You Need to Be Bored

When did you last feel bored?

Not tired. Not distracted. Just bored. With nothing pulling at you and nowhere to be.

I find myself thinking about this more than I expected to.

. . .

Growing up in India, I was bored all the time. There was not much to do. No real TV to speak of, no screens, no constant noise. So I would just sit. And at some point I found the big book rack in our home.

I became obsessed with the Atlas. Not for school, not for any reason really. I would just sit there turning pages, looking at countries, trying to read names I could not pronounce, wondering what those places looked like. Nobody told me to. It just happened, because there was nothing else going on.

Around that same time I started writing a diary. First I would write it for my grandfather, then I kept going on my own. That habit stayed with me for years. I never sat down and decided to become someone who keeps a diary. It just grew out of all that quiet time.

Back then I thought being bored was something to get through. Looking back, I think it was something that was actually building me.

I came across a video on YouTube recently. Arthur Brooks, a professor at Harvard, made it for Harvard Business Review. The title was simple: You Need to Be Bored. Here’s Why.

Brooks talks about something called the default mode network. It sounds technical but the idea is simple. When your mind has nothing to focus on, it does not switch off. It switches over. It starts to wander. And in that wandering, something happens. You start thinking about bigger things. Questions you never get to during a busy day. Things that matter to you but never quite rise to the surface.

He makes a point that stayed with me. Every time we feel even slightly bored and reach for our phone, we are cutting that process off. We never let the mind get there. And over time, without that space, something starts to feel hollow. We stay busy but we lose the thread of what we are actually doing it all for.

What struck me was not the research. It was the recognition. I had been feeling this for a while without having a word for it.

These days the closest I get to that childhood boredom is my drive between Irvine and UCLA. Sometimes it is an hour. Sometimes two. And I almost always turn everything off.

No music. No podcast. No calls.

Just the road and whatever is in my head.

What happens in that time is hard to explain. My thoughts just run. Like a movie that plays on its own. Things I have not had time to think about come up. Ideas connect in ways they do not when I am busy. Sometimes something useful comes out of it. Not because I was trying to solve anything. Just because I gave it room.

That drive is probably the only real idle time I have now. And I protect it.

A few years ago when my daughter was four, we put her into a Montessori school in Singapore. The school had one condition. Screen time had to come down to two hours a day.

We knew we were guilty. The TV had become the easy option. It kept her occupied so we could get on with things.

We agreed to the condition. And then we realised it was not just about removing the screen. We had to fill that time with something. So we gave her our time. We started reading to her. Slowly she started picking up books on her own.

She loves reading now. I watch her sometimes just sitting quietly with a book, completely in her own world. That did not come from us pushing her. It came from giving her space and then filling it with the right thing.

We gave her boredom back. And she did the rest herself.

I think about kids growing up today. Every quiet moment gets filled before they even notice it is there. A screen appears, something starts playing, the moment is gone. They never get the chance to just sit and not know what to do with themselves.

And I wonder what that means. Not in a dramatic way. Just quietly. What thoughts are not forming? What habits are not growing? What questions are never being asked, because there is never enough silence to ask them?

I am not saying phones are bad. I use mine constantly. But I do think we have all quietly stopped giving ourselves the one thing that used to come naturally.

Space to just be.

In my last piece I wrote about lingering. About how we have stopped pausing after we read something, stopped letting it settle before moving to the next thing. Boredom feels like the bigger version of that same idea. Not a pause after something. Just empty time. Time with no purpose, no input, no plan.

The Atlas did not teach me geography. The diary did not teach me to write. The silence did.

I do not have a solution to offer. I am just noticing something. And I wanted to ask you the same question I have been asking myself.

When did you last let yourself be bored?

I want to keep thinking about what this means for children, and also what happens as AI starts doing more of our thinking and writing for us. More on that soon.

If you missed the first piece

Lingering: on reading, attention, and the space between words and thought

References

Arthur Brooks, You Need to Be Bored. Here’s Why (Harvard Business Review, YouTube)

Maryanne Wolf, Reader Come Home

Arthur Brooks, The Happiness Files

Research on the default mode network: Marcus Raichle, Washington University