Ten years ago, I did a crazy thing; armed with the hubris of youth, I marched myself off to a ten-day Vipassana retreat; no questions asked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. To be fair, I was in a desperately seeking place of my life; still, Vipassana is a meditation practice dating back over 2,500 years to the teachings of the Buddha, and the silent retreats that take place around the world brim with a schedule that is uncompromisingly rigorous; ten hours of silent meditation a day, punctuated only by short breaks and minimal instruction, with strict rules against talking, eye contact, or any form of distraction.
You can’t take your phone, a book, or even a notebook and pen; it is literally as close to detaching from all external output that one might find, barring self-isolation in a cave (let’s leave that to the Tibetan masters). Ten years on, and I’m shocked that I did it — and as selectively instructive as memory is I don’t remember truly getting knotted in suffering or boredom. At least, that’s what I like to remember. As I’ve grown up, and as technology has become increasingly invasive and omnipresent, Vipassana feels like an inaccessible concept; how the hell could I ever do such a thing? Now, I fear few things more than the vanishing spaces of true mental stillness, or my capacity to allow my psyche to regenerate. As my friend and performance artist Louise Westerhout says, our visceral reaction to being bored, “is our attachment to consuming the moment.”
Boredom used to be everywhere; in the stretch of breaktime, the shuffle of school corridors, the long commute in the car on the way to work, the wait on the corner for a friend to meet you; boredom was only ever that liminal pause, and now it is one of our most feared states of being. So, it’s of course an incredible irony of our time that at the very peak of overstimulation and distraction, boredom is now being understood as nourishment for our brains.
The lull of time, expertly paved over with scrolling, swiping, and a constant stream of noise — serves as a refusal of the necessary inner communication with ourselves. Personally, I can track the very moment I started to slowly become almost somatically and psychologically at odds with boredom to the advent of Facebook and Tumblr in my early teens, when I would come home and spend hours digitally collaging the stretched-out semblance of a self still forming.
Boredom has been systematically commodified; a pause in our attention offers up a ripe opportunity for capture, as algorithms detect even the slightest hint of inattention and respond with content engineered to pull us back in, turning what was once a natural space for reflection into a marketplace for our attention. As Drew Haller called in her recent CEC piece, ‘Killing Counterculture: How Algorithms and Big Tech Threaten Creative Diversity,’, constant digital distraction means our very creative instincts are at stake; “for our own sake, we must significantly reduce time spent on the apps, and reprioritise a commitment to the belief in art’s ability to move us. Because if the current media landscape only rewards speed and virality, then the best we can do is prioritise slowness and depth, assume intricacy and critique dominant ideology.”
Photography by Renzy Laurel, via Pexels
Photography by Cottonbro Studios, via Pexels
Boredom, as research is increasingly showing, is a crucial state for nurturing creativity and imagination. Psychologists at the Child Mind Institute highlight that when children experience boredom, they develop essential cognitive and emotional skills, including planning, persistence, and emotional regulation — provided they are given the space to act on it. Boredom nudges children toward unstructured, adult-free play, which has been linked to creative problem-solving but also to brain development, including enhanced neural connectivity and executive function.
These findings suggest that boredom is a cognitive opportunity that allows children to explore their inner worlds and test the limits of their imagination. Also, As psychologist Stephanie Lee says, sitting in boredom might have implications for broader life skills; “boredom might not be super distressing, but it’s not fun. Life requires us to manage our frustrations and regulate our emotions when things aren’t going our way, and boredom is a great way to teach that skill.”
In adults, boredom continues to play a vital role in mental flexibility and idea generation. Studies indicate that engaging in repetitive, monotonous tasks can prime the brain for divergent thinking; the kind of original, non-linear thinking that produces novel insights rather than recycled content. Boredom creates a low-arousal mental state, free from constant stimulation, in which we can make connections between memories, or tangents can unfold; basically, the mind can wander into unexpected territory, previously prevented by distraction from stimulation. In essence, boredom acts as “mental compost,” providing the fertile ground from which creative and original thoughts can sprout. Embracing boredom, therefore, might be essential for problem-solving throughout our lifetime – or as the girlies say, manifesting.
Apart from the obvious marketing benefits of boredom’s bad rap, as Naomi Klein notes in her seminal work on the corporatisation of almost everything, No Logo, “Brands want you busy, distracted, constantly consuming,” what is it that makes an unimposed dialogue with our own minds so harrowing? Well, it’s a tale as old as thought itself: a rejection to what the Buddhists call the monkey mind – the restless, erratic, and incessantly chattering quality of consciousness, that at once unsettles us and drives much of our inner-life.
Our thoughts, often irrational and chaotic, demand attention, and are pretty adept at stirring anxiety, doubt, or frustration when we attempt to simply inhabit them (it turns out, continuous questioning of our surroundings is an evolutionary survival mechanism). In a world geared to drown the self in noise, facing our internal wilderness can be raw and disorienting.
The paradox of this tension point (as there often is in this reality) is that while our restless thoughts can feel unbearable when left unchecked, they are also the very engines of imagination, and a radical site of our own potential. Boredom forces us into what psychologists might call “default mode,” a state in which connections spark between seemingly unrelated ideas, and insight emerges from the tension of idleness. In resisting this inner chaos, we may gain temporary comfort, but we forfeit the deeper, and often transformative dialogue with ourselves that boredom uniquely demands.
So, how do we reclaim boredom? For me, it’s the daily task of walking my dog without any earphones, and a self-imposed ban on checking my phone unless for the time – but honestly, it can be anything you want. These are the kinds of practices we have discussed at length on CEC; in being distraction free, even just for a moment, as you wait for a friend at a restaurant and look around, rather than down at a screen, as essential to navigating the 21st century. Getting comfortable with boredom starts with noticing the spaces we habitually fill with noise and distraction, and deliberately leaving them unoccupied. Whether it is the wild rush of stepping outside your house without a device, or letting a routine task unfold without rushing to the next thing; these moments, though modest, create the conditions for thought to emerge organically; our half-baked ideas, dreams, and reflections that would otherwise be drowned in constant stimulation, emerge to tell us something, or even – to take action in realising them.
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once wrote, pretty grimly, that “Boredom is the root of all evil – the despairing refusal to be oneself.” How, he asked, can we ever hope to know who we truly are if our attention is always turned outward, perpetually captured by screens, feeds, and the demands of others? Boredom, in this sense, is a crucible for self-awareness; and what more terrifying beautiful thing is there to do than to confront our own minds and reckon with the patterns, impulses, and possibilities that make us who we are?
Written by Holly Beaton
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