in the same room as someone and stay completely silent. Realizing this, I've started going for walks and leaving my phone at home, enjoying the present moment. Additionally, I've started pushing myself to seek opportunities to think critically (and think slowly).
I try to pick a topic to write on and come up with my own opinions/arguments. Then, without running online to validate my ideas, I just write. Afterwards I have time to read over my own thoughts and reflect, which I believe is the most important aspect of this strategy. When it comes to our phones, we all live in our own world. We see exactly what our brain craves and our own opinions reflected back to us. There are no debates, either 100% agreement or people yelling out nonsense they heard somewhere else.
I guess I've lead onto a separate problem, but I add that it's not just our new ideas being paved away, it's our ability to think critically.
The relationship point is the one that stops me, because it’s the cost nobody counts — two people in the same room, both present in some other world, and the silence doesn’t even register as loss anymore because we’re not bored, we’re occupied. You’ve named something the essay only gestured at: the empty gaps weren’t just where ideas formed, they were where connection happened. Fill them and you can be beside someone for an evening and never actually arrive in the room with them.
And your writing practice is the sharpest antidote I’ve heard to the second problem you raised — forming your own argument before running online to validate it. That sequence is everything, because the moment you check first, you’re not thinking anymore, you’re sorting yourself into an existing camp. Writing your own position cold, then reflecting on it, is the rare thing that rebuilds the muscle the feed atrophies: sitting with a question long enough to find out what you actually think, as opposed to which pre-made opinion feels most like you.
You’re right that it’s drifted into a bigger problem, but I don’t think it’s a separate one — it’s the same wound deeper in. First we lose the boredom, then the ideas that grew in it, and then, as you say, the critical thinking itself, because the feed hands us conclusions so we never have to build any. Each layer makes the next one easier to lose, and quieter. The walk without the phone, the argument written before it’s checked — those are small refusals of that whole chain. Genuinely one of the most thoughtful comments the piece has gotten. Thank you for it.
Really nice read, and put me in thoughts. I would argue it has nothing to do with modern tech. I never remember myself bored. Except school, everything else was exciting, and still is, if you're a person that likes to learn new things, test and break things without fear, and exeprience things in real life, not just in your head. Boredom was not a thing of the past, and now social media attention killed it. I see infinite people around me bored to death, infinately scrolling to nothingness, infinately watching netflix one episode after another on autopilot. Boredom changed form, but the people who were bored are bored today, and vice versa.
Genuinely good pushback. You’re arguing boredom is a disposition, not an era — the curious were never bored, the bored still are — and that’s at least partly right. Where I’d hold ground: curiosity is active engagement; I meant the undirected idle drift, the shower-and-walk state. You can be endlessly engaged and still never have an unfilled minute. But your sharpest line wins — “boredom changed form.” Autopilot Netflix is boredom, just anesthetized instead of sat with. Tech didn’t kill it; it removed the discomfort that made people notice it. Thank you — made the piece better.
Honestly, was just trying to be a smartass, but I took it somewhat personally, as I hear from my friends and family all the time: aren't you bored? and I feel I can never be bored. There is so much life, and experiences unexplored in the world, so many exciting gadgets to test, places to see, people to talk to. How can anyone be bored?
Ha — well, smartass or not, it landed somewhere real. And honestly, “how can anyone be bored when there’s this much world?” isn’t a throwaway line — it’s a whole way of being, and a good one. The people asking if you’re bored might be the ones who most forgot that the world itself is the thing to reach for. Stay unborable.
The line that hit me: "Boredom was the soil those ideas grew in. We just called it wasted time."
I'm the person this post is about, except I did it on purpose.
Three weeks ago, I decided to publish one article every day. I'm now at 25 articles in 25 days. And I built a system around it — a Notion tracker, a content calendar, pitch spreadsheets. Every empty moment became "what should I write next?"
I was proud of it. Still am, honestly. But reading this, I realized I haven't been bored in 25 days. Not once. Every gap got filled. The walk to the kettle, the waiting room, the minutes before sleep — all of it got routed into "content."
And here's the part that stings: the articles got easier to write, but I'm not sure they got better. The first few took hours because I had to actually think. The recent ones take 30 minutes because I've got a template. That's efficiency. But it might not be growth.
The line about "the friction was where the good stuff lived" applies to me. I removed the friction. I'm not sure I kept the good stuff.
I don't have a fix either. But your kettle suggestion is the first one that feels doable. Not a detox. Just not reaching. Once. On purpose. Badly.
Going to try it tonight.
This might be the most honest comment the piece has gotten, because you’re not agreeing with it from a distance — you caught yourself in it mid-motion, and had the nerve to say so out loud. The detail that gets me is that you’re still proud of the 25 days, and you can see what it cost, and you’re holding both at once without resolving them into a tidy lesson. That’s rare.
The thing you noticed is the sharpest version of the whole essay: the articles got easier and you’re not sure they got better. That gap between efficiency and growth is exactly the friction point. The first few took hours because you were thinking; the template took the thinking away and gave you speed — and speed is real, but it’s not the same thing as the slow, uncomfortable work that made the early ones yours. You automated your own boredom into a content pipeline, and the pipeline is working, which is precisely what makes it hard to see the loss. Nobody questions a system that’s producing.
I don’t think the answer is to stop — 25 in 25 is genuinely something, and the discipline is real. But maybe the kettle thing is the counterweight: one gap a day that doesn’t get routed into output. Not every empty moment needs to become content. Some of them were supposed to just be empty, doing the quiet background work you can’t see happening. Let one stay empty tonight. Badly, like you said. See what shows up when you’re not asking it to become anything.
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