The Experience of Boredom

Boredom has become unfashionable. In a world designed to prevent it, its value has been almost entirely forgotten. The smartphone in the pocket has produced a generation for whom the experience of having nothing to do, no external stimulus to respond to, is vanishingly rare. This may not be the triumph it seems.

Boredom, the psychologist Sandi Mann has argued, is not the absence of thought but a particular kind of thinking — diffuse, associative, unanchored from immediate demands. In this mode the mind makes connections that directed attention forecloses, and these connections are often the source of creative insight. The daydream, the reverie, the moment of unfocused attention — these are not wasted time. They are a different kind of work, and one that cannot be replicated by directed cognitive effort.

The relationship between boredom and creativity has been studied most directly in children, whose unstructured time — historically a normal feature of childhood — has been systematically reduced in recent decades by scheduled activities, screen time, and adult anxiety about idleness. The evidence suggests that children who have more unstructured time develop greater capacity for self-directed play, for sustained engagement with self-chosen projects, and for imaginative elaboration. The adult equivalent is harder to study but the principle is likely similar.

There is also a relationship between the tolerance of boredom and depth of attention. A person who cannot bear to be without stimulation is a person who has lost the capacity for the kind of sustained, unrewarded attention that reading a difficult book or thinking through a hard problem requires. These are not separate problems. The intolerance of boredom and the inability to concentrate are symptoms of the same attentional disorder.

What boredom offers, when we do not immediately escape it, is a form of freedom — the freedom of the mind that has nothing it must do and can therefore find out what it wants to.