When I was a child, anytime I felt bored and complained to my mother she would, with a witty smile, invite me to go to the neighbour and ask for un po’ d’intrattieni - a little entertainment.
A doorway she gently pushed me toward: go sit in it, go meet it, go let it do something to you.
Now we exit that doorway before it even fully appears.
It’s not boredom we’ve lost.
It’s the capacity to stay when nothing is happening.
When we lose boredom, we don’t just lose an empty feeling, we lose an entire ecosystem of inner life.
We lose the moment before imagination starts.
Boredom is often the soil where invention first stirs. Without it, creativity becomes forced, performative, or consumed rather than lived.
We lose our tolerance for discomfort. Boredom is a mild form of existential friction. If we can’t sit with that, we struggle to sit with grief, uncertainty, or depth.
Whit boredom disappears also our ability to listen inwardly. Boredom is often what remains when external noise fades. Without it, we stay externally referenced always reacting, rarely originating.
Do you remember when you were bored as a child? Before smart phones and hyper-connectivity? Time stretched. Now it collapses into endless scrolling full, yet strangely empty.
We don’t inhabit time anymore; we consume it.
Boredom is unstructured space. And in unstructured space, something unpredictable can arise. Without it, life becomes curated, anticipated, controlled.
Boredom used to teach us the responsibility to bring life to this moment. Now we outsource that responsibility to algorithms, feeds, noise.
So maybe the real loss is not boredom itself, but our role as co-creators of aliveness.
And maybe that’s why everything feels… saturated, but not nourishing.
My mother’s response was almost philosophical: she didn’t remove boredom. She trusted it. She trusted that if I stayed long enough, something in me would respond.
What happens, I wonder, when we don’t escape it now? Not theoretically but really: when boredom starts to creep in… and we don’t reach for anything?
I am curious, let me know!
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