craigmcn

There was a time when boredom was simply part of life. You sat in a waiting room. You rode the bus. You stood in line at the bank. There was nothing to do, so you did nothing. You stared out the window, let your mind wander, maybe solved a problem you hadn’t been consciously thinking about. Nobody called it mindfulness. It was just waiting.

Now we call it mindfulness and sell courses about it. The idea that you might sit quietly with your own thoughts, without input or stimulation, has become a wellness practice with an app, a podcast and a certification program. The fact that this is considered an achievement in 2025 says everything about where we’ve landed. We engineered away every idle moment and then repackaged the experience of having nothing to do as a skill you have to learn.

Smartphones are the obvious culprit, and it feels almost tedious to say so. But the effect is worth naming: there is no longer any such thing as an unoccupied moment. The 90-second wait for your coffee, the elevator ride, the commercial break, the three minutes before a meeting starts. Every one of those gaps, which used to be tiny opportunities for your brain to wander and reset, is now filled. We’ve handed our idle moments to an attention economy that is very good at making sure they stay filled.

What we’ve lost is not just rest. Boredom was historically where creativity lived. Unstructured time produced ideas, because a mind with nothing to do will eventually make something. “Unplugging” is how people describe what they’re doing when they go for a walk without their phone, as if the baseline state of human existence requires a name and an announcement. It doesn’t, or it didn’t. The fact that opting out feels like a deliberate act, something to mention, something to be a little proud of, tells you how thoroughly the default has shifted. We traded boredom for stimulation and called it progress.