The Lost Art of Boredom in the Age of Endless Scrolling

Boredom is disappearing. Not as the result of a deliberate policy, but through the accumulation of everyday micro-gestures: the hand reaching for the phone while waiting in line, the thumb scrolling through a feed during a commute, the screen lighting up the moment a second of emptiness appears. This disappearance may seem trivial. It is not. Because boredom, as neuroscience has documented over the past fifteen years, is not a sterile void. It is an active, functional cognitive state, and research shows that it constitutes one of the most ro