The Fire Under the Chair, or: What We Lost When We Stopped Having Nothing to Do

There’s a kid at the next table in this coffee shop, maybe eleven or twelve years old, and he’s doing that thing where he cycles between three apps on his phone in a tight, almost mechanical loop. Instagram, TikTok, something else. Instagram, TikTok, something else. His thumb moves with the efficiency of a concert pianist, except nothing is being created; what he’s doing is closer to the motion of a person checking the refrigerator every nine minutes, hoping something new has materialized on the middle shelf. His mother sits across from him, also on her phone, and the two of them are together in the way two people in adjacent rooms are together, which is to say: technically.

I notice this partly because I was doing the same thing sixty seconds ago.

I had come here to write (or at least to think about writing, which sometimes feels the same but isn’t) and within four minutes of sitting down I’d opened my email, checked two news sites, scanned a thread about whether some streaming show is actually good or only good by the diminished standards we now apply to streaming shows, and then come back to my blank document feeling slightly less intelligent and much less motivated than before I started. The kid’s loop and my loop were, functionally, the same loop.

Which got me thinking about boredom, and specifically about its disappearance, and more specifically about whether the disappearance of boredom is one of those things we’ll look back on the way we look back on putting lead in gasoline¹, as in: how did nobody see this was a terrible idea?

Here is a fact almost nobody born after 1998 will believe: there was a time when being home on a Friday night with nothing to do was so common, so unremarkable, so devastatingly boring, that people would do almost anything to escape it. Not "anything" in the reckless, cinematic sense. Anything in the deeply mundane sense. They would call someone they’d been too nervous to call. They’d walk to a friend’s house unannounced (a behavior now so rare it registers as aggressive). They’d pick up a guitar, not because they had musical aspirations, but because the guitar was there and they were here and there was genuinely nothing else happening. The boredom didn’t feel productive at the time. It felt exactly how it sounds. But the boredom was doing something while it felt like nothing was happening, which is sort of the whole trick.

I keep coming back to the story of James Naismith. In 1891, stuck indoors during a New England winter with a class of restless young men who had nothing to do, he nailed a peach basket to a gymnasium balcony and handed everyone a soccer ball.² Basketball. The entire sport, the multi-billion-dollar global industry, the cultural force, the reason for March Madness and pickup games on cracked playground courts, all of it started because some people were trapped inside with nothing but time and their own agitation. You have to be extraordinarily bored to look at a peach basket and think, "What if we threw things into that?" And yet someone did. Because the boredom was a kind of pressure, and pressure, as any geologist or songwriter will tell you, makes things.

Or consider Gregor Mendel, the Augustinian monk who spent years (years!) in a monastery garden cross-pollinating pea plants to see what would happen.³ He tracked seven different traits across some 28,000 plants and in the process laid the groundwork for modern genetics. This was not a man with a Netflix queue. This was a man with peas, time, and a mind the boredom had freed up to wonder about things nobody else was wondering about. His findings were ignored for thirty-five years, which is its own kind of tragedy, but the point is: the work happened because the conditions for sustained, purposeless curiosity existed. He had space. Mental space, temporal space, the kind of space you get when there’s nothing pulling at your attention except the peas.

Now, I’m not saying boredom is enjoyable. It isn’t.⁴ That’s the whole point. Boredom is a signal, the way hunger is a signal, the way pain is a signal. It’s your nervous system telling you that the current state of affairs is insufficient, and something needs to happen, something needs to change, something needs to be done or made or attempted or at least considered. Blaise Pascal, writing in the 1600s, noted that humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Which, okay, is probably overstating it. (It’s hard to blame the Thirty Years’ War on restlessness.) But the observation underneath the hyperbole is sound: we are built to flee emptiness. The question is what we flee toward.

