By Angad Singh
I was travelling in the Delhi metro last week, amidst the millions of daily commuters when I noticed something strange. There was not one single person around me whose eyes weren’t glued to their phone. Strangely, nothing unusual about that, one might say. But what was unsettling for me was the speed at which they were scrolling. Thumb flicks every second. Like they were searching for something they would never find. Aimlessly consuming more and more, faster and faster, through an endless stream of content that didn’t seem to satisfy them.
Then I slid my phone out and caught myself doing the very same thing.
We have built a world around us where boredom has become almost impossible to experience. Within seconds of feeling under stimulated, we can summon infinite entertainment, answers, and companionship. The technology promises efficiency, connection, and unlimited creative output. Yet something feels fundamentally wrong about this bargain we have made.
The question is not so much about quantifying the productivity of these tools. Everyone knows what they do. The question is rather about losing something essential in the process. something that only takes form in the pause between thoughts and in my case, in the deafening silence on a train ride full of strangers on a slow afternoon.
Boredom used to be a fundamental part of human existence. Everyone waited days for the letters. There was an eagerness to hear the phone ring. Long lines of people without anything to distract them except their own thoughts. These moments were not always fun. Often, they caused deep discomfort. But they were also the very moments when minds wandered into unexpected territory. And each mind had its own freedom to wander without an individually curated but universally accessible social media feed seeping into everyone’s subconscious. Neuroscience suggests that boredom is key in activating the default mode network in our brains.
This is the very network associated with daydreaming, self-reflection, and creative problem solving, according to Eastwood. In breaks from external stimuli, the brain begins making connections between disparate ideas. It manufactures future scenarios. It processes unresolved and non-discrete emotions. This mode of thinking seems unproductive because nothing tangible is being produced. However, it may be precisely where the innovation begins.
Consider how many breakthrough ideas emerged during moments of enforced idleness. Archimedes in his bath. Newton was watching an apple fall while his mind wandered. Poincaré described how mathematical solutions came to him during aimless walks rather than focused study sessions. These stories have become clichés. But they all point to something real about how human cognition works. The mind needs slack in the system. It needs time to consolidate, wander, and take unexpected leaps.
AI gets rid of that slack. Every question is answered immediately. Each moment of potential boredom is filled with algorithmically optimized content. Eventually, we lose the conditions under which certain kinds of thinking are made possible.
There is a difference between having tools that augment our thinking and having tools that replace it. The calculator did not make us worse at mathematics. We still had to understand and decide what calculation needs to be inputted and whether the answer was correlated to the problem. Distinctly, AI does not just calculate, it generates, suggests, and pretends to offer a complete solution. It anticipates what we want to say before we have fully worked it out ourselves.
When one asks an AI to help brainstorm ideas, it vomits a list within seconds. The thoughts are often good, sometimes excellent, but often garbage. And on looking closely one notices something troubling. The thought process feels very similar across different sessions. The ideas and thoughts are of someone who may be well read but thinks lazily and shallowly.
This may be a limitation of current AI capabilities as future versions could possibly generate genuine novel ideas. But there is a deeper concern here about the pipeline itself which is that offloading ideation to machines deteriorates the muscle of generative thinking over time.
Scholars who use AI to write their essays may produce quantitatively more work in the short term, but they may also be depriving themselves of the struggle through which thinking develops. AI accelerates this change by wiping away the struggle of going through a difficult text, line by line. Why sit scratching your heads when you can demand immediate clarity? The loss is that we don’t fully recognize the significance of confusion: it is often where understanding begins. The struggle to articulate half formed thoughts is how those thoughts become fully formed.
The argument that the abundance of having access to more information, entertainment, and creative content than any previous generation makes us more creative, informed and capable stands true in very few contexts. Most people report feeling overwhelmed, paralyzed by options, and unable to commit to any single pursuit long enough to develop real expertise. This is termed as “decision paralysis” by Barry Schwartz in the Paradox of Choice.
AI worsens this problem by seemingly equalizing the accessibility of otherwise diverse and distinct actions. Want to learn piano? An AI tutor can get you started. Want to write a novel? AI can generate plot outlines and character descriptions. Want to paint? AI can create images from text prompts. These tools remarkably lower barriers to entry. This sounds democratic and promising, but also steals away the human effort that is used to force commitment and remain committed.
Human attention remains finite despite the grand evolution of mankind. We have roughly sixteen waking hours each day and a fairly small fraction of that time can be spent in focused concentration. Every minute spent consuming AI generated content or interacting with AI systems buys into the next minute not spent engaging with real thoughts and ideas.
The content is not necessarily bad, and thus, the problem is not the nature of the content. Much of it is entertaining, and some even educational. The problem is its relentlessness; its endlessness. There is no natural point at which it stops. The feed and suggestions are infinite. You finish one video, and three more are queued. You close one chat, and another notification pops up.
The most unsettling aspect of AI’s rise is most definitely how it changes humans’ relationship with uncertainty. Our species has always held space for unanswered questions, unsolved mysteries, and ambiguities in life. While this uncertainty was uncomfortable, it was very importantly generative. It kept us curious while enabling a sense of ease without knowing.
The danger is that we become intellectually passive and mentally lazy. Why use your own cognitive abilities when the AI can do it for you? Why sit with confusion when clarity is a prompt away? Why read the long original thinkers when the AI can summarize all of humanities philosophers? There’s a good reason to use each of these shortcuts independently. However, collectively, they add up to a fundamental shift in how we engage with knowledge.
One way to end this would be with recommendations like delete the apps, take walks, embrace discomfort. But who hasn’t heard that before, and here you still are, reading, scrolling, consuming. We all are.
Perhaps the real question isn’t how to reclaim boredom. It is whether we have the capacity to want it back. Whether we can be with ourselves when no one and no screen is watching. Whether we remember what our thoughts sound like when they’re uninterrupted, incorrect, and incomplete, not tampered with by an algorithm.
The only one way to find out requires doing the one thing that has become almost impossible: stopping. Not replacing this article with another. Not switching apps. Not asking an AI what it thinks about what you just read. Simply stopping.
The space after this final period is yours. What will you fill it with?
(The writer is a 4th Year B Tech Student at Plaksha University, Mohali)
