We wake up, and our phone is immediately in our hand – we scroll, we text, we check the weather, the news, our emails. Then it’s breakfast, which we eat while scrolling, tapping, and liking. We brush our teeth with a YouTube video on, walk to lectures while on the phone, eat lunch while watching TV. And then, when it’s time to sleep, our phones are the last thing we look at. Every day is the same.
When this reality is spelt out, it does sound slightly dystopian. With hundreds of thousands of hours of content and entertainment at our disposal – all accessible whenever and wherever – there is little reason to ever feel bored. When there’s a lull in the conversation, a queue to wait in, a moment of silence, we can pull out our phones and be instantly entertained. To us, boredom has become a gap to be filled, an empty space to be occupied with distraction. But perhaps, in our eagerness to fill these spaces, we have underestimated what they were doing for us.
Short-form content is everywhere on social media. A mere swipe-up on your phone can send you down the rabbit holes of TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. And sometimes, even the short-form content isn’t short enough. Our attention spans have become so fried that we won’t even watch the entirety of these 30-second videos, deftly scrolling after we’ve read the caption and seen the first 10 seconds. This quantity-over-quality style of media consumption, one which delays not only our having to feel bored but also our need to think critically, is having knock-on effects on all forms of media; even Netflix, famously designed for streaming long-form content, has a designated ‘Clips’ section now. Algorithms and media corporations have recognised that we are, in fact, becoming increasingly restless with engagement that requires patience or critical thinking.
Our unwillingness to accept boredom has not only changed how long we are willing to watch content, but how we watch it. I’ve noticed a tendency in modern films to use dialogue to over-explain – think exaggerated exposition scenes, where we are explicitly told how a character feels, rather than being clued in by context. Even the unnecessary inclusion of ostentatious, fast-moving action scenes is designed to draw our attention away from our phones. Films that present ambiguity or require interpretation can feel unusually demanding by comparison, and are thus often misconstrued. Engaging properly with films requires patience and active thought, but, faced constantly with media that immediately rewards us, we are becoming unfamiliar and thus uncomfortable with this. And it is not only that we are unwilling to actively engage with other media – a decline in media literacy has eroded our ability to do so.
As children, boredom was typically remedied with activities that required patience and creativity: drawing, writing, inventing. Now we have a whole generation of iPad kids who have never felt bored and likely will never have to. We, too, are now made so uneasy by boredom and the gaps that it creates in our lives that we avoid it completely. With this, though, we are losing access to the mental space that allows us to create our best ideas. We make our best decisions, have our best thoughts, and best understand the world around us when we allow ourselves the time to actually think, without a phone in hand or music in our ears. And nowhere is this discomfort with unstimulated thought more evident than when we have to actually concentrate on something.
When we try to study, we are forced to confront something that our phones have been shielding us from – the fact that not every moment will provide stimulation, entertainment, or immediate gratification. We have become so used to unthinkingly filling every idle moment that it can be a real struggle when it becomes time to switch our brains back on, especially after a long vacation spent without any academic stimulation. At Oxford, despite a barrage of deadlines and collections and essays constantly looming over us, the ever-present option of unlocking our phones and not having to think is increasingly tantalising. And then a five-minute break becomes a one-hour scroll. I’ll admit that I’m often the first to pull out my phone when struggling to come up with ideas, idly waiting in a queue or walking somewhere, but it is undeniable that sometimes we do just need to pause, to wait, and do nothing. It is precisely when we resist this urge, when we allow ourselves to feel and to sit in our boredom, that our brain begins to make important connections and create original ideas.
We’ve come to think of boredom as an inevitable but unpleasant gap between activities, or as space to fill, but we’ve stopped seeing that space as worthwhile in itself. Those ‘lightbulb’ moments where a crucial point suddenly comes to mind often occur in moments of inactivity, like when you’re in the shower and a thought pops into your head, or when you’re staring into space, struggling to write an essay, and an idea suddenly comes to you. It’s when we allow ourselves to exist with this feeling that we do our best work.
The discomfort that boredom brings is arguably necessary, not only in academia, but for life in general. Giving our brains space to actually think allows them to work, whether that be to problem-solve or to spark our creativity. So whenever you next find yourself waiting in a queue, or walking to a lecture, it might be worth not immediately trying to fill those gaps. Instead, try to see this time as something that needs to be embraced, rather than something to be filled. Maybe then what feels like empty space might not be so empty after all.
