Ask any kid if they like to be bored and you’ll be met with a resounding no. Boredom is the root cause of all those “Are we there yet?” questions on long car rides, the catalyst for how peanut butter ends up as a toddler’s second skin, and the explanation for why the dog’s nails got painted with Dior lipstick. No one likes being bored—it makes us feel idle, purposeless, and unengaged, like life is a movie and we are falling asleep at the theater.
A quick visit to Google Trends shows that the search for “what to do when bored” has steadily decreased over the past 15 years (except for a peak during the Covid lockdown). Perhaps it’s not the most rigorous metric, but it seems to suggest the world is less bored than it used to be. I, for one, cannot remember the last time I was truly bored. Even when I’m out of available friends to see, projects to stress about, hypothetical vacations to plan, and TV shows to binge, there’s always the ability to scroll endlessly on my smartphone. But who am I kidding? Instagram and Tiktok take hold of me even when I do have more important things to do.
Why do I hate boredom so much that I would rather be entertained by my phone for two hours than sit with my thoughts? Shouldn’t boredom be neutral on the spectrum between pleasure and pain? For myself and many others—especially children, given the way they whine and cry and beg for their screens—boredom seems synonymous with pain.
Perhaps I hate boredom so much because it makes me work. I’m left alone with my thoughts; even when there is nothing left to think about, my brain wants to continue thinking. Before the proliferation of smartphones, I would read the chemicals on the back of the shampoo bottle, memorize the patterns on the back of the spider crawling across our ceiling, daydream about dinner or my crush or what I could have said in that argument two months ago. Boredom drives people to clean their entire apartments, read entire novels, or even start companies. At its best, boredom accelerates productivity; at the very least, it pushes us to think about the world around us. But more than anything, perhaps, boredom reminds us that our brains love, no, crave, thinking.
Yet, thinking takes work. It is hard and requires effort. Isn’t it just so much easier to relinquish ourselves to the smartphone that can do the work for us? It can come up with topics for us to look at, absorb, and appreciate, without us ever having to do the work of thinking about them in the first place. It is gratification without the delay.
I’ve deleted the Instagram app off my phone. I have not, however, stopped using Instagram. I spent this morning scrolling on the browser version and came across an infographic about the effects of dopamine culture. Let’s ignore the irony for a moment. Here’s what the post has to say: “play a sport” has changed to “watch a sport” and then “gamble on a sport”; “film & TV” has changed to “video” and then “reels of short videos.” Dopamine culture has pioneered the need for shorter, quicker, punchier modes of consumption. But maybe the very irony of this graph being a “TL;DR” proves its own point: an art is lost when we select for only the shortest, quickest, punchiest modes.
I’ve been interrogating screens as a shortcut to resolve boredom, but let me villainize over-productivity as well. In high school, in an effort to prepare for college, parents will have their kids jump directly from basketball practice to chemistry tutoring to clinical volunteering in the course of an afternoon, while homework from five AP classes gets pushed to after dinner and the exhausted teen finally greets their bed for too few hours before leaving again for morning swim practice. To many, this sounds like the optimal way to ensure acceptance at a top-ranked university, commonly synonymous with success. But it is a schedule that is all-encompassing, leaving no time for thinking. What will happen when that teenager makes it into an elite college and is faced, for the first time, with free time and the choice of what to do with it? They have spent the past 18 years surrounded by waves and streams pulling them in multiple directions, without ever getting the chance to pause and notice in which direction they would like to swim.
I sometimes wonder if this is as strong a catalyst for the multitudes of Ivy League grads headed for industries like investment banking and consulting as family wealth or prestige. Working in industries characterized by stringent hierarchies and required productivity, bankers and consultants are left with very little energy for the much more daunting work of thinking about what a they might dedicate their lives to. And with recruitment for internships in these fields beginning as early as sophomore year, many students spend a significant fraction of their college years stacking their resumes and racking up coffee chats rather than exploring themselves and the world. I’ve been through this. It’s all-consuming. This career option is handed to directionless undergrads just like an iPad is handed to unruly and restless children; it’s an easy fix for the much harder job of actually getting to know yourself.
What you think about when you are bored is what you are aching to know. What emerges from the backdrop when there are no more distractions center-stage was there all along, and it will continue to be there no matter how exhausting it is to deal with, no matter how desperately you place bigger and more extravagant and more attention-consuming actors in front of it.
What are your passions? What causes do you think are worth fighting for? What makes you fulfilled? What do you think love is? What do you like about yourself, and what don’t you?
How many of us don’t know the answers to those questions? How many of us never actually think about the answers to those questions because it’s hard? Without allowing ourselves the chance to think about the answers, how are we to live a life with passion, with causes worth fighting for, with fulfillment, with love, with growth?
It is all too easy to lose oneself to others’ thoughts when we never give ourselves the chance to come up with our own. It is all too easy to become a reflection of our environments. To forget ourselves. Let us accept being a little more bored in life. Let us sit in an empty theater and admire the backdrop and let the selves that we have been fervently hiding finally reveal their colors to us.
Let me introduce you to you.
