WHY BOREDOM MATTERS

Modern men have lost the ability to experience boredom. Every idle moment gets filled. Waiting in a queue? Check your phone. Commuting? Listen to a podcast. Evening? Watch Netflix. Walking? Play music. Eating alone? Scroll through social media. Men have eliminated every moment of unstimulated existence.

This is no accident. Technology companies design products to capture your attention during every possible moment of boredom. Your phone is engineered to make boredom feel unbearable, compelling you to seek stimulation. The business model relies on your inability to tolerate empty time.

When was the last time you sat without a smartphone, book, music, or any form of input? Simply sitting. Most people cannot remember. The very thought induces anxiety.

What Boredom Actually Offers

Deep thinking requires sustained attention without interruption. It also requires periods during which your mind can process information without new input. The best insights often arise not during active work but during monotonous walks, long drives, or simply sitting quietly. When you constantly feed your mind new content, you never create the space needed to process what you already know.

Boredom also acts as a filter. What holds your attention even when it is dull? That reveals what you truly value. Reading only entertaining books suggests you prefer distraction to reading itself. Training only when motivated indicates you value the feeling of motivation more than the discipline of training. Engaging with your children only during enjoyable activities implies you prioritise entertainment over fatherhood.

Everything worthwhile involves periods of boredom. Building a business entails administrative tedium. Raising children involves repetitive tasks. Physical training requires unglamorous consistency. Marriage includes mundane domesticity. If you cannot tolerate boredom, you will not sustain anything worthwhile because you quit when novelty fades.

Boredom tolerance also rebuilds your attention span. Always seeking stimulation disrupts your focus, making you reliant on novelty to maintain concentration. When you can endure under-stimulation, you can concentrate on challenging problems for longer periods. The man who reaches for his phone every five minutes cannot sustain focus for hours on work that truly matters.

Where Men Escape Boredom

The smartphone has become a security blanket against fleeting moments of emptiness. Every spare moment prompts a compulsive reach: waiting for coffee, standing in a lift, sitting at traffic lights, walking between rooms. You are not checking for important messages. You are escaping boredom. This habit trains your inability to exist without stimulation.

Podcasts and audiobooks now accompany almost every activity. Walking, driving, cooking. This may seem productive, but it prevents the reflective thinking that occurs in silence. Consuming content feels productive. Generating original thoughts requires the boredom you are avoiding. A commute with a podcast feels useful. A commute in silence feels wasted. Yet silence is where you process what you have learned, where ideas connect, where genuine thinking takes place.

Social media offers endless novel stimulation without demanding active engagement, making it ideal for filling boredom. It also destroys attention span. You train your brain to need constant novelty and to avoid sustained focus on challenging tasks.

Even at home, background noise fills the space. Television playing while doing other things. Music accompanying nearly every task. The discomfort with genuine silence reveals dependence on external noise to feel normal.

Teaching Children to Tolerate Boredom

I did not fill every moment of my children's time with activities or entertainment. They endured long car journeys without devices and periods without scheduled activities. They had to work out what to do with themselves. This felt more challenging at the time, but it developed their ability to exist without being constantly stimulated. Some learned to read deeply because books alleviated boredom better than anything else. Others developed hobbies that maintained their interest beyond initial novelty. It was easier for my older children as smartphones didn’t even exist when they were young. But they all learned that boredom is survivable and that something worthwhile often emerges from it.

Parents who treat a child's boredom as an emergency requiring immediate solution raise children who become adults unable to think or focus. Allowing boredom builds the capacity they will need.

Building Capacity

Begin by deliberately creating periods of boredom. Take walks without your phone or music. Just walking. Your mind will initially resist. Let it settle. Commute in silence. No podcasts, no music, no phone. Just driving or sitting on the train. Have meals without devices or reading. Just eating, tasting your food, being present with the discomfort of nothing else happening.

Notice the compulsion each time you reach for your phone. Pause before doing so. What are you avoiding? Usually boredom, sometimes difficult emotions, occasionally a genuine task. But mostly just inability to tolerate an empty moment. This compulsion reveals dependence. Becoming aware of it is the first step towards breaking it.

Five minutes without stimulation feels impossible to the man who has trained himself to require constant input. Start there. Sit for five minutes with nothing. No phone, no book, no music, no task. Just sit. Discomfort is normal. The aim is not comfort but rebuilding capacity to exist without constant input. Gradually extend the duration as this capacity develops.

This is not an excuse to avoid work. Boredom tolerance supports productive focus. The man who can endure boredom can also concentrate for hours because he is not reliant on stimulation. The lazy man evades difficult tasks by filling his time with entertainment. The disciplined man endures boredom whilst undertaking challenging work because he does not require continual novelty.

Why This Matters

Deep work requires tolerance for boredom. Difficult problems often involve long periods without obvious progress or stimulation. Maintenance work is frequently tedious. Physical training, regular upkeep, sustained effort all lack novelty. Accelerating culture makes boredom feel impossible, with everything moving faster and demanding more attention. Boredom tolerance creates a counterweight to this acceleration.

Constantly needing entertainment reveals fragility. Being able to exist in quiet demonstrates strength. The man who cannot endure boredom is governed by his craving for stimulation. The man who tolerates boredom is free to choose when to be entertained rather than being driven by compulsion.

Most men will continue filling every idle moment, reaching for phones compulsively, overlaying every activity with audio, treating boredom as something to eliminate. They will wonder why they cannot focus or think deeply or sustain effort through difficulty.

You can understand that boredom is not your enemy but necessary space for genuine thinking, for discovering what you actually care about, for building capacity to focus and persist. Deliberately create boring time. Notice the compulsion to fill the space and resist it.

Build the capacity. Practice the discipline. Tolerate the discomfort. The ability to be bored is the ability to think and focus and sustain effort through unglamorous work that produces lasting results.

Richard Morrissey