There was a time when there was no cure for boredom. If nothing piqued your interest, you had no choice but to sit there and accept the absence of entertainment. You had to wallow in the boredom, exist in it, accept it, and hopefully push through it like it was a boulder impeding your forward progress, and eventually hope that you stumbled upon a way to entertain yourself.Now boredom lasts roughly four seconds before we whip out our phones, swiping and swiping the hope that something will get our dopamine receptors to spray a little bit of that good, good juice that makes us feel good, each swipe feeling emptier than the one before it.Therein lies the problem: the idea that boredom must be defeated. That’s been the dominant theory for nearly 20 years now, and it’s no wonder that theory was invented by tech companies, who conveniently came armed with a cure. Boredom exists for a reason, not just as an indicator that we should get up and do something constructive, or more likely, do something that simulates feeling constructive when you’re not actually accomplishing much of anything.Listen to Your Brain, Not the Call of the VoidScientifically speaking, boredom isn’t your brain lacking stimulation. Psychologists argue that boredom functions as a regulatory signal, with your brain basically saying that this activity you’re currently doing isn’t good enough, so try again. Again, that sounds like a lack of stimulation, but there is a fine distinction, one pointed out in a research paper published in the journal Behavioral Sciences back in 2013. The team from Texas A&M University describes boredom as motivating us to pursue new goals when the current one stops being meaningful.From that lens, we can view boredom not as the absence of entertainment but as the search for meaning. With that framing, the quest to kill boredom has a much deeper, more profound weight. You’re not looking for something to kill time. You’re looking for something that matters to you. You’re looking for a deeper emotional connection. Something that sparks a sense of life in you. It’s a productive version of rage quitting the dull YouTube videos you’re watching, or the derivative video game you’re playing, or the uninspiring book you’re reading. Boredom is ultimately trying to push us toward novelty, which ultimately is a quest for creativity, either externally sourced or internally crafted.Studies have found that people forced to do dull, mind-numbing tasks often perform better on subsequent creative exercises. There’s a simple line of logic to it, one that you probably followed at several points throughout your life but probably less so in recent years, thanks to the dopamine slot machines we all carry around in our pockets. Your brain wants to be stimulated. When it’s understimulated, it starts making its own entertainment.The result of your brain trying to entertain itself is what we call creativity. Inspiration. Innovation. You’re using your body’s natural biochemistry and electrical pulses to create entertainment where there was none. It just sucks that the conveniences of the modern day are almost explicitly designed to be so easily accessible, so algorithmically packed with the most potent industrially manufactured boredom-killing properties, that we rarely allow our brains to follow that path toward self-generated entertainment and exploration of our own limitless creativity.Your Baseline for Stimulation Is Way Too HighBoredom can feel like your brain is attacking you. Like there’s something physically wrong in your body and with your environment. That’s probably because you’ve built up such a high baseline for stimulation that the lack of it feels like a threat, like not having anything to do for a few minutes might as well be a lion hunting you in the savanna.Modern neuroscience on the subject is telling us to lean into that pain because something good will come of it soon enough. Speaking with National Geographic, professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo, James Danckert, says that just as physical pain tells us there’s something wrong in our body, the pain of boredom tells us that something in our head needs to change.A lot of us try to avoid pain altogether rather than pushing through it. That’s where the eternal war against boredom becomes darkly funny. Research has found that the more we try to avoid boredom, the worse it gets. For instance, a 2024 study out of the University of Toronto Scarborough found that modern-day boredom avoidance tactics like doomscrolling actually increase boredom rather than relieving it. Those shortcuts that modern tech has convinced you are the ultimate weapon against boredom are actually just cramming you deeper into boredom than you were before. You tried to escape boredom, and all you did was create Boredom Premium Plus.Kill Your Boredom-Killing DevicesAssuming you can eschew all of the modern boredom-killing devices that are actually doing anything to remedy your boredom, and you set out on the path toward sitting with your boredom in the hope of having some kind of self-entertaining creative breakthrough, you probably quickly recognize the real value of boredom: it creates space. It offers a mental void, a beautiful one full of potential that you’ve been aggressively filling with notifications and autoplay videos for years. Staring into that void can be terrifying. It’s a limitless space that can be filled, but it’s up to you to fill it.Space is important. Without it, your brain never wanders and stumbles upon new things. It never connects ideas in weird, unexpected, delightful ways. Without it, creativity, problem-solving, and maybe even having the occasional life-changing revelation, could not happenBoredom feels like the end of the world. But it doesn’t have to, and, frankly, it shouldn’t. It should feel like the start of a whole new world that you are in charge of and that you can do anything with. You just have to stop anesthetizing yourself the second the door opens because you’re afraid of what’s on the other side, even if what’s on the other side is the true escape from boredom.The post Trying to Cure Your Boredom Is Making You Boring (and Killing the Best Parts of You) appeared first on VICE.