Learning to Be Bored

It happens in line at the coffee shop. I’m waiting for my iced matcha, and before I can even blink, my thumb opens TikTok. Then Instagram. Then back to TikTok, because maybe something new appeared in those thirty seconds. Spoiler: it didn’t.

But what if I just stood here, while the barista called out names that I don’t recognize.  No phone, no scrolling, no pretending to text.

When I try it, I instantly regret it. The air feels too loud, and someone’s straw keeps squeaking against plastic. My brain starts fidgeting like a toddler and every second lasts forever. I last forty seconds before I give in and check my phone again. But I can’t help but wonder: When did boredom become unbearable?

When Silence Was Still a Thing

I used to be good at being bored. Summer afternoons sprawled across the floor, ceiling fan spinning like a slow galaxy. I’d stare out the window or make up stories about people at the grocery store. I didn’t call it creativity; it was just something to do.

Now, “nothing to do” feels like a crisis. Five minutes of silence, and I’m refreshing apps like an emergency responder. The stillness feels wrong, like a missed notification.

Somewhere between Vine and the endless scroll of TikTok, boredom stopped being neutral and became a problem — something to fix, to patch, to medicate. But, perhaps boredom isn’t a malfunction but a message. 

Detox or Withdrawal?

For a week, I decided to go on what my friend jokingly called a “boredom cleanse.” No phone or social media. Just me, a journal, and the horrifying sound of my own thoughts.

The first day was chaos. I kept reaching for my phone like a phantom limb. My brain screamed for distraction, anything to fill the void inside. By hour three, I was pacing my room, opening and closing drawers, convinced I had forgotten to do something.

But then, sometime around the second evening, the noise started to settle. I noticed tiny things: the way light curved through my curtains, my dog snoring on the couch, the faint hum of traffic outside my window. I wrote in my journal. I even went to the park and sat on a bench for an hour to people-watch.

I doodled and daydreamed. I thought about people I hadn’t seen in years. And it hit me: boredom isn’t emptiness. It’s space, the kind you can finally hear yourself in.

The Economy of Distraction

The truth is, boredom has been designed out of our lives. Our attention is the new oil, and tech companies are very good at drilling. Every app, every notification, every scroll is engineered to make boredom impossible.

You’re not supposed to stare at a wall anymore. You’re supposed to “engage,” “consume,” “connect.” In a world that measures worth by productivity and visibility, stillness can feel like failure — boredom becomes something to escape instead of sitting with. Tech companies capitalize on that discomfort, designing platforms around infinite scrolls, autoplay, and notifications that reward constant attention. But all that connecting leaves us scattered. We’re everywhere and nowhere at once — a thousand tiny tabs open in the background of our minds.

Maybe that’s why stillness feels so radical. When you choose to be bored, you’re choosing not to feed the machine. You’re saying: my attention belongs to me.

The Return of the Wandering Mind

After my little experiment, I started trying to sneak boredom back into my day — not as punishment, but as practice. I walk without earbuds now, sometimes. I let silence fill the car instead of a playlist. I eat breakfast without my phone. 

At first, my mind panicked. It kept looking for the next update, so to speak. But then something curious happened: I started thinking in paragraphs again, not push notifications. Ideas wandered in like old friends.

Boredom became a kind of rhythm, like a resting heartbeat or the space between notes. We call it “doing nothing,” but maybe it’s where the real things happen: wondering, creating, remembering. The stuff that makes us human doesn’t usually come from being entertained. It comes from being still enough to notice the world around you.

The Honesty of Boredom

Boredom isn’t always peaceful. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable, even painful. Because when the distractions quiet down, the real stuff comes up—the loneliness and uncertainty, the things you didn’t want to think about. Boredom is honesty in disguise. It’s your mind finally catching up with itself.

When I let myself be bored, I start to notice the small griefs I’ve been scrolling past. I start to feel the things I’ve been numbing. And weirdly, that’s where the healing begins — in that slow, silent space where there’s nowhere left to run but inward.

Learning the Pause

I’m not perfect at it. I still scroll before bed, and I still watch three YouTube videos about productivity before doing absolutely nothing productive. But I’m learning to let myself pause and to sit in the in-between.

It is important to remember that  boredom isn’t the opposite of creativity—it’s the soil it grows in.

Maybe that’s what our generation needs; not another app, not another optimization, but a little more nothing. A little more time to stare out windows. To be uninteresting. To be unfinished.

To be here, with ourselves.

So, no, I haven’t mastered boredom, but I’m learning to meet it halfway. And sometimes, on a quiet afternoon, when the sunlight hits just right and there’s nothing left to check, I let it wash over me.

And I think: maybe this is what peace feels like.