We don’t talk about boredom much anymore. Not real boredom—the kind that settles in during a long walk with no podcast, or while staring out a bus window without refreshing anything. These days, boredom gets cut off at the knees before it even shows up. It’s not just that we’re distracted. It’s that we’ve built an entire culture around never having to sit with ourselves at all.
Every spare second has a feed to scroll, a show to binge, a headline to click. Our boredom isn’t just disappearing. It’s being actively hunted. Branded as unproductive, unengaged, low-effort. And that has consequences, not just for attention spans or creative thinking, but for how we come to understand ourselves—what we care about, what we can tolerate, and what we’re even capable of noticing.
We’ve been trained to treat discomfort like a design flaw. But boredom isn’t failure. It’s the pause that forces us to notice what’s missing, what doesn’t sit right, what’s aching to be understood. It’s how kids learn what they’re drawn to. How adults find their way back to themselves. Boredom gives you space to remember what you forgot in the noise. And maybe that is a problem—for some people.
Because if boredom opens a door inward, it also closes the door on everything trying to pull you outward. That makes it inconvenient—to the people who’ve commodified your attention, to the platforms monetizing your mood swings, to the systems that need you constantly entertained, angry, or afraid. Boredom doesn’t perform. It doesn’t share, repost, or double down. It just waits. And in that waiting, something deeper stirs—something that’s harder to track and harder to sell.
This is why disconnection feels so common. We’re surrounded by content, but meaning feels further away. It’s not that we’re missing something obvious—it’s that we rarely slow down long enough to notice what’s already there. The stillness where things used to take shape just... doesn’t happen. Not when every quiet moment fills itself.
This isn’t a pitch for digital detoxes or morning meditations. It’s something quieter than that. A kind of reclaiming. Of time, of attention, of your own mind. Letting yourself be bored—truly bored—is an act of resistance now. And maybe a necessary one. One that could allow you to refocus your mind and soul in ways you didn’t realize they needed.
It may also help explain why so many people feel disconnected from politics. Why so many check out entirely. Why the people who do stay engaged often feel so deeply tired. We’ll be digging into this more in a future piece. There’s something vital at the intersection of boredom, attention, and agency—something about how meaning forms, how reflection deepens, and how we stay grounded enough to resist the drift toward apathy. Maybe we’re not just overwhelmed—we’re undernourished by stillness.