I have a vivid memory of being genuinely, thoroughly bored as a child. No phone, no streaming, no one to call. Nothing to do.
And then, slowly, something to do. A game I made up. A story I started writing. A way to build something out of whatever was around.
The boredom didn’t last, but the thing that grew out of it did. I think about that now, watching children who never have to sit in that gap, and I wonder what they’re missing without knowing they’re missing anything at all.
I grew up in the 90’s, so I was very lucky to experience all that. But the interesting thing is that for people who grew up in the 1970s, boredom wasn’t something that got solved with a device. It was an environmental condition, like weather. You sat in it. You waited. And at some point, almost always, your mind found something to do with itself. That process repeated itself thousands of times across a childhood. And something in the brain learned how to do it.
What “doing nothing” actually was
The long summer afternoons of that era looked, from the outside, like nothing. Kids playing in yards, wandering neighborhoods, lying in grass staring at the sky. Unstructured, unsupervised, unproductive by most visible measures. Adults largely left them to it. There was no enrichment schedule, no curated activity, no digital interface to fill the space.
What was actually happening inside was significant. Research on childhood development is consistent on this point: when children are given time without direction, they build skills that structured activities simply don’t generate on their own. Jamie Jirout, a curiosity researcher at the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development, explains that “when kids have the agency to do what they want to do, they’re going to be motivated to get into activities in a deep way. That motivation will then provide a lot of experience and opportunities for them to develop different skills that they might not get in school, or from more structured activities in general because they don’t have to create the entire structure themselves.” That’s the thing. Nobody was handing over a structure. The child had to build it.
What the brain does when it gets bored
Boredom is not the absence of thought. It’s a state the brain moves through on its way to something else. Sandi Mann, a senior psychology lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire and author of The Upside of Downtime: Why Boredom Is Good, describes boredom as “a search for neural stimulation that isn’t satisfied.” The key part of that definition is what comes next: “If we can’t find that, our mind will create it.”
That creation is not a small thing. When the mind can’t find external stimulation, it turns inward. Daydreaming begins. Ideas start connecting in ways they wouldn’t during focused tasks. The brain’s default mode network, the network that’s active when you’re not focused on anything in particular, starts doing work that looks a lot like creativity from the outside. The 1970s child, sitting with nothing to do on a long afternoon, was in a state that modern neuroscience now recognizes as genuinely productive. They just didn’t know it at the time. Nobody called it anything. It was just being bored.
Why the skill stays with you at sixty
Here is the part worth pausing on. People who grew up with unstructured time didn’t just benefit from it in the moment. They built a capacity for it. They repeated the cycle of boredom turning into imagination so many times in childhood that it became a default mode. When they have nothing to do today, they know what to do with nothing. The pathway from boredom to creativity got practiced. It stayed.
This is why someone in their sixties who grew up without constant entertainment can still read a long book without checking their phone, still sit with a problem without needing immediate distraction, still find something to do in a waiting room besides scroll. The skill isn’t a talent. It’s a rut, in the good sense of the word. A groove worn by repetition across years.
What happens when you remove the gap
The opposite is also true. A child who has never had to sit in boredom long enough to create their own stimulation doesn’t build that particular rut. Every gap gets filled before it can become anything. The phone appears, the app opens, the next thing arrives. The brain never has to turn inward for its next idea because something external is always already providing one.
Mann is direct about what constant connectivity is doing to this capacity. “We’re trying to swipe and scroll the boredom away, but in doing that, we’re actually making ourselves more prone to boredom,” she says, “because every time we get our phone out we’re not allowing our mind to wander and to solve our own boredom problems.” The tolerance drops. The default mode barely gets activated. The groove doesn’t form.
This doesn’t make younger generations less capable in other ways. They’ve developed skills and fluencies that previous generations simply don’t have. But the specific capacity to sit with an empty afternoon and turn it into something, that one has to be built slowly, through repetition, in childhood. And for many children today, the conditions for building it are rarely present.
Final thoughts
I’m not making an argument for removing every screen or filling children’s days with enforced emptiness. Balance is what I believe in, for most things. But I do think there’s something worth understanding in the difference between a generation that sat with boredom for years and a generation that has rarely had to. One of them knows something the other has never had the chance to learn. And the person who learned it at eight still has it at sixty, which is not a small thing at all.
The good news is that the capacity isn’t gone. It can still be built. It just has to be given actual room, which means choosing, sometimes deliberately, not to fill the gap. Put the phone down. Let the afternoon be quiet. See what the mind does with that.
Boredom has a bad reputation. It turns out it was doing a lot of quiet work all along.
