What We Lost When We Lost Boredom

by Loring Mortensen

There used to be moments in every day when nothing was happening.

Waiting for a bus. Standing in a line. Sitting in a doctor's office. Driving on a long stretch of highway (with a paper map in hand). Eating alone at a counter. Just sitting alone in the great outdoors. The gap between dinner and whatever came next. The few minutes before sleep when the lights were already off but sleep had not yet arrived.

These moments were not pleasant, exactly. We did not look forward to them. We called them boring, and we meant it as a complaint. Boredom was something to escape — a problem to be solved by a magazine, a window to look out of, a conversation with whoever happened to be nearby.

And then, almost without anyone noticing, those moments disappeared.

Not because the situations vanished. We still wait, we still stand in lines, we still sit in waiting rooms. But the empty space inside those situations has been filled. We pull out a phone. We read Heather Cox Richardson on Substack. We answer a message. We watch a trailer for a new film with a cameo by Tom Waits. The space that used to contain nothing now contains something — and something, no matter how small, is more comfortable than nothing.

We have collectively decided that boredom is a problem worth eliminating. And we have, more or less, eliminated it.

What we did not realize, until it was already gone, is that boredom was doing something for us.

The unstimulated mind is not idle. It is doing a particular kind of work that no other state can do. When there is nothing arriving from outside, the inside begins to organize itself. Loose threads find each other. Half-formed thoughts complete themselves. Questions that have been waiting underneath the surface finally come up for air. The mind does maintenance work that requires the absence of input — work that cannot be done while attention is engaged with anything else.

Children used to know this, and adults used to suspect it. The phrase "go play, you're bored" was not questionable parenting. It was permission. It was the recognition that something useful happens in unstructured time, even if no one could quite name what it was.

I recently saw a video on Instagram that someone clearly created with AI. It was several scenes of the mid-90s show Friends. Instead of the usual jokes, drama, and Chandler banter, each scene was recreated with all of the cast staring at their mobile devices. No interactions, no slapstick, no warm moments, no Marcel the monkey…just glowing phones, selfish smiles, and poor posture. The point? That if Friends were made today there would be no Friends. It would have been called Screens I suppose.

"Check Out This Bad Boy. Twelve Megabytes Of RAM, 500 Megabyte Hard Drive. Built-In Spreadsheet Capabilities..."
— Chandler Bing, Friends

What we have lost is not just entertainment. We have more entertainment than any generation in history. What we have lost is the time when the mind is allowed to be alone with itself — long enough, and quietly enough, for things to settle.

The cost of this loss is not obvious because it does not show up as a single dramatic symptom. It shows up as a slow background condition. Less reflection. Less spontaneous insight. Fewer of the small realizations that used to arrive in the shower or on a walk or while staring out a cafe window. The connections that used to happen in idle moments do not happen anymore, because there are no idle moments.

We have replaced them with content, and content is not the same thing as thought.

This is not a call to give up phones or to romanticize a slower past. The past had its own problems, and most people would not trade them for the conveniences we now have. But it is worth recognizing what was traded away, and whether it was a fair exchange.

Boredom was uncomfortable. It was also where some of our best thinking happened.

The next time you find yourself in a small empty moment — at a stoplight, in a waiting room, in the few minutes before something begins — try, just once, to leave the phone where it is. See what arrives in the silence.

You may find that the silence was not empty after all. It was just waiting, there for you.