truthiskef

The last time I was bored, legit, painfully bored—I was ten, lying on the living room floor and staring at the ceiling fan. There was absolutely nothing to do. My siblings were out. My friends were unreachable. I mean I didn’t have any. It was a long, slow afternoon in that purgatory between lunch and dinner, and I remember thinking: I might actually die of this.

Reader, I lived.

And now, two decades later, I kind of miss it. Boredom feels like a lost artifact. I strongly feel that we have engineered it out of existence. Standing in line? The answer is to check your phone. Waiting for the train? Well, watch a video of someone else waiting for a train. Even our leisure time is choreographed. From books to finish, podcasts to catch up on, e-mails to read, social events we RSVP’d to three weeks ago that now feel like chores in drag. Any anomaly isn’t allowed.

We’re not just avoiding boredom: we’re afraid of it. We’ve decided it’s not a neutral state, but a symptom. If you’re bored, you’re lazy. If you’re bored, you’re ungrateful. If you’re bored, you’re doing life wrong. Tech culture and hustle culture, this and that. The strange bedfellows who often share the same mattress seem to have all conspired to turn boredom into something we’re supposed to outgrow.

“Stay hungry, stay foolish,” they said. They meant, never sit still. But boredom was never the enemy. It was a portal. It’s where daydreams lived, where stray thoughts collided, where stories and stupid ideas took root, where people like me actually came up with the world’s most creative ideas or so I say. As a kid, boredom made me invent games, sketch awkward comic strips. I can’t do it anymore. It’s dead. It’s a gone game. It wasn’t being broadcast or monetized or packaged for anyone else. It was something real. What we have now isn’t just anti-boredom: it’s overstimulation disguised as engagement. It’s false productivity. Our attention is constantly spliced between tabs and tasks. We’re always running on timelines. Even when we “rest,” we do it performatively: here’s my yoga pose, my curated stack of books, my journal, my low-fat recipe, my slow-living cottagecore breakfast bowl. We’ve made leisure competitive. We’ve made silence something to apologize for. And when we do have a moment of nothing, it feels disorienting like a void we weren’t trained to navigate.

Boredom as a Psychological Necessity

Research shows that boredom is a fertile ground for creativity, self-reflection, and problem-solving. When we’re bored, our brains switch to the Default Mode Network:a state where we process our memories and connect ideas. But we rarely reach that state anymore because we interrupt boredom with screens.

I suspect our collective burnout isn’t just from overwork. It’s from under-boredom. Our brains never get to idle. They’re constantly fed something: notifications, updates, reels, snaps, noise. We never sit long enough with ourselves to actually hear what’s under all that noise. What if there’s something valuable under there? A thought we’ve been avoiding? A feeling that’s been buried?

Digital Routines Have Become Rituals of Emptiness

I recently watched someone unlock their phone, open Instagram, close it, and then open it again (within ten seconds). Not because they were looking for something, but because their thumbs had memorized the motion. These micro-moments are now consumed by compulsive gestures that mimic connection. In trying to stay constantly visible, we’ve lost touch with what it means to be truly present.

A few days ago, I opened Snapchat to check the unopened snaps. And I wasn’t even surprised. People who were half asleep had still taken the effort to click a blurry photo of their dimly lit rooms to boost their streak game. That’s it. It made me think: why can’t everyone just be for once? Why this constant need to show up digitally, even when our real selves are exhausted? Why so much overstimulation all the time?

The average user checks their phone 96 times a day, or once every 10–12 minutes (Asurion, 2023). Let this one sink in!

No wonder we feel like we’re constantly “behind”—we’ve removed the only moments that let us catch up to ourselves. I’m not arguing for a full regression to the analog life. I love the internet. I love my phone. I will absolutely continue Googling “Do I have an iron deficiency?” at 3 a.m. But I want to make space for boredom again. I miss being bored. I miss lying on that ugly living room carpet, not doing anything impressive, not achieving anything at all, not being productive. Just… existing, waiting for the next moment to show up. Seriously, we need more of that again. I most definitely do.