Boredom Is a Skill Issue

I’ve heard the complaint. “AI is killing boredom!” they cry. “We’re losing our ability to just sit there and do nothing!”

To which I say: good. Thank God. Boredom was a design flaw in the human firmware, a legacy bug from a time when we had to wait for the mammoth to wander by. You remember boredom, don’t you? That empty, cavernous feeling in a waiting room, on a long bus ride, in a queue at the pharmacy. The agonizingly slow tick of a clock. The desperate search for a distraction, any distraction, even if it was just reading the ingredients on a shampoo bottle.

Are those people wrong? I don’t think so. They were just suffering. It was a disease of inactivity, a mental toothache. And now we have the cure. A clean, instant, infinitely available dose of not-boredom. It’s right there in your pocket, a little sparkle-shaped syringe ready to inject pure stimulus directly into your brainstem.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Stimulated

Why on earth would you choose to be bored when you can be… anything else? You can argue with a Roman soldier about aqueducts. You can generate a photorealistic image of a sad clown eating a hot dog in a hurricane. You can ask for a five-hundred-word sonnet about your cat’s existential dread. The menu is infinite. The dealer never sleeps.

Let’s be honest: the people who miss boredom are the same ones who romanticize churning their own butter or dying of polio. They’re fetishizing a struggle we have thankfully overcome. They call it “space for creativity” or “a moment for introspection.” I call it what it was: a void. An inefficient use of cognitive resources. My AI assistant doesn’t have “downtime”; why should I?

Before you start, here is my methadone for today: schedule a 15-minute “boredom meeting” in your work calendar for tomorrow. No phone, no computer, no book. Just you and a wall. See how long you last before you start inventing a new shade of beige. For more advanced treatment, some people seem to like the resources on the Freedom blog.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go. I just had a brilliant idea for a shrimp-based cryptocurrency, and I need my dealer to help me write the whitepaper.

Your turn: