I like to watch people standing at the traffic lights. I like it, but then I feel sorry. Almost all of them, in the few seconds of waiting, compulsively take out their smartphones: as if those twenty seconds of inactivity represented a threat, an unbearable void to be filled at all costs. Daydreams, once faithful companions of our moments of pause, have become an endangered species.
We have sacrificed them on the altar of efficiency and continuous stimulation. Yet, it was precisely those moments apparently “wasted” in mental wanderings that nourished our creativity, built our capacity for anticipation, and gave us the opportunity to process emotions and thoughts. Today, no one wants to be bored anymore. And this, paradoxically, is making us much more boring.
When boredom was normal
There was a time when boredom was simply a part of life. I am a Gen Xer who grew up without any portable technology more sophisticated than a “Jiminy Cricket” (if you are my age, you know what I mean). Our empty hours had to be filled in other ways, mostly by going out and doing things with friends. Some watched TV, but the programming options were limited. Boredom was part of life, and I accepted it.. What's more, we often got something good out of it.
Contrast this with my daughter, Generation Alpha, born in the age of mobile technology. She and her ilk must never be bored: every platform, every app for kids accustoms them to the idea that they must not be bored. I worry about how this will change their expectations and ability to deal with delays, frustrations, and empty time as adults.
Because boredom has a purpose. To understand and harness it, we need to give our minds more opportunities to experience it, rather than fighting it like an enemy to be defeated at all costs.
The extinction of interstitial time
We used to just stare at the view out the window. Marshall McLuhan observed that in Greece men used the komboloi (a kind of rosary) to pass the time. This reflected a deeply felt human need to fill interstitial time. We all do these little rituals: scribbling, fidgeting, knitting; many smoked.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi he called these “microflow activities that help us get through the dead moments of the day.” While the experience of boredom is profoundly human, what we resort to when we experience it is socially structured, unique to our historical moment.
The komboloi and cigarettes of earlier times have given way to smartphones. Ours is a less carcinogenic but no less harmful distraction, with long-term impacts we are only just beginning to understand. Secondo Pew Research, nine out of ten Americans own a smartphone and 95% of teenagers have access to it. Half of teenagers aged 13 to 17 said they were online “almost constantly”. In Europe, however, prevalence exceeds 80% among 9-16 year olds in many countries (including Italy, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Croatia, Lithuania, Norway, Romania, and others.)
In short, the “average person” in the West spends most of his free time looking at a screen. What has significantly decreased is the free time spent with other people.
A world that never leaves you alone
What happens when we replace boredom with constant distraction and stimulation? Warnings about the harmful effects of too much stimulation are not new. Sigmund Freud observed:
“For a living organism, protection against stimuli is almost a more important function than the reception of stimuli.”
And given the range and speed of stimuli at our disposal, we may need a new way of thinking about their effects.
It is a reasonable human impulse to seek distraction from the uncomfortable experience of boredom. What is new about our current moment is that the method we choose to relieve boredom in the short term has long-term negative impacts on our attention span and our ability to practice patience. We have created a stimulation machine far beyond anything imaginable in Freud's time.
In a some letters and Aldous Huxley exchanged with George Orwell in 1949, we read: “I feel that the nightmare of 1984 is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world more like the one I imagined in Brave New World.”
What did Huxley see in this dystopia? Not a global world order or a charismatic despot, but change “as a result of a perceived need for greater efficiency.” How damn right he was, my friends. We enjoy the efficiencies and distractions that technology brings, but it leaves us less skilled at patience.
We are taught to value efficiency above all else and to be suspicious of idle time, when we should see moments of downtime as opportunities for reflection and renewal.
The Unfortunate Death of Daydreams
A boredom-free culture focused on efficiency also undermines daydreaming, another thing that interstitial time used to be devoted to. “Daydreaming” seems like an antiquated term in an age when productivity and usefulness are prized. But as psychologists and neurologists have discovered, a wandering mind (often the first sign of impending boredom) he is also a creative mind.
In the 60s, the psychologist Jerome Singer, the grandfather of daydream studies, identified three types of mental wandering: the productive, creative “positive constructive fantasy”, the obsessive “guilty-dysphoric daydreaming” and “poor attention control”. Singer believed that daydreaming was a positive adaptive behavior—a bold departure from the conventional wisdom of the time, which linked daydreaming to other psychopathologies such as excessive fantasizing.
Since then, researchers have found numerous positive effects in a “wandering mind.” The psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman he summed them up: “self-awareness, creative incubation, improvisation and evaluation, memory consolidation, autobiographical planning, goal-driven thinking, future planning, retrieval of deeply personal memories, reflective consideration of the meaning of events and experiences.”
Daydreaming is also a memory boost. As he claims Stefan Van der Stigchel In “Concentration: Staying Focused in Times of Distraction,” “When you daydream (or mind wander, as it’s called in scientific circles), memories you thought were lost forever can come flooding back.” She adds that the neural activity observed during daydreaming is very similar to that found in the “default network,” a network of brain regions that are active during periods of rest.
End of the preview
Now that we have so many ways to fill even the smallest fragments of time, our psychology of expectation has changed. We are more likely to experience waiting as an unpleasant delay rather than as anticipation. Waiting has become a problem to be solved, rather than a logical, human experience. When we become accustomed to filling time easily, opportunities for anticipation, like opportunities for daydreaming, disappear.
Anticipation is a kind of preparation for the future. Actively embracing anticipation is also important for your emotional health. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio He calls this practice the “imagination response,” and in many ways it resembles daydreaming in its power to prepare the mind for new experiences. Because of this, despite the enormous number of stimuli, we never feel prepared.
Wake up your daydreams. And try to get bored
Does it matter if we no longer tolerate boredom, let our minds wander, cultivate a sense of anticipation, and practice patience? Our demand for immediate answers is voracious, and not all bad. It drives innovation and commerce and has enabled communication on a scale barely imaginable a century ago.
However, living a full and meaningful human life means facing the liminal, those in-between moments in life when we must endure uneasy or uncomfortable experiences, from boredom at a meeting to witnessing someone else's illness to simply being stuck on a bus.
As parents, we have a crucial role in teaching children how to deal with boredom, and it can be as simple and old-fashioned as telling them, “Go outside and play.” Instead of handing a child a distraction slot machine, encourage them to invent their own game or activity. Rather than structure and organize an activity for our children, let them figure it out on their own, or with their peers.
Try it too: for a day, don't reach for your smartphone during small breaks in your routine, like waiting for the train, or sitting in your car at a stoplight. Pay attention to your surroundings, or let your mind wander. It seems like a simple experiment, but it reveals our bad habits. Reaching for the phone every time is the easy solution, but it has long-term harmful consequences for individuals and society.
In other words: a little boredom is good for us, so next time you have a free minute, be rebellious: daydream.
