Songs From Nothing: The Endangered Art of Being Bored

First published in London Daily News

The Vanishing Gift of Boredom

In the neighbourhood where I grew up, boredom had its own ritual. Whenever a group of us sat idly-too hot to run, too early for dinner, too restless to nap-someone would eventually break the silence with a singsong chant:

“Baithe baithe bore huye, karna hai kuch kaam-shuru karo Antakshari, leke Prabhu ka naam.”

We are bored, the words declared. We must do something. Let us begin Antakshari, invoking the name of the Lord.

And just like that, the air would change. A game would bloom from stillness. One team sang a song, the other answered with another, each melody tethered to the last letter of the one before. Back and forth it went: laughter, memory, music-boredom alchemised into play. The quiet minutes of waiting, of having “nothing to do,” became an arena for invention, a stage where imagination and camaraderie could thrive.

Boredom, in that world, was not an emptiness to be feared. It was a spark, the soil from which games, friendships, and rituals of joy could grow.

Boredom as a Creative Engine

Long before we carried little rectangles of distraction in our pockets, boredom was a familiar companion. It crept in on languid afternoons, in long queues, on quiet evenings. And yet, from that discomfort, people invented worlds.

Children turned sticks into swords, sidewalks into chalk kingdoms, scraps of paper into treasure maps. Adults filled silences with stories, with arguments, with songs that echoed into the night. In my childhood, Antakshari was our ritual, but across cultures there were equivalents. West African griots spun folktales from long nights of idleness. In Japan, there is the concept of ma-the pause, the space between notes in music or gestures in life-a reverence for silence that allows meaning to surface.

Writers and thinkers depended on that same emptiness. Nietzsche insisted that “all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” Pascal mused that humanity’s troubles stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room. Even boredom’s social quality had a peculiar beauty. On porches and park benches, neighbours who might never have spoken found themselves sharing idle talk-not because it was planned, but because time demanded to be filled.

 The Swipe, Scroll, Refresh Age

If the past knew boredom as an unwelcome guest that sometimes brought gifts, the present has banished it altogether. We live in the swipe, scroll, refresh age, an era in which silence rarely survives more than a few seconds. The moment stillness threatens, we reach for the rectangle in our pocket. Waiting in line, riding the train, lying awake at night-every pause is filled, every gap paved over by notifications and feeds.

Technology has built us an anti-boredom machine. Entertainment no longer waits for the evening radio broadcast or the weekly newspaper. It lives in our hands, instantly available, endlessly replenishing. And with it, the ancient drama of boredom, that itch that once drove us to invent games, stories, or philosophies has been short-circuited.

We don’t sit with our thoughts; we scroll past them. We don’t invent games; we download them. We don’t search for conversation with the stranger beside us; we refresh the feed of people we already know. The quiet tension that once forced us outward, or deeper inward, is smothered before it has a chance to breathe.

It is not that creativity has disappeared. In fact, there are more entrepreneurs, coders, and creators than ever before. Technology has unleashed astonishing new forms of imagination. But what has shifted is scale. Where once boredom nudged everyone toward invention-children, neighbours, poets, wanderers alike-today invention feels concentrated among fewer, while the majority swim in an ocean of perpetual distraction.

It is quiet, like the silence of a room never entered. The slow erosion of those aimless, restless hours that once seeded music, myth, conversation, and wonder. We have gained constant stimulation, but perhaps we have lost the space in which the unexpected could appear.

The Psychology of Idleness

Boredom is not an empty space; it is a mirror. It reveals us to ourselves. When the minutes stretch and nothing demands our attention, we are tested. Do we reach for a phone, glowing with distraction? Or a pen, waiting patiently for words? Do we scroll until the hours dissolve, or do we sit long enough for thoughts to wander into unfamiliar territory?

