Seek Boredom

Part 1: The Fertile Soil

Why Boredom Is the Mind's Most Neglected Resource

You take your phone into the bathroom. You do. I do too. We all do now.

You queue up a podcast before the car leaves the driveway. You scroll while the coffee brews. You have a show playing while you fold laundry, another while you eat lunch, something in your ears while you walk the dog. Every gap filled. Every silence stuffed.

And if, by some accident, you find yourself without input—waiting in a line, stuck in traffic without your phone charger, sitting in a doctor's office with a dead battery—you feel it immediately. The itch. The wrongness. The low-grade panic of a mind with nothing to consume.

We have become afraid of our own unstimulated minds.

But here's what I want you to consider: that fear is costing you something. Something significant. Something you may not even realize you've lost because you've been running from it so successfully for so long.

I want to talk about boredom. Not as a problem to be solved, but as a resource to be sought. Not as wasted time, but as fertile soil.

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The Chocolate Problem

As yummy as chocolate may be, too much chocolate is a bad thing.

This is obvious when we say it about chocolate. We understand diminishing returns intuitively when we're talking about dessert or alcohol or even exercise. Too much of any good thing eventually becomes not-good. The dose makes the poison. The law of diminishing returns makes all good things bad over time.

But we have exempted focus from this rule.

We worship focus. We optimize for it, hack it, drink coffee and take supplements and build systems to protect it. Focus is the currency of productivity culture, and productivity culture doesn't believe in too-much. More focus, deeper focus, all the time focus.

And yet.

Too much focus, all the time focus, leaves the mind bereft of its wandering spirit.

Read that again. Let it settle.

Your mind has a wandering spirit. It is not a bug to be fixed. It is not an attention deficit to be medicated into submission. It is a feature—perhaps the feature—of human cognition. And you have been starving it.

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What Happens When You Stop

Neuroscientists have a name for what your brain does when you stop focusing. They call it the default mode network—the constellation of brain regions that light up when you're not engaged in directed, focused, task-oriented thinking. When you're staring out a window. When you're in the shower with nothing to do but stand there. When you're bored.

For years, researchers assumed this network was just the brain idling. The screensaver. But it turns out the default mode network is doing something profound: it's integrating. It's connecting. It's taking all the scattered pieces of your experience and looking for patterns, relationships, meanings. It's where autobiographical memory lives. It's where you simulate future scenarios. It's where creative insight emerges.

The studies on creativity bear this out. Breakthrough ideas rarely come during periods of intense focus. They come after—in the shower, on a walk, in the middle of the night. They come when the focused mind releases its grip and the wandering mind is allowed to roam.

But here's the catch: the default mode network needs time. Space. It needs you to stop feeding the focused mind long enough for the wandering mind to wake up.

It needs you to be bored.

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Boredom Is Not Emptiness

When I say "seek boredom," I don't mean seek emptiness. I don't mean seek nothing.

Boredom is not a void. Boredom is an opening.

Think of it this way: when you finally stop the inputs, when you put down the phone and turn off the podcast and sit with nothing to consume, you don't become empty. You become available. Available to what's already there.

And what's already there?

Everything.

Your thoughts. Your ideas. Your anxieties. Your goals. Your passions. Your half-formed notions and nagging questions and unresolved tensions and quiet hopes and things you've been meaning to think about but haven't had the time because you've been too busy focusing and consuming and filling every gap.

And and and.

All of it is in there, waiting. You carry these seeds with you everywhere, but you never give them soil. You never give them the conditions they need to unfold, to reveal themselves, to grow into something you can see and name and choose.

Boredom is that soil.

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The Garden You Already Have

Spring is operative here.

In the fertile soil of boredom, you don't plant seeds. The seeds are already planted. You've been collecting them your whole life—every experience, every question, every thing that snagged your attention and then got buried under the next wave of input.

What boredom does is let them spring.

When you enter a state of genuine boredom—not distraction, not numbed scrolling, but actual unstimulated presence—you create what is essentially a distraction-free environment for your own interior life. You create the conditions where those buried seeds can push up through the soil and show you what they are.

And then you get to choose.

Which to water. Which to weed out. Which are contemporaneously valuable to you—which matter now, in this season of your life, given who you are and what you're trying to become.

This is the gardener's work. And you cannot do it while you're consuming. You cannot sort and select and tend while you're busy taking in more and more and more. You have to stop. You have to stand still in the garden and look.

You have to be bored.

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The Decision That Emerges From Stillness

There's a difference between decisions made in noise and decisions made in stillness.

