The Boredom Line

How to be happy going to B&Q to look at paint

I once learnt that Mary Shelley came up with the idea for Frankenstein in what she described as a “waking dream”.

It was apparently very popular in the 1820s to let your mind wander, and enjoy what popped in. Doctors warned against it, worrying that people’s minds would become unhinged if not used constructively.

Times change.

Unfortunately, my most productive “waking dreams” - 149 hours of them so far - have been almost entirely about the phone. This is a bitter irony.

Rather than brilliant ideas for novels, I end up with lots of different ways to think about how the phone affects my mind.

And about the challenge which I think faces all of us in 2026: how to learn to be bored again.

So rather than Frankenstein I get boredom and phones.

Ah well. As my daughter’s dance teacher used to say when handing out sweets to the kids, you get what you get and you don’t get upset.

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The Boredom League Table

Let’s line up a few activities in order, from stimulating to boring.

• Going on a rollercoaster

• Using a phone

• Watching Yellowstone or one of its many spinoffs

• Listening to a podcast

• Me telling my wife about my day at work

• Listening to Chappell Roan

• Watching the Netflix rotating screen, unsure what to watch

• My wife telling me about her day at work

• Doing some DIY

• Going to B&Q to look at paints

• Country walk

• Listening to opera

• Looking at artwork for more than 30 seconds

• Being told about Minecraft by a four year old

• Loading the dishwasher

• Commuting on a train doing nothing

• Breathing

Everything towards the top is really easy for the mind to do.

Things lower down the list tend to be more boring. By boring, I mean that these activities in isolation will make you feel antsy and unsettled. You’ll be constantly yearning for more stimulation, for faster input. If your mind doesn’t get them it’ll revolt by filling them with negative thoughts.

Probably the key word here instead of boring is unsatisfactory.

For each of us, you could draw a line somewhere along the boredom league table, and have a boredom threshold. A Boredom Line.

Above the Line is okay, below it is Boring.

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The Boredom Line (And Its Lifechanging Effects)

This line can move. Thousands of years ago hunter/gatherers did very little. Do we imagine they were walking around talking about how bored they were? Likely not. I ride every day on a train that would blow a Victorian’s socks off.

So the line moves up and down - but sadly it doesn’t do it on request. If your spouse is telling you a story about their day at work and you find it boring (ie you feel restless, and like you want to be doing something else) it’s not much good for them to tell you not to feel that way. Sure, you can pay attention and mask your irritation. But you’re still bored.

You don’t want to be bored during this work story about Clive, but you are. What you want doesn’t come into it.

There are plenty of things lower down the list we want to be able to say we find interesting. But deep down, very honestly, we may worry that we are bored by them.

Recently I’ve read a lot of very honest (and quite disturbing) discussions in which people who were once avid readers say they struggle to concentrate on a novel.

The trick to happiness is to gradually move the line downwards so these things become genuinely satisfactory or even enjoyable.

How do we move the line? By steadily, day in day out, reducing the amount of time we spend doing things at the top of the list.

Each minute of the day we spend at the top of the stimulation list moves our boredom line upwards.

And looking at the top of the list, there’s one clear candidate for moving our baseline. I’m sure there’s someone out there who works testing rollercoasters for whom everyday life has been rendered tedious, but for most of us it’s going to be the rectangular thing in our pocket.

The phone is resetting our minimum stimulation levels. It is the thing that is making everyday chores more boring. It’s making interactions with our family more uneasy. It is recasting more and more of our life as unsatisfactory.

With the Boredom Line too high, trips to B&Q to look at paints feel like a waste of time. After the neon glow of the phone, all the paints look the same. Instead of feeling like part of building a home with the person you love, it feels like not enough.

It’s chores like these that are going to comprise the bulk of our lives.

And what does it do to our children when we have to focus hard on their stories? To perform presence, even as the rectangular magnet pulls your eyes back?

And how many people might get on better with their spouse if their Boredom Line moved down a bit? It’s easy to imagine there are couples who have split up who’d still be together.

If you like, you can understand all of this scientifically. I’ve written about downregulation of the dopamine receptors. All that.

But for me the Boredom Line is a more powerful and persuasive argument for using the phone less.

You don’t get away with any usage in my opinion - it all has an effect. You need to ration it carefully. Pick your method.

Mine is to go phone free and do nothing for an hour or two each day. I’ve written about how it rewires my brain, stopping me automatically picking up the phone throughout the rest of my day.

And I believe I’m also enjoying a side effect of that technique. By regularly training my mind to be happy with something at the bottom of the list, I believe I’m actively lowering my Boredom Line.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how I can now sit and enjoy my commute. It’s a nice party piece. But the reason I did it wasn’t for the commute.

It’s to put my thumb on the scales, to overcompensate from all the stimulation I get elsewhere.

Because in the middle of the Boredom League table is everyone I love, everything that’s worth doing, and the default activities that will occupy my days.

If that stuff gets submerged below the Boredom Line, if the everyday gets mired in unsatisfactory irritation, then the loss is incalculable.

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This is part a series of articles following 1,000 hours of doing nothing - here’s the embarrassing story of how it all began.

If you know someone who’s tired of their phone use (or if you know someone whose phone use you are tired of) feel free to share with them.

(Photo by Eduardo Soares on Unsplash)