When was the last time you sat in stillness without reaching for a screen? No podcast humming in the background. No video queued up. No thumb grazing a feed. Just you and the empty air.

I tried this recently. Just sat on a train and looked out the window. And do you know what I felt? Not calm. Not presence. Guilt. A voice whispering, “You’re wasting time. You should be doing something.” Even my mind resisted boredom as if it were a sin.

That’s the world we live in now, a place where silence feels wrong. Boredom feels like failure. And the people who can no longer endure these states? They’re not just kids anymore. It’s all of us. Me. You. The students I teach.

The Disappearance of Space

I feel like a kid born after 2010 may never have tasted real boredom. No long afternoons of staring at clouds. No slow walks home without a soundtrack. Instead, a constant stream of content presses against their senses, promising escape from stillness. I see it in my classroom. In another reflection about teaching in higher education these days, I wrote about how the attention span of my students seems to fracture more every semester. Long readings feel like relics. Silence between tasks? Unbearable. They rush to fill it with something, anything, because waiting feels unnatural.

But here’s the twist. Nowadays, so do I.

I, too, feel restless when I try to sit with my thoughts. I, too, scroll while standing in line, fearing that stillness means lost time. To me, this isn’t just a youth phenomenon anymore. It’s cultural. It’s structural. Unfortunately, we’ve designed a world where boredom has no place, and we’ve trained ourselves to feel guilty when it appears.

The Hidden Cost of Never Being Bored

What happens when life is an uninterrupted stream of stimulation? I don’t think the damage is just to attention span. I suspect something deeper:

• Imagination fades when every gap is filled by someone else’s story.
• Concentration collapses when the mind can’t stay with a single thread without craving a hit of novelty.
• Reflection disappears when there’s no pause to wonder, no friction to spark insight.

Boredom isn’t a “technical bug” in the human experience. It’s actually like a fertile ground where ideas take root and grow. Remove it, and you don’t just lose daydreams. You lose depth.

The Paradox of Mental Energy

Some researchers argue that using ChatGPT may erode our critical thinking skills. Maybe they’re right. But if memory is shutting down, why do I feel so exhausted after hours of AI-assisted work? Something else must be happening. Some uncharted mental process burning through energy while we believe we’re “saving effort.”

That paradox troubles me. Because if effort now feels foreign, and energy still drains, what kind of thinking are we doing? Is it the kind that nourishes us or the kind that hollows us out?

So Where Do We Go From Here?

I don’t know. I just have a hunch that if we don’t reclaim silence, we’ll forget how to hold our own thoughts. So here’s my invitation to you:

• Leave the earbuds at home for one walk this week. Notice how the world sounds without a soundtrack.
• Block out 10 minutes to do nothing. Not meditation. Not productivity. Just sit. Let boredom arrive.
• Design one space in your life where screens don’t belong. Maybe your dinner table. Maybe your morning coffee.

Tiny acts, but maybe that’s where resistance begins. Because the scariest question I keep circling back to is this:

If we lose the ability to be alone with our thoughts, what else do we lose along with it?