I miss being bored

The moment I sat in the driver’s seat, I hit play. There was a podcast episode waiting. There’s always one waiting. I listened all the way to office. My brain was still on it at my desk. On the way back, another episode. Press play. Listen. Arrive.

By the end of the day I’d been “learning” for hours. I felt strangely empty.

It took me back to summers at my grandmother’s house. Excellent food, a daily walk to my aunt’s to catch some TV, and otherwise — nothing. No infinite scroll. No on-demand anything. Just long afternoons with nowhere to put your attention.

In that vacuum, I built things. Fighter planes from matchsticks, rubber bands, scraps of cardboard. I sketched spacecraft too — imaginary ones, meant to carry humans across the galaxy. No reference material. Just time, and a mind with nowhere else to go.

I haven’t sketched anything in years. Finding ten minutes to sit with a book feels like a struggle now. Every gap I might have left empty, I fill. The commute. The meal. The ten minutes before sleep. The boredom is gone. So is whatever it made.

David Foster Wallace said something about this in 2003 — that reading requires sitting alone in a quiet room, and that for a lot of people that now produces something closer to dread than boredom. He noticed that public spaces in America had stopped being quiet. Music piped into every corner. Not because people love the music, but because silence had become unbearable. That part of us that’s hungry for quiet, he said, never gets fed. And it makes itself felt, somewhere in the body.

That was 2003. It’s only gotten louder since.

I think we’ve confused a busy mind with a productive one. When your brain is processing someone else’s podcast, it isn’t making its own connections. It isn’t building spacecraft in its imagination. It’s just a passenger.

The podcast was good, by the way. I learned things. That’s not the problem.

The problem is I stopped leaving any room for my own thoughts to show up.