Boredom is a feature

Early in my career I was working stupid hours, twelve to sixteen a day at a startup. We were building a system that took what an expert knew and turned it into step-by-step guides for someone else to follow. Angular on the front, Java at the back. One screen had a form on it, a big complicated one, and we needed it repeated twenty or thirty times down the page. Should have been easy. It wasn't. Every time you changed one field the whole page went slow, because AngularJS ran a digest cycle that re-checked every binding on the page on every change, and with that many copies of the form there were far too many bindings to check.

I spent weeks on it. Read everything, tried everything I could think of, got nowhere. The performance stayed bad, and it was the kind of bad that makes you wonder if you understand the framework at all. So eventually I sort of gave up. Put it down, picked up other tickets, worked the rest of the week on those, and did nothing at all over the weekend.

The fix showed up the next week, and not while I was working. I basically had it before I sat back down. Break the page into small components so a change only had to re-check the piece it touched, instead of the whole page, and update them lazily. Took an afternoon to write. The weeks hadn't gone into writing it. They'd gone into seeing it, and I saw it while I was doing something else. Angular 2 made this sort of thing easy later on, but that didn't help me that month.

This has happened too many times to call it luck. The answer to whatever I'm stuck on almost never shows up while I'm stuck on it. It shows up in the shower, or on a walk, or on a weekend when I've finally stopped trying. Which is a slightly stupid thing to build a working life around, because that empty time is exactly the thing I spend the rest of my life trying to get rid of.

The bug we've been fixing for a decade

Boredom gets treated as a fault in the system. Something to patch. And for the last ten years we've been very good at patching it. The phone took the obvious cases first: the queue at the store, the elevator, the two minutes waiting for the kettle, the walk from the car. All the little dead spots in a day where you used to just stand there. You don't stand there now. You reach into your pocket and the gap closes. And we reach more every year: across two dozen countries, problematic phone use climbed right through the 2010s.

I'm not going to pretend that was a tragedy. Most of those gaps really were nothing. But the phone was working on the easy boredom, the boredom of waiting. What I've noticed lately is that the tools on my own desk have started closing a different gap, and it isn't the waiting one. It's the stuck one.

When I'm stuck now, I don't sit in it. I paste it into the assistant. The second I feel that particular friction, the one where I don't know the next move, there's a text box right there that will hand me a next move in four seconds, and usually a decent one. I'd be lying if I said it didn't help. But the stuck moment used to be the start of something, and now I skip past it before it can start.

What boredom is actually doing

Here's the part I didn't understand back when I was staring at that form.

The brain has a network that switches on when you stop pointing it at a task. Neuroscientists call it the default mode network, which is a fair name: it's the mode you fall back into when nothing outside is grabbing you. Daydreaming, mind-wandering, the shower, the walk. For a long time this looked like the brain idling. It isn't idling. In a 2024 study in the journal Brain, researchers recorded directly from inside the brains of people doing creativity tasks, then used electrical stimulation to disrupt the default mode network on purpose. When they interfered with it, people's answers got measurably less original. That is not a correlation you can wave away. Knock out the wandering network and you knock out the novel idea.

This is the machinery under a thing most makers already half-know: the incubation effect. You work hard on a problem, you get stuck, you step away, and the answer arrives later while you're doing something dumb. The stepping away isn't a break from the work. It's a different stage of the work, run by a different part of the brain, and it only runs when you're not gripping the problem with both hands.

Which explains my Angular month better than any story about being clever. I wasn't clever. I was stuck for weeks, then I stopped, and the not-gripping did the thing the gripping couldn't.

The stuck moment was the on-ramp

So here's what worries me a little about the assistant, and it's specific.

The phone ate the boredom of waiting, and fine. But being stuck is a different kind of boredom, and it's the useful kind. Being stuck is uncomfortable on purpose. That discomfort is the sign that you've loaded the problem in deep enough that your brain is going to keep chewing on it after you walk away. The frustration and the incubation are the same process seen from two ends.

The assistant removes the discomfort instantly. That's the whole pitch. You're stuck, you ask, you're unstuck. But it also means you never load the problem in deep enough to get the free work later. You get an answer without the itch, and the itch was the thing that would have handed you a better answer on Sunday. For the small stuff, who cares, take the fast answer. The trouble is you can't always tell in the moment whether you're stuck on something small or standing in front of your Angular form. And the assistant is just as happy to unstick you either way.

We didn't lose the answers. We lost the empty stretch where the answers used to arrive.

What I'm not sure about

I want to be honest about the other side, because the easy version of this essay is a rant about screens rotting your brain, and the evidence for that is thinner than people think. When researchers actually ran the numbers on smartphone use and creativity across tens of thousands of people, most of us believed our phones were making us less creative, but the large pre-registered samples found the link was tiny at best. So I'm not going to tell you your phone is lowering your IQ. It probably isn't.

And boredom isn't magic. Most boredom is just boredom. Doomscrolling in a queue is not secretly incubating anything, and staring at a wall on purpose won't hand you the answer to a problem you never worked on. Incubation only pays out if you did the loading first. The weekend didn't solve my form. The three weeks before the weekend solved it, and the weekend just let the solution float up. Empty time without the prior effort is only empty.

So the thing I'm actually protecting is narrow. It's the gap that comes right after real effort: the walk after the stuck afternoon, the weekend after the hard week. That specific gap is where the work finishes itself, and it's exactly the gap the assistant is best at filling, because that's the moment you most want to be rescued.

Which leaves me somewhere uncomfortable, because I can't schedule this. The one time I tried to be idle on purpose, to take a walk specifically so the insight would come, the insight knew I was watching and stayed away. The gap seems to need to be genuine, unforced, a little bit wasted. I don't know how you protect something whose whole value depends on you not trying to use it. Maybe the most I can do is notice, next time I'm stuck, that the box is right there, and once in a while not reach for it.

Sources

• Eleonora Bartoli et al., "Default mode network electrophysiological dynamics and causal role in creative thinking", Brain, Vol. 147, Issue 10, October 2024. Open access (CC BY); free full text also at PubMed Central. Stereo-EEG recordings in 13 patients, with direct cortical stimulation of default mode network regions reducing the originality of responses on a divergent-thinking task.
• Jay A. Olson, Dasha A. Sandra, and Ellen J. Langer, "Creativity and Smartphone Use: Three Correlational Studies", International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 39, No. 14, 2023 (pp. 2920 to 2925). Most people believe smartphone use lowers creativity, but pre-registered replications with large samples found at most tiny correlations. Open data and materials: OSF.
• Jay A. Olson, Dasha A. Sandra, et al., "Smartphone addiction is increasing across the world: A meta-analysis of 24 countries", Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 129, 2022 (art. 107138). Open access. Across 24 countries, 83 samples, and 33,831 participants aged 15 to 35, problematic smartphone use rose from 2014 to 2020.