Boredom, in this sense, is never simply the absence of stimulation. It is a crossroads. To numb, or to build. To flee, or to listen. What we choose in those moments becomes the scaffolding of who we are when we are not bored. Because boredom is not a void at all, it is a doorway. One that can open onto creativity, clarity, even the questions we spend our lives avoiding.

Neuroscience helps explain why. Psychologists speak of the Default Mode Network, the cluster of brain regions that flicker to life when we are at rest, unfocused, idle. It is in this state-daydreaming, staring out of a window, wandering without destination, that the brain begins to connect distant ideas, to stumble into insight. Many of our “aha!” moments arrive not at the desk, but in the shower, on a walk, or in the quiet minutes before sleep.

But in an era where even those spaces are filled, the walk accompanied by headphones, the shower a stage for podcast catch-up, the bedtime stillness lit by a blue screen-the mind rarely slips into that idle, generative state. The problem is not stimulation itself; it is the absence of incubation, the silence in which scattered fragments of thought can cohere into something new. The restlessness we feel when bored is the mind stretching, preparing to leap.

Cultural and Generational Shifts

Boredom, like time itself, has never been experienced in exactly the same way across cultures or generations. It is shaped by circumstance, by tools, by the tempo of daily life.

For Boomers, childhood summers often stretched into endless afternoons of unstructured play. Gen X grew up with television, but even that was rationed by programming schedules. Millennials saw the internet arrive, but slowly, often through the patient screech of dial-up. And then came Gen Z, born into the era of broadband, smartphones, and streaming. For them, boredom is less an interruption than an endangered species.

Across cultures, too, boredom once carried different textures. Antakshari, where I grew up, was not merely tolerated but woven into the fabric of life. In Mediterranean towns, siestas left plazas humming with idle chatter. Today, those communal spaces of idleness have thinned. Train stations once filled with chatter are now quiet with the glow of screens. Parks that echoed with invented games now echo with the tinny spill of earbuds. Where boredom once pushed us outward-toward neighbours, strangers, our own imagination-it now more often pushes us inward, into the sealed world of the feed.

The texture of boredom has changed. It has gone from collective to solitary, from generative to consumptive.

The Cost of a Boredom-Free World

The disappearance of boredom has not come with fanfare. And yet its loss leaves a quiet hollow, like a room we no longer enter but cannot quite remember why.

One of the first casualties is what psychologists call “deep play”-stretches of unstructured imagination that arise when children are left to their own devices. When every pause is filled with videos and games engineered to hold attention, there is little room for the kind of tinkering that once turned boxes into castles, or backyards into jungles.

We also see the decline of reading itself-once the great refuge of boredom. In the U.S., the share of adults who read for pleasure daily has fallen from 28% in 2003 to just 16% in 2023 -a 40% drop in two decades (Bone et al, 2025). The long, patient attention a book demands finds itself at odds with the flickering novelty of the feed.

The costs are not only cultural but biological. Night after night, millions scroll themselves to sleep, glowing screens suppressing the melatonin the body needs to rest. Heavy phone use before bed extends wakefulness by more than an hour (Kheirinejad S, 2022), fuelling a quiet epidemic of insomnia and fatigue (Hjetland et al, 2025). Among children, more than two hours of daily screen time doubles the risk of speech delays and learning difficulties (Alamri MM,  2023 & Alsaadi FA 2024). Even in young adults, neuroscientists now detect thinning of the cerebral cortex -the part of the brain that governs memory, decision-making, and creativity -linked to excessive digital immersion (Takahashi et al, 2023).

There is also a subtler cost: the homogenisation of creativity itself. Algorithms feed us what we are likely to enjoy, narrowing the space for accident, for serendipity, for invention that arrives from the side rather than the centre. A world without boredom is a world where the unexpected has less room to appear.

And perhaps most haunting is the erosion of our capacity for stillness. What disappears with boredom is not only the child’s idle game or the reader’s quiet hour, but the conditions that once shaped civilizations. To erase boredom is to thin not only individual lives, but the very fabric of collective life.

