Experiences – Life – Inspiration 🇨🇭🇯🇵

Somewhere along the way, boredom became something to avoid at all costs.

Any empty moment can now be filled instantly. A phone in the pocket. A screen in every room. A constant invitation to look at something, react to something, consume something.

Waiting has disappeared. So has being alone with one’s thoughts.

I noticed this most clearly after I stopped using social media. At first, there were these small gaps in the day. A few minutes here. A few minutes there. Moments where I would previously have reached for my phone without even thinking.

Now there was just… nothing.

And that nothing felt strangely uncomfortable.

Not because anything was wrong, but because I had unlearned how to simply be there without being fed input. It was a mild, almost invisible restlessness. A habit of stimulation looking for its next object.

But if I did not immediately fill those gaps, something else started to happen.

Thoughts began to stretch out again. Not in a spectacular way. More like a landscape slowly becoming visible when the fog lifts. Ideas connected. Memories surfaced. Questions appeared that I had not asked myself in a long time.

It reminded me that boredom is not an enemy. It is a doorway.

Depth, I think, needs boredom. Or at least it needs space. It needs moments where nothing much happens. Where the mind is not constantly pulled in a new direction every few seconds.

Without that, everything becomes flat.

We still consume a lot, maybe more than ever. But we rarely stay long enough with anything for it to really change us. We know a little about many things, but we rarely let one thing work on us deeply.

Even reading has changed for many people. Not because books have become worse, but because our ability to stay with a text has been trained away. The same with films, conversations, learning new skills.

It is not that we cannot focus anymore. It is that we have built an environment that constantly teaches us not to.

I see this also in my own creative practice. Flying FPV, writing, filming, learning something new. None of these are constantly exciting. There are long stretches of repetition, of small progress, of doing something slightly badly again and again.

If I needed constant stimulation, I would never get through that phase.

But something interesting happens if you stay. If you accept the slowness. If you let yourself be a little bored. A deeper kind of satisfaction appears. Quieter, but more stable.

It feels more like nourishment than like sugar.

I do not think we suffer from a lack of content. I think we suffer from a lack of depth.

And depth cannot be optimized for speed. It cannot be compressed into ten seconds. It does not like being interrupted every few moments.

It grows in silence. In time. In stretches that look unproductive from the outside.

Maybe this is one of the hidden costs of a world that is always entertaining itself. We lose not only boredom, but also the ability to go deep.

And without depth, even the most colorful, most impressive surface eventually starts to feel strangely empty.