In Defense of Boredom
Boredom has an unenviable reputation. It is the state we rush to escape, the empty minute we fill reflexively with a glance at a screen. Yet a growing body of psychological research suggests that this much-maligned experience may serve a purpose, and that our near-total success in abolishing it could carry a cost we have scarcely begun to reckon with.
At its core, boredom appears to function as a signal. It tells us that our current activity is failing to engage us, and in doing so, it nudges us to seek something more meaningful. Viewed this way, boredom is less a problem than a prompt, an uncomfortable but useful indication that our attention is going to waste. Several studies have found that participants who were first given a deliberately tedious task subsequently performed better on tests of creative thinking, as though the mind, deprived of stimulation, had begun to generate its own.
The difficulty is that the signal now rarely gets the chance to register. With an inexhaustible supply of distraction always within reach, the faint discomfort that might once have led to daydreaming, reflection or a new idea is extinguished almost before it arises. We are, in a sense, treating the symptom so effectively that we no longer receive the message.
It would be naive to romanticize boredom unreservedly. Chronic boredom is associated with poorer wellbeing, and there is nothing ennobling about the tedium of a job one cannot escape. The argument is not that boredom is good in itself, but that brief, unfilled intervals may be more valuable than our habits imply.
Reclaiming them requires no grand gesture: a walk without headphones, a queue endured without a phone, a few minutes of staring out of a train window. Such moments are unlikely to feel productive. That, perhaps, is precisely the point.