Decisions made in noise are reactive. They're shaped by the last thing you consumed, the most recent opinion you heard, the loudest voice in the room. They feel urgent because everything in noise feels urgent. They often feel like they're yours, but they're frequently borrowed—assembled from inputs rather than grown from within.

Decisions made in stillness are different. They're slower to form, but they're more rooted. They emerge from the sorting that happens when you let your mind wander among your own seeds. They feel less urgent but more true. They're yours in a way that reactive decisions rarely are.

This is what's at stake when you avoid boredom: you lose access to your own deeper knowing. You stay on the surface, responding to stimuli, never dropping down to where the real work happens.

The real work happens in the garden. In the soil. In the boredom you've been running from.

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An Invitation, Not a Demand

I'm not here to scold you for your phone habits. I'm not here to make you feel guilty about podcasts in the car. I'm not here to demand that you become some kind of ascetic, renouncing all stimulation in pursuit of purity.

I'm here to offer an invitation.

This week—just this week—I want you to notice how quickly you reach for stimulation. Not to judge it. Not to stop it (yet). Just to notice.

Notice the hand reaching for the phone before you're even conscious of boredom. Notice the impulse to queue something up the moment silence begins. Notice how rarely you let a gap be a gap.

That's all. Just notice.

And then ask yourself: What might be waiting in that gap, if I let it stay open?

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The garden is already there. The seeds are already planted. The only question is whether you'll give them soil.

Part 2: The Practice of Losing Focus

How to Seek Boredom in a World That Won't Let You

So you noticed.

You watched your hand reach for the phone before you even knew you were reaching. You felt the pull toward the podcast, the scroll, the fill. You saw—maybe for the first time—how automatic it all is. How the gap opens and something in you rushes to close it before the gap can do whatever gaps do.

Now you're here, asking the obvious question: How do I actually do this? How do I seek boredom on purpose?

It sounds absurd when you say it out loud. Seeking boredom. Pursuing the thing everyone else is fleeing. Intentionally depriving yourself of stimulation in an age of infinite content.

Good. The absurdity is the point. You're about to do something countercultural enough that it feels a little foolish. Hold onto that feeling. It means you're going somewhere new.

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The Spectrum

Let's be clear about what we're after.

Day-long forays into boredom are optimal. Days-long, even better. The deep immersion, the extended emptiness, the kind of sustained unstimulation that lets your mind fully unspool and wander far from its usual tracks—this is where the most profound work happens. Retreats. Silent weekends. Long solo drives to nowhere in particular. Time measured in hours, not minutes.

If you can get that, get it. Protect it. Build your life around making it possible.

But.

You can also find short bouts of boredom that will enrich along the way. Five minutes here. Fifteen there. The small gaps you've been filling compulsively—those count too. They're not nothing. They're the daily watering that keeps the garden alive between the deep soaks.

Both matter. Neither is superior. They serve different purposes. The long immersions let you excavate. The short bouts let you maintain. You need both, and you can start with either.

Start with what you can actually do.

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Tactical Boredom

Here's where we get specific. Uncomfortably specific.

Stop taking your devices and reading material into the bathroom.

Yes, really. This is the low-hanging fruit of boredom practice, and almost no one picks it. The bathroom is a natural pause in your day—a few minutes where you're doing something that requires almost no cognitive engagement. And you've colonized it. You've turned it into yet another content consumption opportunity.

Take it back. Leave the phone on the counter. Let the bathroom be boring again. It's three to five minutes. You can survive it. And in that survival, something small will start to shift.

Drive without music or podcast or talk show.

The car is another natural container for boredom that you've filled to the brim. The commute, the errand run, the trip across town—all of it soundtracked, narrated, stuffed with input.

Try silence. Not once as an experiment you'll tell people about. Regularly. Let the drive be just a drive. Let your mind have the road.

Go to an unfamiliar park and close your eyes for progressively longer periods of time.

This one requires more intention, but it's worth it. Unfamiliar because novelty followed by stillness creates a particular kind of opening. The mind takes in new information, then—with eyes closed—processes without further input. Start with thirty seconds. Then a minute. Then five. Feel how strange it is. Feel how your mind resists, then relaxes, then begins to wander somewhere interesting.

Other possibilities, because the principle matters more than the prescription:

Waiting rooms without your phone. Meals alone without media. Walks without earbuds. Standing in line without scrolling. Sitting in your car for two minutes after you park, before you go inside. The morning coffee without the morning news.

Any gap. Any pause. Any moment you would normally fill—don't.

The point, stated as directly as I can state it: Lose focus.

