We may need the very thing we avoid

In today’s fast-paced, eternally connected world, we are losing the ability to be alone with our thoughts. Some maintain that we are even losing our capacity for complete solitude.

Yes, humans are social beings, but time alone with our thoughts has long been held as a necessity for self-improvement. Ideas and answers to problems often arrive in the alone time of no distractions. Today, however, it seems we cannot even go to the front porch swing without a screen in our hands.

I spent part of my earning years as a photographer, but today I hardly take a picture. I look at people who cannot enjoy anything without their camera in record mode, and I wonder whether they are truly enjoying the moment. What will their memory be of an event they only saw through a palm-sized screen?

Is constant stimulation training us to abandon our own thought processes? Must every idea be the result of a prompt from something we read, saw, or heard?

Here is the possibility I want to explore: that the thing we have spent a generation engineering out of our lives, boredom, may be a necessary ingredient in a well-formed mind and a well-ordered soul. Not a nuisance to be solved, but a discipline to be recovered.

The Experiment Nobody Wanted to Repeat

In 2014, a team led by University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson published a paper in Science titled “Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind.” Across eleven studies, participants typically did not enjoy spending six to fifteen minutes in a room with nothing to do but think.

Then came the study everyone remembers. Participants first experienced a mild electric shock and rated it as unpleasant enough that they would pay to avoid it. Next they were left alone for fifteen minutes with a button that would deliver the shock again, if they wished. Sixty-seven percent of the men and 25 percent of the women pressed it at least once.

Read that again. Given the choice between their own thoughts and a jolt of pain they had already said they disliked, many chose the pain. The authors’ summary is worth keeping: “The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself.”

Notice the word untutored. Wilson and his colleagues did not conclude that solitude is bad for us. They concluded that without training, people prefer doing to thinking, and that because our devices are always within reach, we rarely practice just thinking. The capacity has not vanished. It has atrophied, like any unused muscle.

An Old Diagnosis

None of this would have surprised Blaise Pascal. In the Pensées, written in the 1650s, he observed that all the unhappiness of men comes from a single fact: they cannot stay quietly in their own room. Pascal’s targets were not smartphones but hunting, gambling, courtly business and war. He argued that we chase these diversions not for the prizes but to keep ourselves from sitting alone with who we are and what we face. Wilson’s laboratory, with its bare room and its shock button, was Pascal’s chamber with an electrode attached.

The Greeks saw the matter from the other side. Their word for leisure, scholē, is the root of our word school. For Aristotle, we labor in order to have leisure, not the reverse; contemplation was the end toward which the busy parts of life aimed. The twentieth-century philosopher Josef Pieper revived the point in Leisure, the Basis of Culture, arguing that a civilization which treats every hour as a resource for work loses the receptive stillness from which culture, worship and wisdom grow.

a civilization which treats every hour as a resource for work loses the receptive stillness from which culture, worship and wisdom grow.

The Stoics were practical about it. Seneca scolded the busy man who is always occupied and never lives. Marcus Aurelius noted that people go looking for retreats in the country or by the sea, when at any hour a person can withdraw into his own mind. And Plato’s Symposium preserves a scene of Socrates, on military campaign at Potidaea, standing in one spot from morning until the next sunrise, lost in thought, while soldiers gathered to watch. Whatever else the examined life requires, it requires time that looks, from the outside, like doing nothing.

The Sabbath, the Desert and the Still Small Voice

The Bible does not treat idleness as the enemy; it treats constant busyness as the danger. The Sabbath commandment is the clearest evidence. In a world of agrarian toil and slavery in Egypt, God commanded a day on which nothing productive would be done, and built the pattern into creation itself, resting on the seventh day. A day of enforced unproductivity is a bold theological claim: your worth, and the world’s survival, do not hang on your output.

