Why we get bored, and why phones do not fix it

Boredom is easy to describe and surprisingly hard to define. It is not tiredness, because you can be bored and wide awake. It is not having nothing to do, because you can be bored surrounded by options.

The most useful description is a mismatch: you want to be engaged in something, and nothing available is holding you.

The two halves

That definition has two parts, and both have to be true. You need to want engagement, and you need to be unable to find it. This explains why boredom can feel restless rather than sleepy. The wanting is still switched on.

It also explains why more options does not help. A streaming service with nine thousand titles does not cure boredom, and quite often causes it, because choosing becomes another thing that fails to engage you.

Why a phone makes it stranger

A phone is very good at removing the symptom and leaving the cause. Scrolling is engaging enough to stop you noticing the discomfort, but rarely engaging enough to satisfy it. So the gap stays open while the clock runs.

You have probably experienced the particular feeling of putting the phone down after forty minutes and being no less bored than when you picked it up. That is what that is.

What tends to help

The common thread in things that genuinely relieve boredom is that they have a shape. A beginning, a middle and an end.

• A task you can finish in one sitting.
• A game with a round, rather than a feed with no edges.
• Something that demands a small amount of skill, even a trivial amount.
• Something physical, even briefly. Standing up changes more than it should.

Boredom is not a fault

Worth saying plainly: being bored is not a character failure or a sign that something is wrong with you. It is a normal signal, and historically a useful one, since it is the thing that pushes people to go and find something.

The modern problem is not that we get bored. It is that the nearest available response is usually the one least likely to work.

If you want the least useful possible response to boredom, this site has about nineteen of them. At least they are honest about it.