I used to get bored. Properly bored. The kind of bored where your brain, desperate for stimulation, starts making things up. Connecting random thoughts. Playing with ideas. Inventing problems to solve.
This was where my best ideas came from. Not from brainstorming sessions. Not from productivity systems. From staring at walls and letting my mind wander with nothing else to do.
I cannot remember the last time I was properly bored. I have a phone. The phone has infinite content. Whenever boredom threatens, I pull out the phone and the boredom disappears. Problem solved.
Except it was not a problem. It was a feature. And I optimised it away.
Boredom is not comfortable. That is the point. Your brain does not like being understimulated. When there is nothing external to engage with, the brain starts generating internal content. It connects disparate ideas. It replays memories. It imagines scenarios. It gets weird. This is where creativity lives. Not in the focused work of executing an idea, but in the unfocused wandering that generates ideas in the first place. The shower thoughts. The 3am realisations. The random connections between things that should not be connected. You cannot schedule this. You cannot put creative wandering in a calendar slot. It happens in the gaps. The waiting rooms. The commutes. The moments between things. The moments we have now filled with phones.
Every gap is gone now. Waiting for a friend? Phone. Sitting on a train? Phone. Standing in a queue? Phone. Lying in bed not quite asleep? Phone. Every moment that used to be empty is now full of content. This feels productive. You are learning things. Staying connected. Being entertained. The time is not wasted. You are using it. But the empty moments were not waste. They were incubation. Your brain needs downtime to process and connect and create. By filling every gap, we eliminated the processing time. Ideas have nowhere to form. I scroll through content and feel like I am doing something. But I am not creating. I am consuming. Consumption feels like activity but produces nothing. The phone has replaced the boredom that would have produced something.
Every piece of content leaves residue. You read a tweet and part of your brain is still thinking about it. You watch a video and the images linger. You check email and the messages echo. Each interruption leaves fragments that take time to clear. When you fill every gap with content, you accumulate residue constantly. Your brain never fully clears. You carry the ghosts of a hundred micro-interactions into every moment. There is no fresh state, no clean slate from which new ideas could emerge. This is why you can scroll for an hour and feel more scattered than when you started. You did not rest. You did not think. You just absorbed content continuously, leaving your brain more cluttered than before. Boredom used to clear the residue. Having nothing to do meant processing what was already there. Now we add more before the old stuff processes.
I have started trying to be bored on purpose. It is embarrassingly hard. Leave the phone in another room. Sit somewhere with nothing to do. Wait. The urge to reach for the phone is immediate and intense. It feels wrong to not be doing something. The discomfort is real. But if you push through the discomfort, something interesting happens. Your brain starts working differently. Thoughts arise that would not have arisen otherwise. Connections form. Ideas appear. The creativity that used to happen automatically, before phones, still happens. You just have to create the conditions. I am not good at this. I still default to the phone. The habit is too strong, built over fifteen years of constant connectivity. But when I manage to be bored, actually bored, I think better. I have ideas I would not have had.
We measure engagement. Time on screen. Content consumed. These metrics go up constantly. They are designed to go up. Billions of dollars have been spent optimising them. We do not measure what we lost. The ideas that were not had because boredom was prevented. The creative work that did not happen because every gap was filled. The breakthroughs that required empty space that no longer exists. I cannot prove this cost. I cannot quantify the ideas I did not have. But I know they existed because I remember when I used to have more ideas. Before the phone was always there. When boredom was a regular experience instead of a rare accident.
The best ideas I ever had came from being bored. I have optimised boredom out of my life. I am not sure the tradeoff was worth it.