I Think Boredom Is Becoming a Luxury

I don’t think I get bored anymore. I think I reach for my phone before boredom gets the chance.

A train. A coffee. Someone who is five minutes late. You don’t have to do anything else, just wait. And almost without thinking, your hand reaches for your phone. Did someone text or call you? No. You just open something.

Instagram. Substack. Your email. Analytics you already checked ten minutes ago.

Anything, really.

It almost feels stranger to stand there and simply look around. Especially in public. Everyone else is looking at a screen too. If you are the only person staring out of the window, watching people walk past, or just standing there doing absolutely nothing, you almost feel like you are the weird one.

Strange place for us to have ended up.

We have become so good at filling every empty moment that I am not sure I remember what real boredom feels like anymore.

And I’m so guilty of this too.

I check my messages when I know nobody has texted me. I open Substack to see whether anything happened. I check the analytics for my blog, even though I already checked them not that long ago.

Often, there isn’t any reason to check them. And I know that. My analytics probably haven’t meaningfully changed in the last ten minutes. There probably isn’t suddenly an important message waiting for me.

But that isn’t the point.

The point is that for a few seconds, nothing was going on and apparently, doing something now feels easier than allowing that nothing to exist.

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It’s not that our phones got rid of the boredom. It’s still there. But they’ve done a very good cover-up. You open Instagram for a few minutes. Check Substack. Look at your messages again.

And the moment you do that, boom, dopamine hits you, and the boredom is briefly gone. No more empty space inside.

There is movement. New information. Something to look at.

It feels like you are doing something, even when none of it really matters. But the feeling disappears almost immediately. The same counts for impulse shopping.

You close one app and open another. You refresh again. You put your phone away, only to pick it back up a few minutes later.

And nothing really happened.

It’s this weird kind of satisfaction that we’ve taught ourselves to enjoy. Just enough stimulation to stop you from feeling bored, but not enough to actually make you feel satisfied.

And that’s only where this problem started.

Because boredom used to have somewhere to go. You could sit with it for a while. Become restless. Look around. Start thinking about something. Find something to do because you actually wanted to do it.

Now we can interrupt that process.

The first second of discomfort appears, and there is already something waiting in our pocket to make it disappear.

Except it doesn’t really disappear.

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Now we confuse boredom with doing nothing, but I disagree that they are the same thing because they are not. You can do absolutely nothing and feel completely fine. That’s not boredom.

Like sitting on the train, staring out the window. Walk without listening to anything. Lie on the couch for twenty minutes and let your mind wander. None of that has to feel boring.

And with statements like these, the opposite is true as well.

You can be busy and still be bored.

You can sit through a meeting, scroll through your phone, watch a video, play a game, or do something you have done a hundred times before and still feel that strange urge for something else. That’s boredom.

We might need to redefine boredom here.

It is not really about the absence of activity. Maybe it is the feeling that whatever is happening right now is not enough to hold your attention. That’s a very important nuance to make.

Because if boredom simply meant doing nothing, then filling every empty moment would solve it. Right?

It doesn’t.

What I actually miss is not being bored in the miserable sense of staring at a wall and counting the minutes. I miss being okay with the possibility that nothing needs to happen for a while.

No new post.

No message.

No statistic changing.

No video playing in the background.

Just a little bit of space.

And the thing is that this kind of space often feels uncomfortable before it starts to feel peaceful.