And here’s where things get complicated, or at least more complicated than the nostalgia-merchants on social media would have you believe.⁵ Because the old world didn’t just passively tolerate boredom. The old world weaponized it. If you were a kid in the 1980s, being grounded was a meaningful punishment specifically because being confined to your house meant being confined to your own thoughts, your own devices (the figurative kind, not the ones with screens), your own restless, fidgeting, agonizing boredom. And the boredom made you do things. Not always good things. Sometimes stupid things. But things. The activation energy required to pick up the phone and call someone you had a crush on was enormous, truly cardiac-event-level anxiety, but the boredom supplied the fuel. The person on the other end of the line, equally bored, was more likely to say yes to whatever you proposed, even if what you proposed was bowling, because bowling was better than the alternative, which was nothing.

That word, "nothing," is the one we’ve effectively eliminated from the human experience, at least in the developed world. Nothing used to be a real place you could end up, a psychological location with its own geography and weather. You could be stuck in nothing for an entire Saturday afternoon, and the nothing would eventually become so intolerable that you’d generate something out of sheer self-preservation. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who studied what he called flow states, observed that optimal experience tends to emerge not from leisure or relaxation but from the active engagement with a challenging task.⁶ And the precondition for that active engagement was, more often than not, having exhausted all the passive options first. You entered flow because you’d already cycled through boredom and come out the other side. Boredom was the antechamber.

What we’ve done with smartphones and infinite scrolling and algorithmic content delivery is, in effect, walled off the antechamber. We’ve made it so you never have to pass through the room where boredom lives. You can go directly from one hit of micro-stimulation to the next, all day, every day, from the moment you open your eyes until you fall asleep (often while still scrolling).⁷ Anna Lembke, the Stanford psychiatrist who studies addiction, describes the mechanism plainly: every notification, every new video, every refresh produces a small burst of dopamine, and the brain, forever seeking homeostasis, responds by downregulating its own pleasure receptors.⁸ The result is that you need more stimulation to feel the same amount of engagement. And more after that. And more after that. It’s not that the content is addictive in the way heroin is addictive. It’s that the delivery system, the scroll, the feed, the infinite autoplay, exploits the same reward architecture, the same circuitry that evolved to push us toward food and mates and shelter.

Which means: the boredom signal still fires. Your brain still registers the discomfort of under-stimulation. But you never sit with it long enough for it to do its work, because you’ve got a device in your pocket that will make the sensation go away instantly, the way a painkiller makes a headache go away instantly, which is to say: it addresses the symptom while completely bypassing the cause.⁹

I think about this in relation to the guys I see online (and it’s overwhelmingly guys, which is itself a whole separate essay) who talk about their inability to form romantic connections. There are entire communities organized around this particular misery, and the explanations they generate tend to be structural or conspiratorial: it’s feminism, it’s dating apps, it’s the economy, it’s the decline of institutions.¹⁰ And look, some of these factors are real, or at least real-adjacent; the world has changed, and not every change has been an improvement. But what almost never gets mentioned is the variable of boredom, or more precisely its absence. In an earlier era, the sheer emptiness of an unoccupied Friday night would, eventually, force you to do something terrifying, which was to risk rejection by another human being. The boredom created a pressure gradient, and the gradient pushed you out the door. Now there is no pressure gradient. There is always another video, another game, another thread, another season of something to half-watch while you eat delivery food. The discomfort never builds to the point where action becomes necessary, which means the action never happens.

This isn’t about willpower. I want to be clear about that, because the willpower explanation is the one comfortable people like to deploy, the one that lets you feel superior to the kid in the coffee shop or the twenty-six-year-old who hasn’t been on a date in two years. The attention economy is a trillion-dollar industry staffed by some of the smartest engineers on Earth, and their entire job is to ensure that the sensation of boredom, of emptiness, of not-enough, never persists long enough to become generative.¹¹ They are very, very good at this job. Infinite scroll was a design choice. Autoplay was a design choice. The pull-to-refresh gesture, the one that mimics a slot machine’s lever, was a design choice.¹² These are not accidents of technology; they are features engineered to prevent exactly the kind of discomfort that used to make people write songs and start businesses and walk to their neighbor’s house on a Tuesday evening for no particular reason.

