In defence of boredom

Last Tuesday I stood in a queue at the post office for eleven minutes and did not once reach for my phone. I mention it because it felt like a small act of rebellion. Around me, nine of the other ten people were scrolling, their thumbs moving with the steady rhythm of people who have not been bored in years. I looked at the ceiling tiles, counted the strip lights and, somewhere around minute six, had a thought about my sister's wedding speech that I had been chasing all week.

Boredom has a poor reputation, and it is easy to see why. Psychologists define it as the unpleasant feeling of wanting to be engaged in something but being unable to find anything satisfying to do. In a well-known experiment published in Science in 2014, many people left alone in a bare room for fifteen minutes chose to give themselves a mild electric shock rather than simply sit there. Most had said beforehand that they would pay to avoid it. We dislike an empty mind, it seems, and get little practice at tolerating one.

That discomfort may be doing us a favour. Researchers at the University of Central Lancashire asked volunteers to copy numbers out of a phone book and then to think up uses for a pair of polystyrene cups. Those who had done the dull task first came up with more creative answers than a group who went straight to the cups. The lead researcher, Sandi Mann, suggests that a bored mind starts to wander, and that wandering is how it stumbles on connections that focused attention would never allow. Many writers describe the idea that arrives in the shower or on a long walk.

I am not claiming that boredom is pleasant, or that we should all sit in silence for an hour a day. Pupils in a grey classroom and workers given pointless tasks have good reason to complain. My worry is narrower. Every gap in the day, from the lift to the bus stop, is now filled before we have noticed it was there. The apps we use are built by people paid to make sure of that, and they are good at it. What disappears is the unstructured moment in which the mind turns inward and sorts out what it has been carrying.

So I have started a modest experiment of my own. The phone stays in my bag in queues and on trains, and I allow myself ten minutes of doing nothing after lunch. The first days were awkward and I felt twitchy. By the second week the twitch had faded, and I was noticing things: a man teaching his daughter to whistle, the way the light moves across the platform at four o'clock. Nothing profound has come of it yet. Even so, the wedding speech is written, and I wrote it in my head, standing in a queue.