Lose it on purpose. Lose it repeatedly. Lose it until losing it stops feeling like loss and starts feeling like liberation.

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The Companion Practice

Write in your boredom.

Not always. But often.

Here's why this matters: boredom surfaces things. It brings up thoughts and ideas and half-formed notions that have been waiting for air. But these surfacings are often fleeting. They rise, shimmer for a moment, and sink back down. You feel like you had an insight, but you can't quite remember what it was. You touched something important, but it slipped away.

Writing catches what rises.

Writing cements your thinking and your conclusions into long-term memory. The act of putting words to the vague, the murky, the not-yet-formed—it clarifies. It solidifies. It makes real.

And writing is accessible later. That fleeting thought you captured in a notebook or a notes app or the back of a receipt—you can return to it. You can reengage ideas that would have otherwise vanished. You can develop further what would have been lost.

There's a parallel here worth naming: writing begets creation similar to how boredom begets creativity. Boredom opens the space. Writing makes the space productive. They're companions, these two practices. Each amplifies the other.

A note on what kind of writing: I'm not talking about polished prose. Not essays, not journals with prompts, not anything you'd show another person. I'm talking about capture. Raw, unstructured, sometimes incoherent capture. The goal is to get it out and down, not to make it good. You can make it good later, if it turns out to be worth making good. Most of it won't be. That's fine. You're panning for gold, and panning requires sifting through a lot of silt.

Keep a notebook in your car. On your nightstand. Wherever your boredom practice happens. Not your phone—the phone is the enemy here, even in notes-app form. Paper, if you can. Something that doesn't light up, doesn't notify, doesn't tempt.

Write what comes. See what stays.

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What to Expect

I should warn you: this will be uncomfortable at first.

You have trained yourself—or been trained by a billion-dollar attention economy—to find boredom intolerable. Your nervous system will resist. You'll feel restless, itchy, wrong. You'll be convinced you should be doing something productive. You'll have the strong urge to check just one thing, just for a second, just to make sure.

This is normal. This is withdrawal. This is what it feels like to stop a habit that has been running in the background of your entire waking life.

Push through. Gently, but push through.

What's on the other side of the restlessness is worth reaching. The mind settles. The churn slows. The seeds you've been carrying—your thoughts, your ideas, your anxieties, your goals, your passions, your and and and—they start to become visible. You start to see what's actually in the garden.

And then the sorting begins. Which to water. Which to weed out. Which are contemporaneously valuable to you, right now, in this season.

This is the work. This is what you've been missing. This is what all that focus and input and consumption has been obscuring.

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Permission to Be Imperfect

You will not do this perfectly. You will reach for the phone sometimes. You will fill the gap out of habit. You will forget for days or weeks at a time that you ever cared about this.

That's fine. That's human. That's what it looks like to build a new relationship with your own mind.

The goal is not perfection. The goal is practice. The goal is accumulation—small deposits of boredom that compound over time into something different. A mind that's a little less frantic. A self that's a little more known. A garden that's a little more tended.

Every unfilled gap counts. Every moment of chosen boredom is a vote for a different way of being. You don't have to win every moment. You just have to keep casting votes.

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The Garden Is Waiting

Here's what I want you to understand: you are not building something from scratch. You are not starting from zero. The garden is already there. It has always been there. The seeds were planted long ago—by your experiences, your questions, your longings, your life.

What you're doing now, by seeking boredom, is simply showing up to tend it. Finally. After years of neglect, of overstimulation, of filling every gap with someone else's content instead of your own.

The garden is waiting for you. It has been patient. It will be patient still. But it cannot tend itself. It needs you to stop, to be still, to be present, to be bored.

Boredom is not wasted time.

Boredom is time reclaimed. From the feeds, from the podcasts, from the endless scroll. Reclaimed for you. For your seeds. For whatever wants to spring up from the fertile soil of your unstimulated mind.

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The Challenge

I'll leave you with something concrete. Not a suggestion. A challenge.

For the next seven days:

1. No devices in the bathroom. Not once. This is non-negotiable.

2. One drive per day in silence. It can be short. But one.

3. Five minutes of intentional boredom. Sit somewhere—anywhere—with nothing to consume. Eyes open or closed, it doesn't matter. Just five minutes of nothing. Set a timer if you need to. But no input.

4. Carry a notebook. A small one. Physical. And when something surfaces during your boredom, write it down. Not in complete sentences. Just capture.

That's it. Seven days. See what emerges.

And then tell me—tell someone—what you found in the garden.

What seeds had been waiting.

What wanted to spring.