Unfinished business occupies a privileged space in memory; the brain keeps the file open, keeps returning to it, keeps nudging you toward resolution.¹³ The creative implications are obvious: an unfinished melody, an unsolved problem, an unanswered question, these stay with you, gnaw at you, drive you to revisit and recombine until something emerges. But the this only works if you leave things unfinished. If every experience is bite-sized and self-contained, if every video is thirty seconds and every article is a headline and every interaction is a notification, then nothing remains open. Everything is a closed tab. There’s no cognitive residue, no lingering unease, no nagging sense that something isn’t resolved. The brain’s filing system stays neat and empty.

And empty, it turns out, is different from bored. This is the distinction I keep wanting to make and keep failing to articulate perfectly, though maybe imperfect articulation is the best any of us can do with this stuff. Boredom has a quality of tension to it, a spring-loaded quality; it wants to move toward something. Emptiness is flat. Boredom is the state of having no good options and wanting one desperately. Emptiness is the state of having been given so many micro-options, so many tiny dopamine transactions per minute, that the wanting itself has been anesthetized. The fire under the chair has been replaced by a warm hum, pleasant enough to keep you seated, too faint to make you stand.

I catch myself in this state more often than I’d prefer to admit.¹⁴ There are evenings when I look up from my phone and realize I’ve spent forty-five minutes consuming content I can’t remember, that I couldn’t summarize if you paid me, that left no residue at all, and the specific feeling in those moments is not guilt (though there’s some of that) or even regret (though there’s that too) but something closer to bewilderment. Where did the time go? Not in the metaphorical sense. Literally. What just happened? Because something was happening, obviously, electrons were moving, photons were entering my eyes, neurons were firing, but whatever was happening wasn’t generating anything. No thought. No question. No itch. Just consumption followed by more consumption followed by a vague hunger for more consumption.

I think there’s a version of this observation that’s purely nostalgic, the "kids these days" version, the one that assumes everything was better before the internet and we’re all going to hell. That version is lazy and probably wrong. People have always found ways to avoid discomfort; the Pensees are four hundred years old, and Pascal was complaining about the same basic tendency to flee from ourselves.¹⁵ What’s different now isn’t the impulse; it’s the infrastructure. The impulse to avoid boredom is ancient and hardwired. The infrastructure to avoid it permanently, seamlessly, without any friction at all, is about fifteen years old. We are running Stone Age neurochemistry through Space Age delivery systems, and the results are, at minimum, worth paying attention to.

The kid at the next table has left, along with his mother. Their cups are still there, emptied. I’ve been sitting here for over an hour, and my own document is no longer blank, which is something.¹⁶ I don’t know if what I’ve written is any good (a writer never does, or at least this one doesn’t, which is either humility or cowardice depending on the day). But I know this much: I started writing because I ran out of things to scroll through. I got bored. The boredom became uncomfortable. The discomfort became a kind of pressure, and the pressure pushed me to do something, which was to try to make sense of a kid I’d noticed at the next table and a feeling I couldn’t quite name.

Maybe the question isn’t whether we can get boredom back (you can’t un-invent the smartphone any more than you can un-invent the television). Maybe the question is whether we can learn to notice the moment just before we reach for the cure, that half-second of discomfort, the tiny fire, and choose to sit in it a beat longer. One beat. Two. Enough for the pressure to build. Enough for something to happen.

Outside the coffee shop, someone is walking a dog that clearly does not want to go in the direction it’s being pulled. The dog keeps looking back over its shoulder, straining at the leash, wanting to return to whatever it smelled a hundred feet ago. There’s an unfinished investigation. An open tab.

———

Notes

¹ The leaded gasoline comparison is not hyperbolic, or at least not as hyperbolic as it sounds. Leaded gasoline was a known health risk for decades before it was phased out, largely because the industry that profited from it was very effective at manufacturing doubt. The parallel to social media companies commissioning studies about their own products’ effects on mental health is, at minimum, uncomfortable. ↩︎

² The actual origin story is slightly more complicated. Naismith was a physical education instructor at a YMCA training school in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the game was designed to fill a specific pedagogical need: an indoor activity that would keep students engaged during winter without the injuries associated with football. So it was a combination of boredom and institutional mandate, which, if we’re being honest, describes the origin of most innovations. ↩︎

