There was a moment—probably around 1994—when boredom died. Like, officially. Quietly. Without a eulogy or a funeral. One day we were all sitting in cars with no music, staring out the window during road trips and inventing games like “count the cows.” The next, we had Game Boys. Or AOL chatrooms. Or eventually, the dopamine cannon that is your phone.
But here’s the twist: boredom didn’t actually die. It just got disguised. It became shameful. Like mold in the back of the fridge—you’re not supposed to have it, but you always do, and you definitely don’t want anyone else to see it.
We started treating boredom like a character flaw. A sign you weren’t ambitious or curious or optimizing your life correctly. “You’re bored? Read a book! Launch a side hustle! Take a cold plunge at 6am!” The implication was always that being bored made you lazy, or worse—uncool.
But the thing no one wants to admit (because it’s phenomenally unsexy) is that boredom is the precursor to every interesting thing that has ever happened. Before there was punk rock, there were a bunch of teenagers sitting around, bored out of their minds in suburban garages. Before there was Donkey Kong, there was some guy at Nintendo going, “Well, what now?”
In other words: boredom is the portal.
And we slammed it shut.
Instead, we built an entire civilization dedicated to eliminating even the threat of it. If aliens came down today and judged humanity by our apps, they’d assume we were terrified of three consecutive seconds with no stimulation. They’d see us open Instagram, close it, open Twitter, close it, open TikTok, watch 1.4 seconds of a guy cutting soap, and then do it all again like we’re playing a slot machine rigged to pay out in attention deficit disorder.
We didn’t just kill boredom. We criminalized it. But here’s the glitch in the matrix: in killing boredom, we also killed off everything that used to follow it—curiosity, reflection, obsessive interest, weird side projects that somehow became your job 10 years later.
We didn’t mean to do it. Nobody planned this. But we’ve created a world where the moment you start to feel unengaged, you reach for a glowing rectangle that floods your brain with something—anything—because anything is better than sitting in the nothing.
Except… maybe it’s not.
Maybe boredom is where all the best stuff lives. Not the polished stuff. Not the scrollable or monetizable stuff. The good stuff. The stuff that’s a little uncomfortable at first. The stuff you can’t explain to anyone else but feels weirdly important to you. Like building a haunted miniature golf course in your garage. Or writing 4,000 words about the ethics of The Truman Show on your Substack with 19 subscribers. Or learning Swedish because you watched one Bergman film and now you’re kind of obsessed.
None of that happens unless you stop interrupting your own brain every eight seconds.
That’s the real problem with screen time. Not the blue light or the sleep disruption or the digital detox stuff people pretend to care about. The real issue is that every time you reach for your phone, you’re voting against your own potential to be interesting. You’re saying, “I’d rather watch other people’s lives than sit with my own long enough to make it weird and wonderful.”
So maybe don’t delete TikTok. Maybe don’t burn your phone in a cleansing fire while chanting affirmations and drinking mushroom tea. Just… let yourself be bored. For like five minutes. Let the nothing expand. Let the clock tick. Let your brain get so restless that it has no choice but to do something strange.
Because on the other side of that strange? Might be your actual life.