The wisdom literature presses the same point. “Be still, and know that I am God,” says Psalm 46:10, and the order matters: stillness first, knowing second. Psalm 4:4 gives remarkable advice for a sleepless night: commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be silent. Psalm 131 pictures a soul calmed and quieted like a weaned child with its mother, no longer fretting for what it wants. Isaiah 30:15 delivers the verdict Israel refused to hear: in returning and rest you shall be saved, in quietness and trust is your strength. The last line is the sad one: “But you were unwilling.”

Genesis even offers a small, almost throwaway portrait. Isaac, awaiting his future, goes out into the field at evening to meditate (Genesis 24:63). No agenda is recorded. And when Elijah, exhausted and afraid, meets God on the mountain, the Lord is not in the wind, the earthquake or the fire, but in a sound of sheer silence (1 Kings 19). The drama came first; the voice came in the quiet after it.

Then there is Jesus. Mark records that he rose a great while before daylight and went out to a solitary place to pray (Mark 1:35). Luke notes it was his habit: he would withdraw to desolate places (Luke 5:16). When the disciples came back from ministry, thrilled and drained, he did not debrief them. He said, “Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while” (Mark 6:31). If the One with the most urgent mission in history built unhurried solitude into his schedule, the rest of us can hardly claim to be too busy.

The early monks understood the cost. The desert fathers had a saying attributed to Abba Moses: go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything. They also named the enemy.

Evagrius of Pontus described acedia, the “noonday demon,” a restlessness in which the hours crawl, the monk keeps glancing at the window and feels certain that his life would be better anywhere else. That is boredom, diagnosed sixteen centuries ago as a spiritual battleground. Notice what the monks did not do: they did not flee the cell. Their discipline was to stay, and in staying, to be taught.

What the Laboratory Is Learning

Modern research is beginning to confirm what the ancients assumed, with some important qualifications.

In studies presented in 2013 at a British Psychological Society conference, Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman of the University of Central Lancashire had forty people copy numbers out of a telephone directory for fifteen minutes before asking them to think of uses for a pair of polystyrene cups. The bored group generated more creative uses than a control group that went straight to the task.

In a second study, people who merely read the numbers, the more passive and mind-wandering-friendly chore, outperformed those who copied them. The researchers’ reading: tasks that leave room for daydreaming feed creativity, while tasks that absorb the hands and eyes crowd it out.

A more rigorous study by Benjamin Baird, Jonathan Schooler and colleagues, published in Psychological Science in 2012, tested “incubation,” the old experience of solving a problem after you stop working on it. People who spent a break on an undemanding task, one that left the mind free to roam, later improved more on problems they had already seen than people who took a demanding task, rested, or had no break. The improvement tracked with how much their minds wandered.

Here I owe you a correction to my own thesis. In that study the undemanding task beat plain rest. So the research does not say that sitting motionless in a room is magic. It says that a lightly occupied, unoccupied-for-thought mind is fertile ground. Think of washing dishes, walking the fence line, sitting on the porch swing or a rocking chair with nothing in your hand. That is precisely the kind of quiet we are filling with screens and sound.

Brain science adds a clue as to why. Neuroimaging work links mind-wandering to the default mode network, a set of regions active when we remember the past, imagine the future and take other people’s perspectives. Studies of autobiographical planning, a cognitive process that involves identifying and sequencing the necessary steps to achieve personal, real-world goals, suggest this network works together with executive control regions when we think through how to reach a personal goal. When we never allow the mind to idle, we may be starving the circuitry we use to make sense of our own lives.

Finally, back to the camera. Linda Henkel of Fairfield University took people on a museum tour, having them photograph some objects and simply look at others. The next day they remembered fewer of the photographed objects, and fewer details about them. She called it the photo-taking impairment effect. Her explanation is that when we trust the camera to remember, we process the experience less deeply ourselves. In one of her experiments, zooming in on part of an object reduced the effect, suggesting that active attention is what protects memory. Later work has shown the effect is more complicated than the headlines suggested, but the core insight stands: attention given away is memory not formed.

