I have an old memory. A man sitting on a low wall at the edge of a field in the late afternoon, looking at the grass. Not waiting for anything. Not solving anything. Just looking at the grass move, or not move, while the light went down. No phone, obviously. No book. No podcast whispering productivity into his ears. He could stay like that for what felt, to a restless child, like an eternity. If you asked him what he was thinking about, he would have looked at you with mild surprise. “Nothing. Why would I be thinking about something?” That man was my grandfather.
At that time, I used to find that incomprehensible, almost suspicious. Now I find it close to miraculous.
Because I can’t do it. Or at least I can’t do it the way I’d like to do it. Because even an empty mind may be something to achieve. You know, I have spent years training to do it. Zen, mindfulness, my own little Shultz Hour, cigars smoked slowly with the explicit goal of wasting time well. And yet the moment a gap opens up in my day, some reflex reaches for the phone before I’ve even decided to. The elevator. The queue at the pharmacy. The thirty seconds while the pasta water comes to a boil. The brain, it turns out, is never off. We’ve simply gotten very good at pretending the constant low hum is the same thing as silence.
I want to defend something unfashionable here, and I want to be precise about it, because I’ve written before about otium and I don’t want to repeat myself. Otium, for the Romans, was a noble thing: the cultivated leisure of Cicero retiring to write, of Seneca insisting that the mind needs rest the way a field needs to lie fallow. It was leisure with a destination. What I want to defend is the thing that comes before otium, the raw material, the part nobody romanticizes: boredom. Plain, uncomfortable, slightly itchy boredom. The state my grandfather was in on that wall, though I suspect he wouldn’t have dignified it with a name at all.
It’s worth remembering that “boredom” as a word is young. It’s often credited to Dickens, who popularized it in “Bleak House” in 1852, though the word had already been drifting through newspapers and magazines for a couple of decades before he got to it. Either way it’s a child of the nineteenth century, arriving right as the modern, accelerating, industrial world was being assembled. Which is a lovely irony: the word settled into common use at almost the exact moment we started building the machines that would let us escape the experience. And we have been escaping it ever since, with extraordinary success. Television gave us the first reliable off-ramp. The smartphone paved the off-ramp, lit it, and put a vending machine every three meters along the way. There is now no moment so small that it cannot be filled.
Here’s my worry. Boredom is uncomfortable for a reason, and the discomfort is the point. It’s the friction that pushes the mind to wander, to free-associate, to make the strange lateral jumps that don’t happen when you’re focused and don’t happen when you’re entertained. Neuroscientists have a name for what switches on when we stop doing things on purpose: the default mode network, the brain’s idling state, which turns out to be where a lot of memory, imagination, and self-reflection quietly happen. It’s the engine room of daydreaming. And we have spent twenty years carpet-bombing it with content.
One of my favorite philosophers, Blaise Pascal, saw the whole thing coming, three and a half centuries early. “All of humanity’s problems,” he wrote, “stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Left alone with ourselves, with no diversion, we would meet something we’d rather not meet, and so we’d do almost anything to avoid the encounter. He was describing a man with nothing in his pockets. Imagine what he’d make of us, each carrying a rectangle engineered by some of the smartest people alive for the express purpose of making sure that sitting quietly in a room alone never, ever happens again.
I don’t think the answer is to throw the phone in the river, much as the gesture appeals to me. I’m a founder; I’ve chosen a life that doesn’t leave a lot of low walls to sit on, and I’d be a hypocrite to pretend otherwise. But I’ve started to treat boredom as a resource to be protected. A rationed luxury.
That’s the whole secret, I think. The good ideas, the real ones, almost never come while you’re chasing them. They come in the shower, on the walk, in the queue, in the unguarded minute you forgot to fill. They come to people who have left a little room for them to land.
So this is a small, quiet argument for being bored: a right we’re at risk of forgetting we ever had. The right to a mind that is, for a few minutes, going nowhere in particular.
Try it today. Find your wall. Look at the grass.
And, whatever you do, leave the phone in your pocket.
