Boredom Is Just Not Paying Attention

Sam Harris, a writer who has long questioned how people find contentment, was in a conversation this week about why happiness feels so elusive. The talk turned to an experience most people no longer have. Being bored.

"Boredom really is just lack of attention," Harris said.

He meant it literally, he argued. There was a time, not long ago, when a person could get stuck in a waiting room while the doctor ran an hour late, with no magazines worth reading and nothing to do but sit with his own thoughts. In that spare hour, Harris said, many people discovered something uncomfortable. The mind was not at rest, and not at ease. A person would find himself casting about for anything worth noticing, and realize he was not comfortable in his own skin.

Very few people have that discovery anymore, Harris argued, because the smartphone in our "pocket has canceled the very possibility of boredom." Any blank minute can now be filled, in his words, "by watching something or reading something or listening to something." He said he was not praising boredom as a good experience in itself, but that the old, unfilled pause let people see there was "something on the other side of" boredom, as he put it.

That something becomes clear, he said, on a silent meditation retreat, where people do nothing but meditate. There is no reading, no writing, no watching, and no conversation. There is only paying close attention to moment to moment experience, "noticing sights and sounds and sensations," and then "the arising of each subsequent thought." Watched that closely, he argued, boredom turns out to be an illusion.