I am bored with my phone. I don’t mean I want an upgrade. I mean that it hit me recently that the emotion I most associate with this technological marvel, this palm-sized portal to every wonder and horror of the world wide web is – absurdly – boredom.
Any psychologist will tell you that boredom is subjective; it is a reflection of how we feel about an activity, and not a quality of the activity itself. As the psychologist Sandi Mann observes in The Science of Boredom (2017), Thomas Curwen, a scientist at Dulux responsible for studying how paint dries, loves his job. Watching paint dry can be fascinating, Curwen once told journalists, if you know how to look.
The problem is that I don’t look at my phone in the right way. I dig it out of my pocket intending to read something while I wait for the bus or take a writing break, and instead do something closer to firehosing my brain with words and images. I let conversations with friends I adore peter out because, after the firehose, texting is too tiring. I obviously don’t use my phone to actually phone people, because in the year 2024 such behaviour is borderline psychopathic.
My point is that, like many people, I’ve spent so many years using my phone as an instant entertainment device and emotional crutch that I’d almost forgotten it’s no good at either task. Smartphones have come to operate a bit like dummies for adults: a temporary distraction from our hunger, for connection, meaning and purpose. They don’t suck, we do.
This revelation was, ironically but unsurprisingly, prompted by something I read on my phone: a new paper, published in the journal Communications Psychology, charting a “concerning” rise in boredom among young people, which the researchers attributed to digital media. A large-scale study of American college students found the proportion who agreed with the statement “I am often bored” increased by more than one per cent a year between 2010 and 2017. “These changes might appear small, but they carry significant implications as their effects could accumulate over time,” the authors, Katy YY Tam and Michael Inzlicht of the University of Toronto, noted.
Boredom can be useful. Like pain or hunger it alerts us to a need, and feeling bored encourages creative thinking and can prompt people to find something more meaningful and interesting to do. But feeling easily or often bored is associated with a whole range of problems, among them underachievement, apathy, depression, anxiety, over-eating, drug abuse, social aggression and even heart problems.
One intriguing study found a link between boredom and political polarisation. Through a series of experiments, the researchers found that a bored individual’s quest for meaning can cause them to gravitate to political extremes. Boredom could, then, be an under-explored contributor to our deeply fractured politics: it certainly makes intuitive sense that a significant proportion of trolls, online extremists and conspiracy theorists act the way they do because they are bored out of their internet-addled minds.
In the Communications Psychology paper, the researchers proposed several mechanisms by which digital media increases boredom. It has increased our desire for stimulation, so that we’re quicker to feel bored, while also constantly distracting us, making it harder to feel fully absorbed in what we’re doing. The deluge of disparate information we encounter – daily headlines, memes, texts from friends, 50,000 different options for buying socks – also inhibits our ability to make meaning and sense of the world.
But on top of that, they observed, our phones trap us in a boredom loop. Whenever we’re bored we check our phones, but our phones in turn intensify our boredom. This is a pattern I recognised in myself, and that I suspect will be familiar to almost everyone, judging by how quickly we all reach for our smartphones to fill any idle moment.
“It’s almost like smartphones are a trick,” Helen Lench, the director of the emotion science lab at Texas A&M University, told me. “When you feel bored, you’re prompted to seek out new activities and explore new things, and if instead you pick up your phone you feel like you’re doing something important. It feels like you’re connecting with family and friends. It feels like you’re accomplishing goals on whatever game. But you’re not.” No one I know believes the most meaningful thing they can do with their one precious life is spend more time on X/BlueSky/whatever, but that’s often where we end up when we’re bored.
After reading the paper, I phoned Corey Keyes, the American sociologist whose book, Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down, a distillation of his life’s work, is the wisest and most compassionate self-help book I’ve read this year. Keyes coined “languishing” to capture the opposite of flourishing, an absence of well-being. To languish is to feel stuck and aimless, disconnected and adrift. Languishing, to quote a viral New York Times piece about Keyes’s work, is “that blah feeling”. Keyes believes that underpinning the rise in mental illness is a massively overlooked and bigger rise in the number of people who are languishing, because their deep, fundamental needs for community and social connection, meaning and purpose, are not being met.
Boredom is not a symptom of languishing, but it is a related phenomenon. And Keyes cautioned me against blaming digital media for either, believing it a scapegoat for deeper problems such as social atomisation and loneliness, pressured, over-structured childhoods and helicopter parenting. “I think the disappearance of unstructured free time, where kids have autonomy, has made it almost impossible for them to engage in active leisure,” he said. “Most of their leisure is very passive. And that’s what’s left of their freedom: passive leisure through social media.”
Active leisure is restorative and improves life satisfaction: it’s any activity you choose to do for fun that requires your active participation, such as hiking, knitting or playing chess. Passive leisure is TV-watching or internet browsing, and it doesn’t restore us in the same way. The amount of time spent on active leisure has decreased among all ages, and what is true for college students is true for the rest of us: when you stop your working day to check your phone you are not – in any meaningful sense – taking a break.
This is no cure for the wider problems Keyes discussed, but recognising that my phone is boring me has at least helped me start to look at it differently. Instead of reaching for it aimlessly each time I hit a lull or am gripped by boredom, at my desk or on the sidelines of a playground, I could check it only when I have a clearly defined goal in mind. And then I could try to stick to that goal. I could message back friends, or actually read the news. I could check social media, briefly, because I have actively determined I want to know what people cleverer and funnier than me are saying about the latest political scandal. And maybe instead of wondering why, although it bores me to distraction, I have spent more time looking at the hard, cracked face of my iPhone than those of my own children, I could relearn to appreciate it for the technological marvel that it is.
[See also: Inside the teenage mind]
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This article appears in the 05 Dec 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Christmas and New Year Special 2024