The Slow Hours.

On Boredom in an Age of Everything

There is a certain hour in the middle of the day, when the sky is white and blank, the hum of the fridge sounds louder than it should, and the urge to reach for a phone, a screen, a fix, becomes nearly unbearable. This is not hunger, not thirst, not even desire exactly. It is boredom—strange and shapeless, hovering like a half-formed ghost just beyond the perimeter of thought.

I’ve been thinking a lot about boredom lately. Not the kind that flits through you like a passing weather system—a dull moment on a train, a slow-moving queue—but the deeper, sedimentary kind. The kind that settles. The kind we’ve been trained to extinguish. In a world where every impulse can be met, every itch scratched within seconds, what becomes of the slow, awkward intervals where nothing happens?

Once, boredom had its own ecology. It was in the long Sunday afternoons of childhood, where time slowed to a crawl and the air grew thick with stillness. You learned to live with it, to pick it apart, to tunnel your way out of it with fantasy or mischief or the slow accretion of a game. Boredom bred invention. It was a cradle for dreaming. Now, boredom is something closer to a glitch, a failure in the machine. We are not meant to feel it. And if we do, there are apps for that.

I keep returning to an image of the desert. Simone Weil wrote about it—not the real sand and heat of it, but the desert as a spiritual condition, a necessary emptiness. Boredom might be our desert. A space emptied out not of meaning, but of stimulation. To sit in it is uncomfortable. It asks something of us. It calls for patience, for attentiveness, for a tolerance of our own interiority. But it also makes us vulnerable. The marketplace thrives on that vulnerability. It whispers: You don’t have to feel this. Here’s a new thing. Here’s a better one. Here’s a thousand others.

What we’ve lost, perhaps, is not just the experience of boredom, but the dignity of it. The right to be unproductive, unentertained. To be fallow. I think of Derek Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage, its stubborn life coaxed from shingle and salt. A place that should have been barren, and wasn’t. That’s what boredom can be. A landscape that resists cultivation but still holds seeds.

Lately, I’ve tried letting myself be bored. Not scrolling. Not filling. Not fixing. Just sitting in the slow hours. It is excruciating, sometimes. But something stirs. An image, a phrase, a memory unbidden. I find myself reaching back to the person I was before the feed, the pings, the endless flicker of digital motion. There is a tenderness to that encounter, a recognition. I was not always this hungry.

We talk about abundance as if it were salvation. But too much can flatten as surely as too little. When everything is available all the time, nothing surprises. Boredom, then, might be our last radical gesture. To refuse the scroll. To sit with the ache of want. To do nothing, and see what emerges.

In the end, perhaps boredom is not the absence of content but the presence of time. Real time. Slow time. The kind that asks for nothing and offers everything. If we can bear it. If we can stay.

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