The Uses of Boredom

Boredom feels like an empty room, and our first instinct is to fill it. We reach for a screen, a snack, a conversation, anything at all to escape the small discomfort of having nothing to do. We treat the feeling as a problem to be solved as quickly as possible. But boredom may be doing something useful precisely when it feels most useless. It is the mind, having run out of easy stimulation from the outside, beginning to turn inward and invent its own. Many of our best ideas arrive not while we are busy and focused but during the dull, undirected stretches that a busy life leaves no room for. Think of a child left alone with nothing: before long, the floorboards become a river and the couch becomes a ship. A child who is never bored never learns to make a game out of nothing, never discovers that the imagination can supply what the world withholds. If we numb every empty moment the instant it appears, soothing it away with a glowing screen, we may be trading away the very restlessness that creativity needs in order to begin.