Boredom!

Broadly speaking, however, boredom is usually thought of in one of two ways. The first is as a deficit of meaning— a sense of purposelessness and existential disinterest. The second is as a deficit of attention— a state where the mind is unoccupied and without focus. The first, what may be called ‘cultural boredom’, is abstract, less urgent, and entirely man-made— an unintended byproduct of natural selection’s misalignment with modern life. The second, what may be called ‘biological boredom’, is much older and more primal— an evolutionary function woven into the logic of selection and shared across species. In short, there is boredom as defined by nature and boredom as defined by humans.

But perhaps the more useful distinction is between feeling bored and being bored. Like the difference between feeling alone and being alone; one is a psychological state and the other is a material circumstance. One a measure of subjective experience, the other a measure of objective conditions. What this means is that feeling bored is self-reported— you can only know if someone feels bored by asking them. But to know if they are bored, you don’t need words— you need observation: brain scans, environmental situations, introspective awareness, etc.

Of all the available measures, arguably the most comprehensive marker of being bored is the activation of what neuroscientists call the brain’s ‘default mode network’. The default mode network describes a network of brain regions that are more active when an individual is not focused on the outside world and is instead engaged in internal thoughts, daydreaming, self-reflection, or other forms of “mind-wandering”. Put simply, it is the brain alone with nothing but its own thoughts. 

In the most absolute terms, being bored is the condition of nothingness. It is not something felt but something endured; not a disturbance but an absence. It is the blank space behind every human experience; the raw foundation of existence before feeling or meaning is imposed. Being bored is not just a pause in the dopamine drip, but the void into which thought, desire, and distraction rush to take shape. It is not merely the opposite of stimulation— it is the state from which all stimulation is an escape. There is boredom, and from it, everything else grows.

[---]

Americans today live a more cushioned existence than any population—human or otherwise—in history. Parents no longer watch half their children die before the age of five. Smoke-suffocating factories no longer employ eight year olds until they run out of fingers to lose. Our laws no longer punish people for baking bad bread by boiling them alive. The flu no longer sweeps through towns like a biblical reckoning. Cognitively impaired 13 year olds no longer inherit absolute power; and we no longer expect to drop dead before the age of 30. 

The average American lives in a home with climate control, clean water, and a refrigerator stocked with more food, flavor and convenience than kings of old. Thomas Jefferson, one of the richest Americans of his time, never went a winter where he wasn’t cold in his own home, complaining that his pens would freeze and spending every morning chiseling the ice off his writing desk. Even the poorest among us have access to medical care, public education, and safety nets that would have been unthinkable in previous centuries. The daily struggles that once consumed our ancestors—finding food, surviving disease, avoiding violence—are no longer the defining features of life.

[---]

In a society where we have no thing—no predators, no famine, no war—to torment us, nothing itself becomes the torment. In other words, leisure curdles into boredom— a hell so unbearable that international law recognizes it as a torture device (i.e. solitary confinement) and NASA assigns its astronauts busywork to safeguard against it. Studies have found we’d rather blast our ears with the sound of a screaming pig than listen to nothing or engage in dangerous behaviors such as drug-use, erratic driving or high-risk financial speculation in order to avoid boredom. One study of particular interest, published in Science, found that most of us (two-thirds) would rather self-administer electric shocks than endure just 15 minutes devoid of external distraction; with a similar majority saying they’d pay money to never experience such boredom again. 

Important to note is that all the aforementioned examples of boredom involve individuals unable to sit alone with their thoughts; trapped in the claustrophobia of sensory-deprived consciousness. This is, of course, not the kind of boredom most Americans today are experiencing— opening apps, closing apps, reopening the same apps. The kind where, instead of being unable to sit with it for 15 minutes, we are unable to sit without it for more than 15 minutes— jonesing for another hit of flickering junk; compulsively returning to it over and over and over. The kind that feels like boredom, looks like boredom, but, in being, is not boredom. It is— cultural boredom.

If biological boredom is a negative feeling triggered by the absence of stimulation, cultural boredom is the feeling of boredom untethered from that absence— an emotional layer we’ve learned to apply even when nothing is missing. In other words, biological boredom is a response to being bored; cultural boredom is the invention of boredom as a feeling in itself— freestanding, self-replicating, and often entirely disconnected from a stimulus gap.

[---]

In order to endure boredom, one must have a purpose— but in order to discover that purpose, one must first endure boredom. Put another way, the precondition for meaning is the willingness to be with its absence— because it arrives not when we want it, but instead appears when there’s nothing left to distract us. In order to find a new direction, we must stop moving forward. Just as the chalkboard must be erased before anything new can be written, the mind, like a cup, can only hold what it makes room for. What is not empty cannot be filled. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger put it:

“The nothing is what makes possible the openness of beings as such for [emergent awareness]” 

That is to say, the openness we rush to fill—with stimulation, with pleasure, with clicks—is the only space where purpose, drive, creativity, even just basic decision-making can take root. It’s not what boredom gets you— it’s what it frees you from. You can’t force insight. You can’t download creativity. You must sit, watch and then catch it—as it drifts through the open space of awareness—by paying attention. It is what the poet John Keats called “negative capability”— the ability to remain present with uncertainty and unknowing, without lunging for premature relief. 

In other words, we must give up control and make room for disorder.

[---]

As the composer John Cage put it: 

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”

The shift is not so much in what you see, but in how you see it. It’s a recalibration of what we find worthwhile— one that exchanges the frenzy of getting for the depth of being. Boredom turns us inward, towards nothingness, not to escape the world, but to meet it more fully— without decoration, without desire or demand. Here, the mind stops chasing and starts noticing— what once felt empty reveals itself as open. The path to peace isn’t paved with novelty; it’s cleared of clutter. 

- More Here