If a medieval monk, a nineteenth-century poet, and a psychiatrist from the 1950s could agree on one thing, it would be this: boredom was not something anyone should actively seek. Today, we seem to believe the exact opposite. Boredom has become fashionable.
For centuries, nobody wanted anything to do with it. Today, we are told to embrace it, to put our phones away and allow ourselves to experience it. Children, we hear, should be bored more often. Creativity supposedly flourishes in it. If current headlines are to be believed, boredom has become the secret behind almost everything worth having: creativity, imagination, even happiness.
The reversal is remarkable, but it is also deeply misleading. The problem is not that boredom has become beneficial. Rather, we have quietly started calling a very different set of experiences 鈥渂oredom.鈥�
Most people do not actually long to be bored. They long for something else: unstructured time, silence, leisure, freedom from constant notifications and endless obligations. Afternoons without schedules. Walks without destinations. Conversations uninterrupted by the impulse to check a screen. These are valuable experiences. They simply are not boredom. If anything, they are often the very conditions that keep boredom at bay.
Browse the lifestyle pages of almost any newspaper or magazine and the advice quickly becomes familiar: put your phone away, stare out of the window, let your mind wander, and鈥攁bove all鈥攂e bored. Popular books, podcasts, newspaper columns, and social media posts celebrate boredom as the secret ingredient behind creativity, imagination, and self-discovery. It is now almost impossible to defend silence, leisure, or reflection without invoking boredom somewhere along the way.
Boredom acquired an entirely new public image. It stopped being something to avoid and became something we were supposedly missing. But boredom itself has never undergone such a transformation. Our interpretation of it has. The rehabilitation of boredom rests on a simple misunderstanding: we have confused boredom with silence, leisure, and the mental space in which curiosity and imagination flourish.
For well over two thousand years, Western culture kept reinventing the meaning of boredom. Medieval monks feared acedia. Nineteenth-century writers transformed it into ennui. Twentieth-century psychiatrists increasingly described it as a psychological condition. Philosophers, novelists, theologians, and physicians all struggled to explain why human beings sometimes found themselves trapped in a state that seemed to drain purpose from the world around them.
Their explanations differed dramatically. Some regarded it as a moral failing. Others as a psychological condition, a social pathology, or even an illness. Yet they all agreed on one point: boredom was not something people actively sought.
We have not abandoned the old misunderstanding. We have simply inverted it. The old story portrayed boredom as a disease. The new one often treats it as a cure. Neither captures what boredom actually is.
Ironically, the modern celebration of boredom began with an entirely reasonable scientific insight. Over the past two decades, psychologists have shown that boredom is not simply a meaningless annoyance. It performs an important function: it tells us that our current activity is no longer providing satisfactory engagement and encourages us to look elsewhere. Like hunger or pain, it is unpleasant for a reason.
Somehow, this insight escaped the laboratory in a rather distorted form. Instead of concluding that boredom serves a useful function despite being unpleasant, public discussion gradually arrived at a different message altogether: boredom is good.
No one celebrates hunger simply because it tells us when to eat. Nor do we celebrate pain because it warns us that something is wrong with our bodies. Their usefulness does not make the experiences themselves desirable. The same applies to boredom.
This becomes especially clear when we think about children. Parents are frequently encouraged to 鈥渓et children be bored鈥� because boredom supposedly stimulates imagination. There is certainly good reason not to entertain children every waking moment. Constant stimulation leaves little room for curiosity, exploration, or independent play. But none of this requires boredom. A child who spends an afternoon inventing imaginary worlds, building elaborate games, or getting lost in a book is not bored. Quite the contrary. The child has forgotten the passage of time altogether.
The real gift is not boredom but the opportunity to become absorbed in something freely chosen. It is the freedom to choose what deserves our attention.
The same confusion shapes popular discussions of creativity. We often hear that our best ideas arrive when we are bored. Yet much of the research cited in support of this claim concerns something else entirely: mind wandering, reflection, or incubation. These states can foster creativity. They simply are not boredom.
Confusing these experiences impoverishes our understanding of both. Perhaps this explains why boredom continues to provoke such contradictory reactions. We instinctively dislike it, yet we have begun celebrating it. We fear lives without stimulation while simultaneously romanticizing one of the least pleasant emotions we experience. In trying to correct centuries of hostility toward boredom, we have swung to the opposite extreme.
The challenge is not to decide whether boredom is good or bad. That is the wrong question. The more interesting question is why we keep misunderstanding it. Boredom has spent centuries being misunderstood. First we treated it as a disease. Now we increasingly celebrate it as a virtue. Perhaps the real challenge is to stop turning it into either.
Boredom does not need better publicity. It needs better understanding.
Josefa Ros Velasco is professor at Complutense University of Madrid. She is founder and president of the International Society of Boredom Studies and coeditor in chief of the Journal of Boredom Studies. Her books include Boredom Is in Your Mind and The Culture of Boredom.