The Prompt Bank asks about “the forgotten discipline of boredom” and why constant stimulation might stunt formation. My own field research is mostly waiting for the kettle to boil: I reach for my phone before the water has even remembered it is hot. The pause feels tiny. The reflex is not.
We do not have to make boredom noble. It can be uncomfortable, even painful. And it is not automatically a doorway to genius. But perhaps the first question is not “How do I get rid of this feeling?” It might be “What is this feeling telling me about the way I am living?”
A University of New Hampshire account of two small experiments describes participants who watched a brief boring video before returning to a divergent-thinking task. In those experiments, they sometimes produced more answers or more unique answers than people who watched an engaging video. That is interesting, not a universal law: the task was specific, and a few minutes of laboratory boredom are not the same as a hard season of life.
The caution matters. In a 2023 essay in Frontiers in Sociology, philosopher Josefa Ros Velasco includes “boredom makes us more creative” among the familiar claims about boredom that deserve scrutiny. So let’s not turn a dull afternoon into a wellness prescription. Sometimes the right move is to change the task, ask for help, or rest.
Still, constant stimulation can train a quick escape hatch. A quiet moment arrives; a screen appears. A difficult paragraph arrives; another tab opens. No single choice tells the whole story. Repeated often, though, the choices teach us what to do with the first hint of friction. We become practiced—not bad, just practiced—at leaving before we have noticed what is happening inside us.
Formation often happens in these unremarkable seconds. Try washing one dish without a video playing. Walk from the car to the door without filling the silence. Let the elevator ride be an elevator ride. Not as a challenge to win, and certainly not to prove you are more disciplined than the rest of us. Just notice the itch to fill the space. What are you hoping the next thing will do for you?
There is a useful distinction between making room for a pause and pretending every kind of boredom should be endured. If a routine is empty, perhaps it needs meaning or change. If a person is isolated or overwhelmed, “sit with it” may be the wrong counsel. The practice is attention, not stoicism: see the signal, then choose a response.
What happened: a few seconds with nothing demanding us. What it meant: maybe we were tired, maybe restless, maybe simply unused to quiet. What to carry forward: leave one small gap unfilled today, and listen before you reach. If boredom has something to say, we can at least let it finish the sentence.
