May 7, 2026 May 7, 2026 2026-05-07

In 2009 I wrote about why we get bored, framing boredom as a diagnostic problem, something that we must cure, and I also tried to give a solution. And that was basically you understanding the gap between what you’re doing and what you want to be doing, closing that gap somehow, boom: boredom goes away. Practical and genuinely useful.

And a little bit backwards from what I’d say now.

The Original Definition Still Works

The 2009 post defined boredom as a state of anxiety and low self-respect — what happens when activities fail to produce satisfaction and you reject both the task and yourself. That’s accurate as a description of the experience. What I got wrong was treating it like “there’s something wrong with you”, like a condition to cure.

The assumption underneath the whole piece was that boredom just happens to you and your job is to escape it. I didn’t consider that the capacity to be bored might be worth something. Or that losing it could cost you something really worth having.

When Did You Last Actually Get Bored?

Try to remember the last time you were genuinely bored. Not between tasks, not waiting for something to load, not in a meeting that should have been an email. I mean actually bored — empty time, no input, nothing to react to.

I tried to remember mine recently and it took a while. And that’s because we live in a world now where the conditions for genuine boredom barely exist anymore. There’s always a phone to check, a message queue to process, something to answer to. If a gap opens up, something rushes in to fill it before you can even notice the gap was there. That’s not random – I think it’s by design.

The Business Model

The attention economy runs on boredom elimination. Every product in that category — social feeds, streaming, notifications — is optimized to catch you at the moment when your current activity fails to satisfy you and redirect that restlessness toward the product. This is exactly the activity gap the 2009 post described. It’s being currently deployed at industrial scale.

The business model requires that you never sit long enough in that uncomfortable space to find out what it’s pointing toward. Because it is pointing toward something. There is something underneath the feeling. Boredom has an inner sense of expansion — the original post got this right. It’s not just emptiness. It’s a signal about what you actually want, before the wanting gets redirected. In that sense, boredom is a signal, a symptom and barely a condition. Or, in programmer’s lingo: it looks like a bug, but it’s actually a feature.

What Boredom Actually Produces

The things I care about most clearly emerged from boredom, or from a state very close to it. Not from planning, not from productivity systems, but from long stretches with nothing forcing my attention in any particular direction. Staying in that uncomfortable space long enough crystallizes a sense of clarity. That pull I’ve talked about in other contexts — the sense that certain things are drawing you toward them rather than you pushing yourself — it comes from boredom. If you’re always engaged in something, you’ll miss that pull.

This is what we’re giving away, what we’re losing if we try to “cure boredom”. It’s the moment when you find out what you actually want, as opposed to what you’ve been handed to want, what you’ve been offered and blindly accepted.

Engineering It Back In

I’m not going to pretend I’ve solved this. I’m as susceptible to distraction as anyone. But I’ve started treating boredom less like a state to escape and more like a resource to be used. Walks without headphones. Meals without a screen. Time on a train where I don’t reach for the phone. Not because I’m virtuous (pretty far from it, actually) but because I’ve noticed what the alternative costs.

The 2009 version of me would have found this borderline cultivation of boredom a waste of time. That “me” was running a blog, was enthusiastically online, and genuinely excited by how much information was suddenly available.

In 2026 the problem is not the choice of activity. Plenty of that available. The problem is stillness and how you negotiate your position towards it.