In Praise of Boredom

There was a time, not so long ago, when waiting was simply something you did. You stood at a bus stop and watched the traffic, or sat in a waiting room studying the pattern of the carpet, and the minutes passed with the peculiar slowness of minutes that have nothing in them. That kind of empty time has all but vanished. Every pause in the day, from the line at the pharmacy to the seconds before a traffic light changes, can now be filled with news, messages, games or the bottomless scroll of other people's lives. For perhaps the first time in history, boredom has become optional.

It is tempting to treat this as an unqualified victory. Boredom is unpleasant by definition, and few people have ever wished for more of it. Yet the ease with which we now escape it ought to make us a little suspicious. In the seventeenth century, the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal observed that human unhappiness can be traced to a single cause: people cannot bear to sit quietly in a room by themselves. He was not offering advice on interior decoration. Pascal believed that we chase diversions of every kind, from gambling and hunting to war, precisely so that we never have to be alone with our own thoughts, and he reached this conclusion more than three centuries before anyone carried a screen in a pocket.

His point cuts both ways. On the one hand, it suggests that our restlessness is nothing new: we never needed technology to flee from ourselves, and those who blame our devices for an ancient human habit are giving the devices too much credit. On the other hand, it reminds us that the flight used to be possible only up to a point. There were long evenings, solitary journeys and dull afternoons that no amount of ingenuity could fill. What has changed is not our desire to escape, but the efficiency with which that desire can now be satisfied.

Boredom deserves a closer look before we abolish it altogether. It is not the same as rest, which restores us, nor the same as idleness, which can be a perfectly contented state. Boredom, by contrast, is restless: the wish to be engaged combined with the absence of anything worth engaging with. In this sense it resembles hunger. It signals that something is missing, and like hunger, it can be answered well or badly. Reaching for the nearest distraction whenever boredom stirs may be the mental equivalent of answering every pang of hunger with sugar: satisfying in the moment, and impoverishing over time.

What, then, might boredom be good for? Anyone who has had an idea in the shower, or solved a problem on a long and uneventful walk, knows that the mind left to itself does not simply switch off. It wanders, it recombines, it returns to questions it seemed to have abandoned. Children with nothing to do will usually, after a period of loud complaint, invent a game. Boredom, in other words, is often the discomfort that comes just before initiative, and if we always relieve the discomfort at once, we may never discover what it was about to produce.

It would be dishonest, however, to romanticize the condition. The boredom of a repetitive job, a hospital ward or a prison cell is not a creative opportunity but a form of suffering, and those who praise boredom most warmly tend to be people who are free to end it whenever they wish. Nor does boredom lead reliably anywhere good; it can drive people to recklessness as easily as to art. The case for boredom is not that it is pleasant, or even that it is always productive, but that a life without any empty spaces in it is poorer in ways that are easy to overlook.

Perhaps the real cost of constant stimulation is not that we are never bored, but that we never stay with anything, boredom included, long enough to find out what lies on the other side of it. We speak of paying attention as if it were a currency, and never has it had so many eager collectors. The remedy need not be dramatic. It might mean leaving the phone in a pocket on the bus, walking without headphones, or tolerating the first uncomfortable minutes of an empty afternoon instead of reaching for relief. Pascal's room, after all, was never meant to be a prison. The point is not to stay in it forever, but to stay long enough to meet the person who has been sitting there all along.