The Value of Boredom Is the One Thing My Generation Was Not Taught

I had been in a continuous state of stimulation since approximately the age of twenty, moving seamlessly between one content source and another with a fluency that meant the experience of having nothing to look at or listen to or scroll through had not occurred to me in nearly a decade of adult life.

The boredom, when it arrived, arrived because of a flight from Hyderabad to London with a malfunctioning entertainment system and no internet connectivity and a battery that had died before the halfway point. Eight hours with nothing external to engage.

I want to describe the first two hours accurately: they were uncomfortable in a way that had nothing to do with the flight and everything to do with the specific restlessness of a mind that had not been unoccupied in recent memory and that did not know what to do with itself in the absence of input.

I did not reach for the book I had brought because the book felt too much like the passive receipt of someone else's content, which was not what the situation was offering. The situation was offering something rarer and less comfortable: my own thinking, unprompted by anything external, with no exit available.

By hour three something had shifted. I was thinking about a problem I had been not thinking about for weeks - not solving it, because the problem was not solvable in a single uninterrupted session, but circling it in a way that genuine uninterrupted attention allows.

By hour five I had the beginning of an approach to it that I could not have reached in any of my usual working sessions because those sessions were too fragmented by incoming stimulation to sustain the depth the thinking required. The boredom was not pleasant.

It was the most productive cognitive experience I had had in months, because boredom, it turns out, is not the absence of something interesting. It is the condition in which original thinking becomes available.