Make Boredom Normal Again

Real breakthroughs rarely happen at 2x speed.

We have become allergic to the “gap.” If there is a five-second delay in an elevator, we claw at our pockets for our phones like we’re reaching for an EpiPen.

We’ve trained ourselves to swat boredom away the moment it appears, like a fly buzzing near our attention. In doing so, we’ve lost one of the few remaining habitats where depth actually grows.

This past weekend, I led a silent retreat. Students voluntarily chose to sit still, say nothing, and resist the urge to check if anything important was happening elsewhere. Revolutionary stuff.

Unsurprisingly, people got bored. And that’s when things got interesting. When there’s nothing obvious to do, the mind wanders off-script. Old questions resurface. Half-formed hopes stretch their legs.

By turning down the noise and allowing ourselves to get “bored,” we notice that far more is happening around us and through us than we normally realize. It’s wonderful—and it’s anything but boring.

Pascal nailed it centuries ago: humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. We are so used to being “on” that stillness feels like an emergency.

But doing nothing, it turns out, is not nothing. It’s an act of resistance.

As Catherine Price suggests, there’s hidden power in being the “weirdo gazing off into space” while everyone else hunches over a glowing rectangle. Perhaps the person staring at nothing in the checkout line isn’t wasting time. Perhaps they’re the only one actually here.

In the land of the distracted, the person who loves boredom is king.