³ Between 1856 and 1863, to be precise. Seven years of pea-based research. The man was working with peas before Darwin had even published The Descent of Man. ↩︎

⁴ Though it’s worth noting that some researchers argue boredom has a faintly positive valence for people who are high in what psychologists call "openness to experience," one of the Big Five personality traits. These are people who, when bored, tend to start wondering about things rather than simply suffering. The rest of us mostly just suffer. ↩︎

⁵ There’s a whole genre of online content dedicated to this: “How We Used to Play as Kids” videos, accompanied by footage of children on bicycles and narrated in tones usually reserved for nature documentaries about extinct species. These videos are, themselves, consumed on the very devices they’re lamenting, which is an irony so thick you could stand a spoon in it. ↩︎

⁶ Csikszentmihalyi’s research, published most accessibly in his 1990 book Flow, found that people reported their highest levels of satisfaction not during passive leisure but during activities that demanded concentration and skill. Watching television, for instance, correlated with some of the lowest self-reported happiness in his data. This was before streaming. One wonders what his numbers would look like now. ↩︎

⁷ The average American adult now spends more than seven hours per day consuming digital media, which, if you subtract sleep and work, leaves remarkably little time for the kind of unstructured thought boredom used to provide. Whether this is a crisis or merely a transition depends, I suppose, on what you think unstructured thought is worth. ↩︎

⁸ Lembke uses the metaphor of a balance: every time the pleasure side tips, the brain adjusts by pushing the pain side down. Over time, with repeated stimulation, the balance point shifts, and what used to be pleasurable becomes merely baseline. Which is a clinical way of describing something most of us recognize intuitively: the third hour of scrolling doesn’t feel good, exactly. It just feels less bad than stopping. ↩︎

⁹ I’m aware of the irony of writing an essay about the death of boredom that will be read on a screen, possibly between bouts of the very scrolling I’m describing. I don’t have a solution to this irony. I’m mostly just acknowledging it and hoping the acknowledgment counts for something. ↩︎

¹⁰ I want to be careful here not to trivialize what is, for many people, genuine pain. Loneliness is a real health crisis, with documented effects on mortality comparable to smoking. The point isn’t that these men should "just get off their phones." The point is that the phones may be removing the specific type of discomfort that used to serve as the bridge between isolation and connection. ↩︎

¹¹ The term "attention economy" was coined in the late 1990s by various theorists who noticed that, in a world of information surplus, human attention was becoming the scarcest and therefore most valuable resource. Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, put it plainly: a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. ↩︎

¹² Aza Raskin, who invented infinite scroll in 2006, has since expressed regret about its effects. Which, credit where it’s due, is more self-reflection than most of us apply to our work. But the genie is, as they say, out of the bottle. ↩︎

¹³ The original observation came from her mentor, the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin, who noticed the phenomenon at a restaurant. Zeigarnik then designed a series of experiments to test it formally, which is how most good psychology works: somebody notices something ordinary, and then somebody else spends years proving the obvious thing is actually real. This may also describe what I’m doing in this essay, though with considerably less rigor. ↩︎

¹⁴ "More often than I’d prefer to admit" is doing a lot in that sentence. The honest version would be: most evenings. Nearly every evening. But admitting that fully feels uncomfortably close to admitting a dependency, which I suppose it is. ↩︎

¹⁵ Pascal’s actual line, from Pensées 139, is: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” This was written in the 1660s. Without the internet. Without television. Without even reasonably interesting wallpaper. The man was diagnosing the human condition with access to nothing but quill pens and candles and his own agitation, which, if you think about it, is a point in his favor. ↩︎

¹⁶ I should note that during the writing of this piece I checked my phone eleven times. I counted. The count itself is a kind of experiment I sometimes run on myself, less to shame myself than to observe the pull, to feel its texture and frequency. It’s remarkably consistent. Every four to six minutes, the itch appears. Usually without a trigger. Just: a faint thinning of attention, a micro-boredom, and then the hand reaching for the pocket. Most of the time there’s nothing there. No notification, no message. Just the screen, waiting. The itch isn’t about information. It’s about the itch. ↩︎