I Think We've Forgotten How to Be Bored

I noticed recently that I can barely wait for the kettle to boil anymore.

Not because I’m rushed; more often than not, I’ll have the phone in my hand before I’ve even properly registered that I’m in the kitchen. Somewhere between opening Instagram for “just a second,” half a dozen reels, and finding myself reading three comments deep in a row about someone else’s holiday, the kettle has boiled, and I’ve already missed the small stretch of quiet that used to come with it.

I reckon somewhere along the line we’ve become suspicious of doing nothing. A queue in Aldi that isn’t moving at Formula One pace, someone texting “parking now” - thirty seconds of empty space now feels like something that needs filling.

What interests me isn’t the scrolling itself, it’s what I’m interrupting. I don’t think we’ve become bad at waiting; I think we’ve forgotten what waiting was quietly doing for us. I believe we've become uncomfortable with unfilled space, and our phones have become remarkably good at making sure we never have to sit with it for long. Somewhere along the way we've become convinced that every spare thirty seconds is a productivity opportunity. Waiting for the microwave? Duolingo. Walking the dog? Podcast. As if we've all quietly agreed that the only acceptable way to wait for something is to do something else at the same time. 

More, I wonder if we’ve become so practised at paying attention to everything around us that we’ve forgotten how to pay attention to ourselves, the tiny conversations we used to have throughout the day. “God, I’m actually wrecked today.” “That conversation bothered me more than I realised.” “I really can’t wait for the weekend.” “That made me laugh.” “I didn’t even realise I’d been clenching my jaw.” They’re hardly groundbreaking, but they’re how we stay in relationship with ourselves. We check in on friends, ask our partners how their day was, remember birthdays. What if the relationship we spend the least time tending to is the one we have with ourselves?

Relationships are built through conversation, and conversations need pauses. Imagine someone interrupting you every time you opened your mouth - eventually you’d stop trying to speak. I sometimes wonder if we’ve started doing something similar to ourselves. Before a thought has the chance to properly arrive, we’ve usually found something else: a podcast before we’ve left the driveway, scrolling while the television is on, the phone while we cook. It’s become surprisingly difficult to let one thing simply be one thing.

Sometimes that's completely harmless. Sometimes I really do just fancy watching somebody restore a rusty frying pan for seven uninterrupted minutes on YouTube, and before I know it I'm oddly invested in the final reveal. I'm not suggesting every quiet moment needs to become a profound spiritual experience; sometimes a restored frying pan is just a restored frying pan. But I think part of me still recognises the value of that kind of empty space. Long car journeys as a child were full of that kind of waiting. We'd count cows, race raindrops down the window, stare out at fields for miles. Looking back, I don't remember boredom so much as I remember my imagination quietly getting on with something. I have a feeling that part of us is still there, waiting. 

What might happen if you sat for two minutes without reaching for your phone? Maybe nothing much. Or maybe Tuesday’s awkward conversation would wander back in. Maybe you’d remember to buy milk, or remember somebody you miss.

One of the simplest questions I find myself coming back to in the therapy room is, "What are you noticing?"

It’s often met with a pause. Not because the person doesn’t have an answer, but because they’re checking for the first time that day. Sometimes they realise they’ve been holding their breath. Sometimes their shoulders are up around their ears. Now and then someone smiles, almost apologetically, and says, “I actually don’t know.” Those are some of the moments I love most in the work. Not because anything dramatic has happened, but because someone has finally given themselves enough quiet to hear their own experience. It was never hiding. It had simply been waiting for a little bit of space.

We often assume that what’s waiting for us in the stillness is something difficult. And sometimes it is: grief, anxiety, or the realisation that we've been running on empty for longer than we'd admitted. But here’s the part I don’t think we talk about enough: sometimes what we’ve stopped noticing is joy. The little flicker of pride after doing something difficult. The feeling of opening the curtains and noticing it’s a lovely day. The relief of finishing something that’s been hanging over you for weeks. The quiet contentment of driving home after a lovely evening with friends. When we stop leaving ourselves enough room, we don't just miss the hard stuff. We miss the quiet reminders that life has been happening to us too. And before long, we can end up missing ourselves altogether.

I wonder if that’s part of what we’ve misunderstood about boredom.

Maybe those little pauses were never empty. Maybe waiting had been quietly doing far more for us than we'd realised. It was where our minds quietly caught up with us. Perhaps it's no coincidence that so many of our best ideas arrive in the shower, halfway through a walk, or while staring out at the rain. Those moments aren't magical. They're simply some of the few moments left where nothing else is asking for our attention.

Mindfulness has suffered a bit from its own reputation. Somewhere along the way it got wrapped up in apps, expensive classes, and yet another thing we should probably be doing better , as if it only counts if you’ve got twenty uninterrupted minutes, a yoga mat, and a playlist that sounds like you’re wandering through a rainforest. We've somehow managed to turn noticing into another thing to achieve. 

I don’t think it’s nearly as complicated as we’ve made it. At its heart, it’s just noticing. And maybe that’s exactly what we’ve become so good at avoiding, not because we’re running from ourselves, but because we’ve got so used to filling every spare second that we barely notice the space was there in the first place.

The irony is that we've never known more about what's happening everywhere else. We know tomorrow's weather before we've opened the curtains, we know there's traffic on the South Link before we've even left the house, and we know what somebody we haven't spoken to since secondary school had for dinner on Tuesday night. Yet if somebody asks us, "How are you, really?", many of us genuinely have to stop and check.

Not because we don't care. Perhaps we've just fallen out of the habit of asking ourselves. And before anyone starts worrying, this isn’t the part where I tell you to throw your phone away. But every now and then I wonder what might happen if we let the kettle boil without reaching for anything. If we went for an evening walk without a podcast. If we gave ourselves the occasional ordinary moment that didn't have to be productive, entertaining, or optimised into something useful. 

Maybe boredom was never really the point. Maybe it was simply the space that allowed something else to arrive - a thought, a feeling, or the answer to a question we hadn’t given ourselves time to ask.

We ask that question of the people we love all the time. I wonder what might change if, every now and then, we remembered to ask ourselves.

“How am I, actually?”

And then waited long enough - even just as long as it takes the kettle to boil - to hear the answer.