Why Boredom Is Holy

You are bored. You reach for the phone. You scroll. You are no longer bored, but you are no longer anything else either.

This has been happening for a decade. The pattern is so practiced that you do not notice it. The boredom signal arrives — a small flicker, a low-grade restlessness — and the phone is in your hand before any conscious decision has been made.

Boredom is not, however, a problem to be solved. Boredom is one of the great open doors of the inner life. It is the moment in which the mind, having no scheduled stimulation, begins to do what it does when left alone — which is to think, to wander, to associate, to make.

Most of the writing, art, and useful thought of the last few thousand years was made by people who were bored before they began. They had nothing to do, and so they did something. The phone has removed this experience from most of our days.

A small experiment

Tomorrow, when the boredom flicker arrives — in the queue at the supermarket, in a slow elevator, on a train — do not reach for the phone.

Stay in the boredom for one minute. It will feel like an hour. The mind will protest, will manufacture urgency, will offer a dozen plausible-sounding reasons to look at the screen. Just to check the time. Just to see if she replied. Just to glance at the news.

Resist all of them. Stand. Wait. Look around.

Within ninety seconds, something almost always happens. A thought you had not had room for. An idea you had been trying to remember. A memory that arrives unannounced and unfolds. A small noticing of the room you are in.

This is not a magic trick. This is what your mind does when you stop interrupting it. You used to know this. You have just been pulling the alarm every minute for ten years.

What boredom is for

Boredom is the soil. Almost nothing of value grows on a phone screen. The phone is mostly an infinity of consumption. Boredom — proper, undisturbed boredom — is the small empty patch in which something might be made.

Defend a few of these patches in your life. Not many. A handful. Refuse to fill them.

Be willing to be bored on the train. Be willing to be bored in the bath. Be willing to be bored at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday with nothing to watch.

Something else will arrive in the gap. It is always more interesting than the feed.

You will be glad to have stayed.