Boredom Is a Skill

Most People Would Rather Electrocute Themselves Than Be Alone With Their Thoughts

That's not hyperbole. It's data.

In 2014, Timothy Wilson and colleagues at the University of Virginia published a study in Science that should have alarmed everyone and instead alarmed almost no one. They sat participants in a bare room for 6 to 15 minutes. No phone. No book. Nothing to do but think. The only available stimulus was a button that delivered a mild electric shock, one that participants had already said they would pay money to avoid.

67% of men and 25% of women shocked themselves anyway. One man pressed the button 190 times.

People chose physical pain over the experience of sitting quietly with their own minds. Wilson's team called this result "striking." That's one word for it.

The Mind That Wanders Is Working

Here's the thing nobody tells you about boredom: your brain doesn't turn off when you stop feeding it input. It turns on differently.

Neuroscientist Marcus Raichle identified the default mode network (DMN) in 2001, a set of brain regions that become most active precisely when you're not focused on an external task. For years this was considered noise in the data. Why would the brain expend energy when it had nothing to do?

Because it was doing something. The DMN handles autobiographical memory, future simulation, moral reasoning, social cognition, and the construction of narrative identity. In plain language: when you're doing nothing, your brain is busy figuring out who you are, what you've experienced, and what you might do next.

Jonathan Schooler and Jonathan Smallwood at UC Santa Barbara have spent two decades researching mind-wandering. Their findings are consistent and clear. Mind-wandering during incubation periods, those stretches where you step away from a problem, reliably produces more creative solutions than sustained focused attention. The wandering mind isn't broken. It's doing a different kind of work, the kind that requires you to not be trying so damn hard.

The catch: the DMN only does its thing when you give it room. If every idle moment gets filled with a podcast, a scroll, a notification, the system never engages. You starve the very cognitive process that produces insight and self-understanding.

We've been starving it for about fifteen years now.

Infinite Content, Zero Gaps

Think about the last time you did nothing. Not "nothing" as in scrolling while lying down. Actual nothing. No inputs. No screen. Just you and whatever showed up inside your head.

If you can't remember, that itself is the answer.

The architecture of modern life is designed to eliminate dead time. Aza Raskin, who invented infinite scroll while working at Mozilla, has spoken publicly about his regret. He built a mechanism that removed the natural stopping cues from content consumption. Before infinite scroll, you hit the bottom of the page and had to make a conscious decision to continue. After it, there was no bottom. There was always more.

That was 2006. Since then, the entire attention economy has been engineered around the same principle: never let the user reach a point where they might stop consuming. YouTube autoplays. TikTok's algorithm requires zero effort. Spotify queues the next song. Every gap is an opportunity for capture, and every company is competing to fill it.

The average American checks their phone 144 times a day. That number, from a 2023 survey by Reviews.org, means you're picking up the device roughly once every seven waking minutes. This is not a habit. It's a reflex.

And every time you reach for the phone in a moment of nothing, you're making a trade. You're swapping a few seconds of boredom for a few seconds of content. This seems costless. It is not.

What Gets Lost

Boredom does specific things that stimulation cannot replace.

It builds tolerance for discomfort. Boredom is mildly unpleasant. Sitting with that mild unpleasantness (not fixing it, not escaping it, just experiencing it) exercises the same psychological muscle you use when you persist through a hard conversation, a difficult project, or a craving you know you should resist. Every time you kill boredom with a screen, you're training the opposite reflex. You're teaching yourself that discomfort is an emergency that requires immediate relief. The downstream effects of this are ugly: shortened attention spans, reduced frustration tolerance, difficulty with delayed gratification. These aren't moral failings. They're training outcomes.

It generates creativity. Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire found that participants who performed boring tasks (reading phone numbers from a directory) before a creative challenge outperformed controls who hadn't been bored first. Her explanation: boredom creates a seeking state. The mind, deprived of external input, begins generating its own. It daydreams. It makes unexpected connections. This is the mechanism behind the shower insight, the walk-around-the-block breakthrough. Creativity doesn't come from more input. It comes from space.

It enables self-knowledge. You can't know yourself if you never spend time with yourself. The phone is the most effective self-avoidance device ever invented. It lets you outsource the contents of your mind at any moment. Feel an emotion? Scroll. Notice a thought you'd rather not examine? Check your email. The result is a population that is deeply unfamiliar with its own inner life, people who can tell you what's trending on five platforms but can't tell you what they actually want.

Stimulation Paradox

We are the most stimulated generation in history and among the most bored. This sounds like a contradiction. It isn't.

Lars Svendsen, in A Philosophy of Boredom, draws a distinction between situational boredom (there is nothing to do) and existential boredom (nothing is worth doing). We've nearly eliminated the first kind. The second is epidemic.

The mechanism is tolerance. More stimulation raises the threshold for engagement. The more you scroll, the more you need to scroll to feel anything. Social media, short-form video, push notifications: they train your reward circuitry to expect constant novelty. When the novelty stops, even for seconds, you feel a void. That void is what most people call boredom. But it's really withdrawal.

The old kind of boredom, the kind your grandparents knew, the long Sunday afternoon with nothing to do, was boring in a different way. It was boring because nothing was happening. And because nothing was happening, something could emerge. A thought. An idea. A restlessness that eventually pointed you toward something real.

That kind of boredom was generative. The new kind is just empty.

Choosing Nothing

What would it look like to practice boredom?

Leave the phone in another room for an hour. Don't replace it with a book or a podcast or anything. Sit with the nothing. Feel the pull. The phantom vibration. The conviction that you're missing something. You aren't.

Walk without headphones. Let the mind go where it goes. It might circle anxieties for a while. That's fine. Let it. Eventually it will move on to something unexpected: a memory, a question, a half-formed idea you didn't know was in there. That's the DMN doing its job.

Wait in line without distraction. Stand there. You'll notice things. The way people hold their bodies. The quality of the light. The strange familiarity of being a person in a place, doing nothing, aware. This was the baseline human experience for ten thousand years. It only became exotic in the last decade.

The discomfort you feel in these moments is real. Respect it. It's showing you the size of the gap between where you are and where the species was designed to operate. We were not built for constant stimulation. We were built for long stretches of nothing, punctuated by bursts of activity.

Boredom isn't a problem to solve. It's a capacity to rebuild.

The hardest thing you can do right now, today, with almost no effort, is absolutely nothing. The fact that it feels so hard tells you everything about what we've lost.