A Fair Caution

I should not oversell any of this. The Wilson shock study used a small number of student participants; twelve of eighteen men is a striking result but not a verdict on humanity. The Mann and Cadman work was presented at a conference with modest samples. And mind-wandering is not an unmixed blessing.

Researchers Michael Kane and Jennifer McVay point out that involuntary mind-wandering can pull us off the tasks that matter, and commentators on the Wilson study have wondered whether some people avoid solitude because they slide into rumination. An unsupervised (untutored) mind can circle old wounds as easily as new ideas.

That is why the ancient traditions did not recommend raw emptiness but disciplined stillness: a Psalm to anchor the silence, a cell with a purpose, a Sabbath with a meaning. Boredom becomes virtue, the same as courage or patience does, only when it is practiced rightly. The point is not to marinate in anxiety but to let the mind move at its own pace until it settles.

Practicing the Lost Art

If boredom is a discipline, it can be trained. A few modest practices:

Leave the phone in another room for one walk a day. Not a podcast walk. A walk.

Take the front porch swing, the rocking chair back. Ten minutes, hands empty. The first three will itch. That itch is Evagrius’s noonday demon, and Wilson’s shock button.

Let one event a month go unrecorded. A grandchild’s recital, a sunset, a Sunday dinner. Be the person who saw it rather than the person who has the footage.

Do one repetitive chore without audio. Dishes, mowing, folding. Baird’s participants would approve.

Keep a Sabbath, however imperfectly. A stretch of time each week in which nothing needs to be produced or watched or listened to.

Write before you search. Before you consult a screen about a question, sit with it for ten minutes and write down what you think. Then check yourself against the world.

A Confession

I will end where I began, with an admission. This article was prompted by a thought from a newsletter to which I subscribe. I took some basic thoughts generated in my own mind and fed them into an AI prompt for further development and fleshing out. I may be a victim of the very thing I am concerned about.

Perhaps so. But the remedy is not shame, it is practice. Use the tools; they are remarkable. Then close the laptop, leave the phone in the kitchen, and go sit somewhere with nothing in your hands. See what rises. If the Psalmist, the Stoics, a French mathematician and a room full of university students with a shock button all point the same direction, it may be worth taking their advice.

Be still, and let your own mind speak first.

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Sources

• Wilson, T. D., et al. (2014). “Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind.” Science, 345(6192), 75-77.
• Baird, B., Smallwood, J., Mrazek, M. D., Kam, J. W. Y., Franklin, M. S., & Schooler, J. W. (2012). “Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation.” Psychological Science, 23(10), 1117-1122.
• Mann, S., & Cadman, R. (2013). Boredom and creativity study presented at the British Psychological Society Division of Occupational Psychology Annual Conference.
• Henkel, L. A. (2014). “Point-and-Shoot Memories: The Influence of Taking Photos on Memory for a Museum Tour.” Psychological Science, 25(2), 396-402.
• Poerio, G. L., et al. (2017). “The role of the default mode network in component processes underlying the wandering mind.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(7), 1047-1062.
• Stawarczyk, D., & D’Argembeau, A. (2015). “Neural correlates of personal goal processing during episodic future thinking and mind-wandering: An ALE meta-analysis.” Human Brain Mapping, 36(8), 2928-2947.
• Kane, M. J., & McVay, J. C. (2012). “What Mind Wandering Reveals About Executive-Control Abilities and Failures.” Current Directions in Psychological Science.
• Pascal, B. Pensées, fragment 139 (Brunschvicg numbering).
• Pieper, J. Leisure, the Basis of Culture.
• Scripture: Genesis 2:2-3; 24:63; Exodus 20:8-11; 1 Kings 19:11-13; Psalms 4:4, 46:10, 131; Isaiah 30:15; Mark 1:35, 6:31; Luke 5:16.