In Praise of Boredom

When did you last do nothing at all? I do not mean resting, or meditating, or listening to a podcast while staring out of a train window. I mean nothing: no screen, no task, no background noise, just you and the slow, faintly uncomfortable passage of time. If you are like most people I know, you will struggle to remember. And if you are honest, you may admit that the very idea makes you want to reach for your phone.

Boredom has a bad reputation, and it is easy to see why. It is unpleasant by design. Psychologists tend to describe it as a signal, a sort of mental alarm that goes off when our attention has nothing worth holding on to. Like hunger, it nags at us until we do something about it. The trouble is that we have never had so many ways of silencing it. A line at the supermarket, a commercial break, the thirty seconds it takes for the kettle to boil: every one of these small gaps in the day can now be filled before boredom has even had the chance to announce itself.

Why should that matter? Surely, you might say, a world with less tedium is simply a better world. I am not so sure. Consider what tends to happen when the alarm is allowed to ring. In one frequently cited experiment, researchers in Britain asked a group of volunteers to spend a quarter of an hour copying numbers out of a telephone directory, a task chosen precisely because it was so dull. Afterwards, the volunteers were asked to think up as many uses as they could for a pair of plastic cups. Compared with a group that had skipped the copying, they came up with more ideas, and more original ones. The study was small, and one should not build a philosophy on a single experiment, but it fits a pattern that writers, scientists and inventors have described for centuries: the good idea that arrives in the shower, on a long walk or in the dead hours of a delayed journey.

The explanation, as far as anyone can tell, is that a mind deprived of stimulation does not simply switch off. It wanders. It starts rummaging through memories, rehearsing conversations, connecting things that had seemed unrelated. Daydreaming, which most of us were taught to regard as a failing, may be one of the ways in which the brain does its quieter, more creative work. Deny it the opportunity, and that work is not so much canceled as postponed indefinitely.

I should concede at this point that boredom is not always benign. Chronic boredom, the kind that comes from a job with no meaning or a life with too few options, is associated with all sorts of unhappy outcomes, and nobody who has spent long months unemployed or in the hospital needs a columnist telling them how lucky they are. Nor am I suggesting that we throw our phones into the sea. What I am suggesting is that the brief, ordinary boredom of daily life is closer to an ally than an enemy, and that we have become strangely eager to avoid it.

How eager? In a study published a little over a decade ago, participants were left alone in a bare room for a few minutes with nothing but their own thoughts and a button that would give them a mild electric shock. A surprising number of them, having previously said they would pay money to avoid such a shock, pressed the button anyway. Given the choice between a little pain and their own company, a good many people chose the pain.

So here is my modest proposal. Leave the phone in your pocket the next time you are waiting for a bus. Let a child complain that there is nothing to do, and resist the urge to solve the problem for them. Take a walk without headphones. You may find the first few minutes almost unbearable. Stay with them anyway. Boredom, after all, is not the absence of a mind; it is a mind asking, rather insistently, to be used.