Technology has supplanted boredom.

I’m going to say it: we don’t know how to be bored anymore.

Over on my other blog I write a parallel daily-ish set of articles about creativity and living a creative life. I’ve never really dug too deeply into the idea of boredom, but anecdotally I will tell you what is easily the number one killer of my creative productivity: distraction.

And technology is a garden of distraction.

Endless feeds of controversial conversation are just a tap away.

Apps are stuffed to the gills with complex news stories.

Games are readily available to kill a few contemplative moments with anything from a crossword puzzle to a battle royale. 

Hey, I used to get up each morning and from six am until breakfast I would work on my game project, write code, and debug interesting problems until everyone else in the house was up and ready for the day.  Lately, I do some word games on my phone and then doomscroll over a cup of tea. Distraction supplanted the boredom that drove me to create… but maybe that’s just me.

But beyond creative productivity, some scholars have argued that boredom is important to mental health, leaving our minds to wander and explore new ideas, and even a core aspect of culture: “Boredom is often considered a trivial and inconsequential emotion, but recent studies have shown that it can have a significant impact on our wellbeing, productivity, and even our health.“^[1]

Technology, it can be argued—and often simply observed—ensures we are never bored: there is always a device to pull from our pocket, a screen to gaze into, words and messages and images swirling around our brains.

What’s that doing to us?