Think about the last time you were genuinely, uncomplicatedly bored.
No, I do not mean that low-level restlessness that arrives when a meeting runs long — I mean the kind of boredom that used to come on long car trips as a child, or on summer afternoons when there was nothing to do and no screen to reach for. The kind where your mind, having nothing to fix on, just… wandered.
Down some half-remembered thought, across some future you were imagining, through nothing in particular.
Most of us can’t quite locate the last time that happened. And that’s worth sitting with for a moment, because something quite important has been lost in the gap.
I want to be clear: I don’t scroll much. I do, however, have a podcast on every time I walk anywhere, music in the background whenever I’m cooking or cleaning, and something playing while I fall asleep. I am extremely busy consuming content I have curated very thoughtfully, which I tell myself makes it different.
It doesn’t, really. The mechanism is the same.
Every quiet moment, filled. Every transition, covered. Every gap between one thing and the next, colonised by something that needs my ears if not my eyes.
At some point in the last decade, silence became uncomfortable enough that we stopped tolerating it — not all at once, and not through any conscious decision. First, the headphones for the commute. Then podcasts for the gym. Then a show playing in the background while we cooked. Then something to listen to while we fell asleep, because the quiet of the bedroom had somehow started to feel like a problem.
I know why I do it. That’s the part I find harder to admit, because it means I can’t blame the algorithm or the attention economy entirely, though they deserve plenty of blame.
I fill the silence deliberately. It’s a coping mechanism.
The noise keeps certain thoughts at a manageable distance — the ones that have been waiting their turn, that I haven’t had time to deal with, that I’m not entirely sure I want to deal with. As long as there’s a voice in my ear, those thoughts have to wait in line.
The line never really clears, of course. That’s the thing about a queue that never closes.
The day in the mountains
Last year I spent a day alone in the mountains in Tsemi, in Georgia — no phone, no music, not talking to another person from morning until evening. It was an experiment I’d set myself. I was curious whether I could do it. The answer turned out to be technically yes, but with caveats.
The hardest single moment was eating lunch. Just sitting with food and not watching anything, not listening to anything, not even having a conversation to occupy the part of my brain that usually runs in the background of meals.
Just… the food. And the mountain. And me, sitting there, aware of how strange this felt for something that should be completely ordinary.
By mid-afternoon, I found myself talking to the dogs that live near the guesthouse. Long, detailed conversations about various things. I am afraid of dogs. I am genuinely working on this. But apparently, a full day without another voice reaches a point where you will seek one out from whatever source is available, even a source you are mildly scared of.
By evening, something had changed. The thoughts I’d been outrunning had apparently given up waiting politely in line and simply arrived. It was uncomfortable in the way that actually dealing with something deferred is always uncomfortable — but underneath the discomfort was something I can only describe as relief. A strange, quiet kind of lightness. Like I’d been carrying something and had accidentally put it down.
I went back to my podcast the next morning. But I’ve thought about that day more than almost anything else that year.
What the brain is doing when we think it’s doing nothing
There is a network of brain regions that neuroscientists spent years thinking was irrelevant — or worse, counterproductive. It activates not when you’re focused on a task, but when you’re not. When you’re daydreaming, staring at a wall, letting your mind wander without any particular destination. It’s called the Default Mode Network, and it turned out to be doing some of the most important work in the entire brain.
What it does during those apparently idle periods is consolidate memories, process emotional experience, imagine future scenarios, generate the kind of reflective self-understanding that helps us make sense of our lives. It’s also closely involved in creative insight — the solution that arrives while you’re in the shower, the idea that surfaces on a walk when you’ve stopped actively thinking about the problem. That’s the DMN, working quietly in the background of an unoccupied mind.
It needs something specific to do that work: mental space that isn’t pointed at anything. A gap. Which is precisely what we’ve spent the past decade systematically eliminating.
The exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix
The psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan developed Attention Restoration Theory in the 1980s, and I find it the most useful framework I’ve encountered for understanding why so many people are tired in the particular way they’re currently tired — not the tiredness that sleep fixes, but the low-level flatness that persists regardless.
His argument is that directed attention — the effortful, focused kind we use when we’re working, watching, reading, listening — depletes with use. It’s a finite resource. And one of the most studied restoratives isn’t sleep — it’s periods of undirected mental activity, particularly time in natural environments, or simply letting the mind go quiet without a directed task.
Mind-wandering.
The soft, purposeless attention that emerges when the mind has nothing it’s supposed to be doing.
What most of us are doing, even in the hours we’re not formally working, is continuing to direct our attention — at content, at news, at whatever’s next in the queue. There’s no recovery phase. The system runs at near-full capacity from waking to sleeping, and the result is a depletion that feels like exhaustion but isn’t fixed by rest because the rest is never genuinely restful in the way the brain requires.
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” — Plutarch, writing two thousand years before wireless earbuds.
Overconsumption is overconsumption
Here’s the thing that people who think carefully about food will recognise immediately: the problem is rarely that any single food is the issue. The problem is what happens when access becomes so frictionless that we stop registering fullness — when the signals that should tell us we’ve had enough get bypassed by something engineered to keep us going.
Content consumption has followed the exact same trajectory. Autoplay removes the moment of choice between episodes. Feeds are bottomless. Podcasts queue themselves. None of this is accidental — attention is an economy, and the platforms optimising for it are extraordinarily good at their jobs. The result is that most of us are consuming in a way that has more in common with eating out of a bag while distracted than with sitting down to a meal you actually taste.
The mindfulness that makes food choices conscious — pausing, noticing, asking whether you’re actually hungry — is available to us with what we consume through our ears and eyes too. It just requires noticing that the reflex is there before we’ve already acted on it.
What I’m not saying
I’m not saying you should stop listening to podcasts. I’m not going to stop listening to podcasts. Some of them are extraordinary, and the good ones feel like having a conversation with a particularly interesting person, which is one of the better things available to us.
And I’m not going to pretend I’ve solved this. I still fill most of my silences. I still know why. The coping mechanism serves a purpose and I’m not ready to retire it completely — I’m just more honest with myself about what it is, which is at least a start. The thoughts in the queue don’t go away because I’m listening to something. They just wait. And they tend to charge interest.
What I am saying is there’s a difference between choosing to listen to something and reflexively filling a silence before you’ve noticed it was there. Between enjoying content and using it to avoid having an unmediated mind. Most of us, most days, are doing both — sometimes within the same hour. The gap between them is the question worth asking.
Because the exhaustion that doesn’t respond to weekends, the flatness that Netflix doesn’t shift, the sense of being full and empty at the same time — that’s at least partly what it looks like when the mind hasn’t been allowed to wander in a long time. Not the only cause, and not the whole story. But a real part of it.
The space is available. The walk without headphones. The meal without a screen. The five minutes before sleep that you haven’t handed to something that needs your attention. It’s small, and it’s uncomfortable at first, and then it’s something else. I know because I spent a day talking to dogs I was afraid of just to fill it, and somehow came out the other side feeling lighter than I had in months.
