Learning to Be Bored

A few days ago, I was watching a video without doing anything else on the side. My attention moved towards a distant glimmering light. It felt warm and oddly familiar, like those idle moments from childhood when I would daydream and let one thought lead to another.

I realised I had not felt that way in a long time.

I have been trying to get bored deliberately. Not because boredom is somehow good by itself, but because it might be the first moment where nothing else is deciding what I should pay attention to. I want to see what becomes possible when I stop filling every small gap.

The habit itself is easy to miss. I finish one thing, enter a tiny moment of waiting, and reach for my phone with a vague feeling that something must be there. My hand often moves before I have made any decision. The gap itself has become a cue.

Usually, nothing is waiting. I feel disappointed. If something is there, I engage with it and often end up irritated anyway. In both cases, I sometimes forget what I was about to do. The check does not just take a few seconds. It can erase the intention I had before it.

At first, I thought Instagram was the problem. I deactivated my account and was fine for a few weeks. Then the urge came back, especially when I was stressed or unsure what to do next. My screen time was still eight or nine hours. I had simply moved to Reddit, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Twitter. It was the same scroll in different interfaces.

That made me realise scrolling was not only entertainment. It was somewhere to hide when I did not know what to do next. The urge usually appeared when something was stressful, difficult, or ambiguous. The phone gave me an answer before I had to sit with the question.

So the problem was probably not any specific content. It was that the urge was choosing on my behalf.

The funny part is that I behave like I am afraid of internal silence. But whenever I get past the initial discomfort, I remember that I enjoy my own company. The anticipation and the actual experience are completely different. The fear seems to exist at the entrance.

Strength training and running have taught me that painful does not mean lethal. Sometimes the discomfort is the thing building you up. I was thinking boredom might be another version of that training. You stay with an unpleasant threshold for a bit and find out that it changes.

Boredom could also be a river we need to cross, into the promised land of “Flow state”.

Nothing is interesting all the way through. Before work becomes absorbing, before a few hours disappear without me noticing, there is usually a period where it is difficult, unclear, or just boring. Every flow state needs me to cross that river of boredom first.

I know what the other side feels like.

In college, my room often became my electronics lab. Once, I spent hours trying to build a high-voltage arc generator using the flyback transformer from an old television. I stood there trying not to electrocute myself, changing transistors and resistors to make the arc more powerful. I never finished it. I also did not notice how much time had passed.

At the end of those long hours, I had something. Even though it was incomplete, it felt satisfying. My mind was quiet, even if there was still some internal chatter. Things failed and I got frustrated, but the frustration belonged to the work. It did not make me leave it.

I do not think heroic discipline kept me there. The project kept giving me one small problem at a time. Choose a transistor, change a resistor, look at the arc, try again. Solving one thing gave me enough confidence to attempt the next. Those tiny feedback loops created momentum, and eventually momentum became flow.

Building was never only about the thing at the end. The hours themselves mattered. I was concentrating, learning how the system worked, and staying in contact with the work. The finished object was evidence of all that attention.

A make, or a build is attention made visible.

I feel a version of this tension with AI-assisted coding now. When I write code by hand, I get the same stream of small feedback moments. I choose one case, try something, inspect the result, and adjust. The software changes as my understanding of it changes. Writing the code is also a way of exploring the problem.

When I ask AI to implement a larger specification, there is more distance between the idea and the result. I explain what I want upfront, wait, and then inspect what comes back. I may get the output faster, but I lose some of the wandering and feedback that made building satisfying for me.

This does not make automation bad. Every tool removes some effort, and what counts as meaningful effort is different for each person. The question I need to ask is whether I understand what the tool is removing and whether I wanted that part gone. Did I come only for the output, or did I also come for the process of making it?

I recently read about the actor Gabriel Basso deleting Instagram after it showed him the view from the summit of Mount Everest. He was sitting on his couch and was shown a view that someone else had risked their life to reach. It bothered him enough to quit the platform. He got the peak without the climb.

I think I understand that reaction. The climb is not only a cost paid to see the view. The effort, skills, and problems along the way change the person doing it. Social feeds can show me the peak without the climb. Some uses of AI can build the thing without letting me go through the making. Both can give me an outcome while removing the part that might have changed me.

This is not an abstract problem for me. My brain often feels fried, as if there is nothing it wants to build. I know that is not my nature. I can still get work done, but I spend too much energy fighting distraction. I keep wondering what I could make if I did not have to win my attention back every time.

I am not looking for digital purity. I also do not want lower screen time just as a nice statistic. I need my mind to be available for the life I have already chosen. I want a couple of hours back to do things I love, and enough undivided attention to give those things everything I have.

Social media is not empty. I would miss the jokes my friends share and the ordinary updates from their lives. I learn from people who understand technology, training, and social justice better than I do. The problem is that connection, inspiration, education, and compulsion are all mixed into the same endless feed.

Twenty intentional minutes on social media are not necessarily bad. But the product does not respect that intention. It is designed to turn those twenty minutes into more.

Before I reach for the phone, I want to ask myself: am I doing this from habit, or with intention? Is it worth it? These questions create a small pause between the urge and the action. Maybe that pause is enough for the choice to become mine again.

But questions are not very useful if my hand moves before they arrive. So I am also adding some friction. I am uninstalling apps, logging out on the desktop, turning my screens greyscale, and keeping the phone away while I work or eat. The point is not prohibition. I only want enough distance for a decision to happen.

Morning makes the problem very obvious. I have been thinking of buying a separate alarm clock because I do not want the object that wakes me up to also contain an infinite feed.

The morning I want is quite simple. Wake up, get ready, make coffee, and go out to train. But even a useful article after coffee can become a productive-looking rabbit hole. Training keeps moving further away while I tell myself I am learning something. Maybe the better setup is to take the coffee outside instead of sitting down and giving the screen a chance to catch me.

I will know this experiment is working if I start making more things. If I can stay with one thing long enough to feel like I gave it everything I had. If difficulty or ambiguity gives me less of an urge to run away.

Success is not that I never reach for the escape hatch. It is that I can return.

Boredom is not the destination. It is probably the first step towards self-direction. It leaves enough empty attention to notice, choose, make, and stay when something becomes difficult.

I am trying to live outside the device.