I don’t think we get bored anymore.
Not really.
Not the kind of boredom that hums in your chest like a low, empty note.
The kind that makes you stare at cracks in the ceiling or count the number of times the fan wobbles as it spins.
Now, the moment silence begins to stretch, we reach for something.
A screen, a scroll, a sound.
Anything that fills the pause before it even arrives.
And slowly, without realizing it, we’ve forgotten how to sit with nothing.
There was a time when boredom was… kind of magical.
It wasn’t pleasant, but it made space.
It gave your thoughts a place to wander, to trip over strange ideas and daydreams.
Somewhere between the endless notifications and the next “recommended for you,” that magic disappeared.
We didn’t kill boredom; we smothered it under convenience.
We traded it for something that feels like stimulation, but mostly just keeps us busy.
Everything’s new now.
Except nothing feels new.
We have infinite shows, infinite songs, infinite feeds — and somehow, all of it feels like déjà vu.
Maybe because it’s built that way.
The algorithm keeps handing us slightly different versions of what we already liked.
And it’s comforting, in a way. Familiar. Easy.
But it also means our sense of surprise, that little gasp of “oh, I didn’t know that existed,”
is fading quietly, like a word we’ve stopped saying.
Sometimes I think boredom wasn’t about having nothing to do.
It was about having room to feel something different.
When we let our minds get quiet, they start reaching for things that aren’t handed to them —
memories, possibilities, stories, solutions.
That’s why the best ideas arrive in the shower or during a long walk with no music.
The brain finally gets a second to breathe.
It starts looking inward instead of outward.
We’ve made it so easy to fill every second now that we’ve left no room for wonder.
And wonder needs emptiness to echo in.
I’ve started trying to do nothing again.
Tiny rebellions — like not opening my phone between tasks.
Letting a bus ride be just a bus ride.
Eating without watching something.
It’s weird at first. Uncomfortable, even.
But then it starts to feel… familiar.
Like bumping into an old friend.
And that’s what boredom is, I think.
An old friend we stopped calling because life got too loud.
Maybe the cure to feeling like nothing’s new isn’t finding something new —
it’s remembering how to sit with nothing.
Because that’s where newness hides:
in the quiet, unpolished, uneventful spaces.
In the part of us that still knows how to wait.
☕
So if you ever catch yourself reaching for your phone just to fill a silence —
maybe, just this once, don’t.
Let boredom find you again.
It’s been waiting patiently.
