The Case for Boredom

There is a 2014 study, conducted at the University of Virginia, in which participants were asked to sit alone in a room with nothing to do for six to fifteen minutes. In some conditions, they were offered the option to administer mild electric shocks to themselves. A majority of men and a significant minority of women chose the shocks over uninterrupted quiet.

I find this study both depressing and clarifying. We are so uncomfortable with boredom — with the experience of having nothing to occupy us — that we prefer physical pain.

This was before the phone had become the complete environment management tool it is now. I suspect the study would show different results today: if the option were to check your phone rather than receive a mild shock, very few people would choose the shock.

Boredom has a bad reputation that it does not entirely deserve. The word connotes tedium, wasted time, the failure of the environment to adequately stimulate. But the psychological literature on boredom is more nuanced: boredom is a motivational state, a signal that current engagement is insufficient, that attention is searching for something more meaningful. It is the mind's way of saying: there is something better available than this.

In this sense, boredom is useful. The creative industries have long understood that unstructured time — time with no task, no screen, no agenda — is often when the most interesting ideas arrive. The shower, the commute before the phone colonized it, the lying-awake-not-quite-asleep period: these are the spaces where the mind, released from directed attention, begins to make the lateral connections that produce insight.

We have optimized these spaces away.

The elevator used to be a place where you stood and thought. Now there are screens. The dentist's waiting room used to be a place where you read a magazine you would never otherwise have encountered. Now you have your own better magazine in your pocket, which means you read nothing you would not have chosen. The restaurant meal used to include periods of table silence. Now the phone is a socially acceptable escape from table silence.

I am not being romantic about the past. Waiting rooms were often boring in the bad sense — tedious, unproductive, wasted. The phone genuinely makes waiting easier and more pleasant. But there is a difference between making waiting bearable and eliminating every moment of cognitive vacancy, and I think we have done the latter without fully examining the consequences.

What are the consequences? The evidence is still developing, but some things are becoming clear. Attention spans for long-form content are declining. Tolerance for ambiguity and cognitive discomfort is declining. The ability to sit with an unresolved problem and allow the mind to work on it at its own pace — what might be called sustained contemplation — seems to be declining.

These are not moral failures. They are adaptations to a reward environment that has been engineered to make every moment of vacancy feel unnecessary. If a tool that prevents boredom is always available, the skill of tolerating boredom without a tool atrophies.

The case for boredom is not that suffering is good for you. It is that the specific kind of unfocused, searching attention that boredom produces is genuinely valuable — for creativity, for self-knowledge, for the kind of reflection that helps you understand what you actually want rather than just what you will click on next.

Recovering it requires something that the attention economy is designed to prevent: choosing, deliberately, to leave your phone in another room.