A Personal Interlude

I am not old, just in my early fifties and I am, by all accounts, an ardent supporter of technology. I marvel at artificial intelligence, at the power of machine learning and deep neural networks. But I also grew up in another rhythm of time. I lived through the afternoons of Antakshari, and I knew boredom well enough to turn it into invention. It was boredom that taught me how to slip, unnoticed, past the watchful eyes of a guava orchard’s owner when the fruit was too tempting to resist.

Later, as an adult, boredom became my companion in quieter ways. It was in those empty hours that I read widely, taught myself to play the saxophone, painted, stitched leather, and listened to music from every corner of the world. I do use the tools of today-the phone, the internet, social media -but the boredom I once carried has left its imprint. I do not scroll or snoop; I search and surf. I do not refresh endlessly; I read.

Because I have known boredom and the unexpected gifts it offers, I can face today’s flood of stimulation without being drowned by it. My concern is not for myself but for the generations who have never met boredom at all. For them, stillness is not an old friend but a stranger. And unless they consciously create room for it, they may never know what it feels like or what it can give.

Reclaiming Boredom

If boredom has quietly slipped out of our lives, perhaps it is time to invite it back in. Not as punishment, not as wasted hours, but as a rare and necessary luxury. To be bored is to be given a gift: the chance to sit still long enough for something unexpected to arrive. In a world designed to erase every pause, choosing to linger in silence is a quiet act of resistance.

We can begin small. A walk without headphones. A meal without the glow of a screen. An afternoon in which children are left to invent their own entertainment. These are not radical gestures -they are acts of restoration, creating spaces where the mind is free to wander, to stretch, to stumble into play or insight.

They are also acts of repair. To put down the phone at night is to give sleep back its rhythm. To hand a child a blank afternoon instead of a screen is to nourish imagination. To choose a book over a feed is to re-train the brain in patience, in immersion, in the slow unfolding of ideas. These are not luxuries -they are the conditions that once allowed thought and culture to flourish.

But there is an urgency here too. We cannot afford to live in a boredom-free world for very long. If every generation grows more estranged from stillness, if children never know the fertile itch of having nothing to do, then the doorway boredom once opened may close for good. And with it, we risk losing not just creativity, but the very capacity to imagine differently.

The danger is not simply that we become distracted. It is that we become diminished-our inner lives thinner, our cultures flatter, our futures narrower. To banish boredom completely is to risk erasing the conditions that once gave rise to song, to story, to invention itself.

This is why reclaiming boredom is more than a lifestyle choice; it is a civilizational task.To preserve boredom is to preserve the possibility of collective imagination, the capacity to ask not only what entertains us now, but what futures we might dare to build together.

The Beauty of Emptiness

Remembering the Antakshari of my childhood, I often ask myself:
What songs were never sung? What ideas never born? What friendships never sparked when boredom was exiled from our lives?

That small ritual was more than a game. It was a reminder that boredom, uncomfortable as it was-is the soil of imagination, the quiet in which the future takes root. To lose it entirely would be to forget how to begin.

References

Bone, J. K., Sonke, J., & Fancourt, D. (2025). Decline in daily reading for pleasure among U.S. adults, 2003–2023. iScience. University of Florida & University College London.

Kheirinejad, S. (2022). Smartphone use in bed adversely affects sleep latency and wakefulness. PMC.

Hjetland, G. J. et al. (2025). Using screens in bed increases insomnia risk by 59% and cuts sleep time by 24 minutes. Frontiers in Psychiatry.

Alamri, M. M. (2023). Screen time exceeding two hours linked with decreased receptive and expressive language development. PMC.

Alsaadi, F. A. (2024). Speech delay observed in approximately 34.9% of children with >2h screen time. PMC.

Takahashi, I. et al. (2023). Screen time at age 1 linked to developmental delays by ages 2–4. JAMA Pediatrics.