being bored can be fun actually

We’ve been all been inundated by all kinds of things that seek our attention. Whether that’s short-form content from Instagram/Tiktok, or more recently running agents in parallel. Our dopamine receptors are absolutely fried. I noticed that I struggle alot with being able to just sit still. To just be without looking at a screen, checking a status bar, or waiting for my agent to finish.

If there is a gap of more than thirty seconds in my day, my hand reflexively reaches for my phone, or my fingers open a new tab to check Hacker News, Twitter, or some dashboard. We’ve effectively eliminated the “in-between” moments.

The death of the in-between

Think about the last time you waited for something. Waiting for a coffee at a cafe. Waiting for a friend who is five minutes late. Waiting for a test suite or a Docker build to finish. Sitting on the toilet.

In every single one of these scenarios, we immediately pull out a device. We have optimized away every single micro-moment of silence. We treat boredom as a bug in our daily operating system. A state of friction that must be patched immediately with a hotfix of digital stimulation.

But this constant stream of low-grade input has a cost. Our brains are never off. We are always processing, always consuming, always reacting.

The cost of constant input

When you never let your brain wander, you lose two things that are crucial for doing good work:

1. The Default Mode Network (DMN): This is a network of interacting brain regions that activates when a person is not focused on the outside world. It’s active when you are daydreaming, reflecting, and letting your mind wander. It is precisely where creative synthesis happens, where that weird bug you’ve been fighting for three days suddenly resolves itself because your brain connected two seemingly unrelated concepts while you were staring at a wall. If you never stop feeding your brain inputs, the DMN never gets to run.
2. Attention Endurance: Focus is a muscle. If you train your brain to expect a novel stimulus every 30 seconds, you shouldn’t be surprised when you can’t focus on a hard programming problem for more than 15 minutes without feeling an itch to check something else. By constantly escaping boredom, we are actively training ourselves to be distracted.

My personal “boring” protocols

I’ve been trying to actively fight this. It’s incredibly hard because the friction of doing nothing feels physically uncomfortable at first. Here are a few small protocols I’ve been experimenting with to re-introduce boredom into my life:

1. The “No New Tab” rule during agent sessions

When an agent is churning away, I force myself to read the reasoning tokens. I dont switch to another agent. I just watch the compiler logs, or if it’s a quiet build, I look out the window. It felt agonizingly slow the first week. Now, it feels like a mini-meditation.

2. Walking without audio

I used to not be able to walk to the grocery store (a 10-minute walk) without putting on a podcast or a playlist. Now, I try to walk in silence at least half the time. I listen to the cars, the birds, the ambient noise of the city. I let my mind drift. Some of my best ideas for side projects or blog posts have come from these silent walks.

3. The coffee shop challenge

When waiting for a coffee, I leave my phone in my pocket. I just stand there, look at the espresso machine, observe the people, and wait. It feels awkward because literally everyone else in the line is staring at their phone. But there is a strange, quiet confidence in just standing still.

Re-framing boredom

Being bored doesn’t have to mean being miserable. If you reframe it, boredom is actually a luxury. It is the only time your brain gets to do housekeeping. It is the space where original thoughts are formed.

Next time you feel the itch to pull out your phone during a brief moment of downtime, try to resist it. Sit with the boredom. Relish it. It might just be the most productive thing you do all day.