We don’t talk enough about boredom. Not the fake kind where you scroll for two hours and say you’re bored. I mean the deep kind. The kind where you’re sitting on your bed, no phone, no noise, and your brain starts to itch. That kind of boredom.
It used to be normal. Now it feels almost dangerous. Like we’re wired to fill every second with content, noise, stimulation. Something. Anything.
But here’s the truth: boredom is where the good stuff lives. Not the flashy stuff. Not the postable stuff. The real stuff.
Boredom is where ideas start. Not perfect ones. But raw ones. The kind that make you get up and go write something. Build something. Rethink something. It’s where your brain gets so restless it stops playing defense and starts playing offense.
Some of my best ideas have come when I was completely fed up with doing nothing. When I was stuck. Mentally pacing. Reaching for something more, even if I didn’t know what it was.
We tell teens to hustle. To optimize. To grind. But we don’t tell them to sit in silence for a bit. To resist the urge to be constantly entertained. To do the hard, quiet work of listening to their own mind.
Here’s what boredom does if you let it:
- It forces clarity.
- It pulls out whatever you’ve been avoiding.
- It teaches you patience, and self-direction, and creativity that isn’t algorithm-fed.
You don’t need a productivity system to change your life. Sometimes you just need 45 minutes with no noise and no escape.
So try it. Let yourself be bored. Not every day. Not forever. But enough to remember what your brain sounds like without the world screaming in your ear.
That silence? That restlessness? That’s not emptiness. That’s your mind stretching. Let it.
