Kathmandu, September 21, 2026 — There was a time when waiting meant waiting.
You could sit on a bus without watching a video. Stand in a queue without scrolling through a feed. Lie in bed without reaching for a phone. Travel without filling every silent minute with music, messages or entertainment.
Nothing was happening, and that was simply part of the day.
Today, nothing happening can feel strangely uncomfortable.
The moment a conversation pauses, a hand reaches for a phone. When a journey becomes dull, a video appears. When work becomes repetitive, social media offers an escape. When sleep does not come immediately, the screen comes on.
We have become remarkably good at eliminating boredom.
The question is whether we are becoming less capable of experiencing it.
Boredom is often treated as wasted time, but psychologists do not regard it as simply the absence of activity. Research describes boredom as an emotional state that can arise when people cannot engage their attention or find sufficient meaning in what they are doing. Psychologist Erin Westgate has described it as a signal that something about our current activity is failing to engage us meaningfully.
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That makes boredom more complicated than it appears.
It can be unpleasant, but unpleasant does not necessarily mean useless.
Boredom can tell us that something needs to change. Perhaps the task is too repetitive. Perhaps it has no meaning for us. Perhaps we need a challenge. Perhaps we simply need a break.
The problem is that modern technology gives us an almost instantaneous way of silencing that signal.
A few seconds of boredom can now be replaced by hundreds of possible distractions.
Open TikTok.
Check Instagram.
Read a message.
Watch YouTube.
Refresh the news.
Check the weather.
Open another app.
The options are practically endless.
And because the next piece of stimulation is always available, we may become less willing to sit with the uncomfortable period between one activity and the next.
Research does not support the simplistic claim that smartphones automatically destroy our attention or creativity. But there is evidence of a meaningful relationship between boredom and problematic digital-media use. A systematic review and meta-analysis of 59 empirical studies found a medium-to-large positive association between boredom and problematic digital-media use, while the association with ordinary digital-media use was smaller. The researchers also cautioned that much of the existing evidence was cross-sectional, meaning it cannot establish which direction the relationship runs.
That distinction matters.
It may be that bored people reach for their phones more often.
It may also be that habitual digital stimulation makes ordinary activities feel less rewarding by comparison.
For some people, the relationship may work in both directions.
A 2020 study of 1,099 university students found that boredom proneness was associated with problematic mobile-phone use, with depression partly mediating the relationship. The researchers also examined attentional control as a factor affecting these relationships.
More recent research has continued to examine the relationship between boredom and problematic social-media use. A 2026 study involving university students in China and Japan found connections among problematic social-media use, boredom proneness and psychological distress, although the relationships varied across the two populations.
None of this means that every person who uses a smartphone frequently has a problem.
That would be an unreasonable conclusion.
Phones are useful tools. Social media can maintain relationships. Digital entertainment can provide relaxation. Online information can educate us. There is nothing inherently unhealthy about choosing stimulation.
The more interesting question is what happens when stimulation becomes our automatic response to every moment of discomfort.
Consider the smallest moments of everyday life.
Waiting for someone.
Standing in an elevator.
Sitting in a restaurant before the food arrives.
Looking out of a window during a journey.
Walking somewhere without headphones.
These moments used to be opportunities for the mind to wander.
Now they are often treated as problems to be solved.
We fill them.
And perhaps that matters more than we realise.
When the outside world stops demanding our attention, the mind does not necessarily stop working. It can remember, imagine, rehearse conversations, connect unrelated ideas and wander into questions that never arise when attention is continuously occupied.
Research on daydreaming has highlighted the potentially adaptive role of what researchers call positive constructive daydreaming. Other research has found relationships between creative thinking and the way people engage with their thoughts when external task demands are relaxed.
This does not mean boredom automatically makes people creative.
That would be another oversimplification.
A 2014 study, for example, found that participants exposed to boring activities subsequently performed better on some measures of creative thinking. But boredom is not a magic creativity button, and later research has produced a more nuanced picture of the relationship between idle thought, attention and creativity.
The more defensible point is that an unfilled mind has room to move.
And modern life increasingly gives the mind very little unfilled space.
There is also a cultural change taking place.
We have begun to expect every experience to be interesting.
A long video is too long.
A slow film is boring.
A quiet restaurant needs background music.
A short journey needs a podcast.
A few minutes alone require a screen.
Even reading a book can become difficult because the mind has become accustomed to the possibility of immediate novelty.
The danger is not boredom itself.
It is our intolerance of it.
If every uncomfortable feeling is immediately escaped, we never discover what might happen if we remain with it.
That matters because boredom can sometimes be a transition rather than a destination.
A person becomes bored with scrolling and starts drawing.
Someone becomes tired of watching videos and picks up a guitar.
A child complains that there is nothing to do and eventually invents a game.
A commuter looks out of a window and begins thinking about a problem that has been occupying their mind.
Nothing guarantees that these things will happen.
But they become less likely when the next distraction is always one tap away.
This is particularly relevant for children.
A child who says, “I’m bored,” is not necessarily asking for entertainment. Sometimes the child is asking for help tolerating the absence of entertainment.
There is an important difference.
If every moment of boredom is solved by an adult handing over a phone, the child may learn that boredom is something that must immediately be removed rather than experienced and managed.
That does not mean children should be deliberately deprived of technology or entertainment. It means they also need opportunities to play, wait, imagine, explore and spend time without constant digital direction.
Adults need those opportunities too.
Perhaps the real skill we are losing is not the ability to become bored.
It is the ability to stay bored without immediately doing something about it.
That is a subtle but important difference.
Boredom can be a signal. If we are bored because our work is meaningless, perhaps the answer is to change the work or reconnect with its purpose. If we are bored because a task is too easy, perhaps we need a greater challenge. If we are bored because we are exhausted, perhaps we need rest.
Simply enduring boredom is not always the solution.
But neither is automatically escaping it.
Sometimes the correct response is to listen.
Modern technology makes that harder because it has made escape extraordinarily cheap.
We no longer need to leave the room to find stimulation. We carry an almost unlimited supply in our pockets.
That convenience has changed our expectations.
Silence feels empty.
Waiting feels inefficient.
Stillness feels unproductive.
And boredom begins to look like a failure.
But a life without boredom is not necessarily a better life.
Some of the most ordinary human experiences require periods in which nothing particularly exciting happens.
Walking.
Thinking.
Waiting.
Looking.
Remembering.
Wondering.
Being alone with one's thoughts.
These activities do not produce notifications, streaks or measurable engagement.
They may nevertheless produce something valuable: attention that is not constantly being claimed by something else.
The goal, then, should not be to romanticise boredom or reject technology.
It should be to recover our ability to choose.
Choose the phone when we actually want it.
Choose entertainment because we enjoy it, not because we cannot tolerate a quiet minute.
Choose music, conversation or a video when they add something to the moment.
And sometimes choose nothing.
Put the phone down.
Look out the window.
Walk without a podcast.
Stand in a queue without opening an app.
Let a few minutes pass without filling them.
At first, it may feel uncomfortable.
That may be the point.
We may not be losing the ability to be bored.
We may simply be forgetting that boredom does not always need to be fixed.
Sometimes, when there is finally nothing competing for our attention, the mind begins doing something of its own.