There’s a peculiar panic that sets in when my phone battery hits 3% and I realise I’ll have to face the world, unfiltered and unscrollable, for the next 45 minutes. I can already feel the itch rising, that low-grade anxiety that comes when the thumb has nowhere to go. I’m told it’s called boredom. But maybe it’s something holier. Because what if boredom isn’t the absence of stimulation, but the presence of self?
When I was younger, boredom was a rite of passage. Long summer afternoons stretched like thick molasses. There was no Netflix to anesthetise me, no dopamine buffet of notifications. Just the ceiling fan, rotating like time itself, and me, an unwilling monk in the monastery of stillness.
We used to be good at being bored. We knew how to stare at the rain until it became a story. How to make a game out of shadows. How to think thoughts without immediately turning them into tweets.
Now boredom has become unbearable. We’ve pathologised it, given it a moral weight, as if being unentertained means being unproductive, and being unproductive means being unworthy. So we flee. Into reels, into Slack pings, into that urgent nowhere that is the internet.
But boredom, I’ve come to think, is not the enemy. It’s a portal.
In the silence that boredom demands, something happens. A memory surfaces. A question you’ve been avoiding whispers at the edge of your mind. A line of poetry arrives uninvited. You begin to notice the texture of your own life, the way sunlight sits differently at 4 p.m., or how your thoughts, when left unsupervised, can be tender, even strange.
The philosopher Walter Benjamin once said boredom is the “dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.” But in our time, we’ve caged that bird behind push notifications. We’ve lost the art of spacing out, of letting the mind wander until it stumbles upon itself.
Maybe this is why everything feels so fast and thin. We’ve stopped metabolizing time. We consume it. We don’t sit inside it.
So lately, I’ve been trying a small rebellion. I let myself be bored. I go for a walk without earbuds. I stare at the wall. I let minutes stretch and yawn. And sometimes, only sometimes, something quietly miraculous happens. A feeling unclenches. An idea blooms. A stillness takes root.
Maybe boredom isn’t an inconvenience after all. Maybe it’s a kind of prayer, a secular meditation for a generation terrified of silence. And boredom doesn’t just invite creativity; it invites clarity. In the absence of constant stimulation, priorities reveal themselves. We notice what we’ve been avoiding: the half-written letter, the conversation we’ve been postponing, the book gathering dust on the shelf. We hear the subtle hum of our own thoughts, and for once, we are not reacting to alerts or feeds or timelines. We simply are.
There’s a courage in doing nothing, a radical refusal to be continually entertained. It’s a small but powerful act of reclaiming time that is truly yours. Boredom teaches patience, the kind that cannot be downloaded or tapped away. It is a gentle tutor, showing us that waiting is not wasted, that silence can speak, and that our inner life is worth the occasional awkward stare into emptiness.
Perhaps, in the end, boredom is an antidote to the frantic illusion of control. It reminds us that we don’t need constant input to be whole, that we can inhabit our own minds without fear. So when your phone dies, or the world feels quiet, don’t panic. Sit. Stare. Let yourself breathe. Something inside you has been waiting to meet you all along.
So here’s my modest proposal: let’s bring boredom back. Let it ache and irritate and open you. Let it be the small, sacred doorway through which your truest self quietly walks in.
