Standing in line at the checkout. The feeling of an event is gone — my hand automatically slips into my pocket for my phone, like it’s not really me moving, just another reflex kicking in. I don’t want anything specific: no news, no pictures, just holding still for a second has become impossible. Pauses don’t exist as space anymore. Just a hole that needs to be filled fast.

Boredom disappeared. Not even as a feeling — I remember irritation or longing well — but as a possibility at all. Cut out of everyday life, like a rare animal: sometimes you see footprints in the sand, but the animal itself is gone and can’t be back. That weird tension between actions used to be a normal state.

What was boredom really? If you pull out childhood summer days: the asphalt softened by the sun, nothing to do at all, and the whole evening still ahead. The brain starts making up silly games — counting windows in the yard, turning clouds into animals, making words from signs on apartment doors. Back then it felt like a sickness of time, but now I see — some hidden muscle of the mind was working.

Then it turned out: if a person has nothing to do, the brain’s default network kicks in — that inner structure that handles imagination, memory, planning, and understanding others. So boredom isn’t emptiness at all. It’s a different kind of filling: inner life instead of outside signals.

Now it doesn’t fit with how the world works. The smartphone always wins — as soon as there’s a chance to slow down, a trigger pops up: a meme, a notification, a quick chat. The attention economy turns every pause into a dopamine shot; even the kettle boils to the soundtrack of incoming messages.

This was seen as freedom: tech took away the routine and gave the brain space for the important stuff. But weirdly, the important stuff doesn’t show up more often. Seems like without that inner silence it’s impossible — no run-up for thought, nowhere for imagination to collapse into something new.

The paradox: we kicked boredom out as the enemy of growth and freed up space… but what’s supposed to fill it? Turns out — nothing just appears. That very emptiness was the launchpad for anything personal: a poem scribbled in the margins or a decision to change life after a long trip away from the usual noise.

Can you be human without inner stops? Is it even possible to think deeply between bits of other people’s content? Or does human nature need artificial boredom — like monks make silence around themselves just to finally hear their own voice?

All the extra stuff (this slow-burning drag) suddenly turns out to be the base of something important — inner freedom for thought to move and the chance to reinvent yourself.

If today the very chance to be unoccupied disappears — does the right to your own meanings disappear with it?