I used to be the kind of person who could disappear into a thing for hours, not because I was disciplined, but because I wanted it, like learning how to solve a Rubik’s cube until the moves lived in my hands, or getting lost in a story until the world around me went quiet. Now I notice how often I cannot do a basic task without attaching a second stream of input to it, music or podcasts while coding or making breakfast, a video while folding laundry, something playing in the background while I do anything repetitive mostly, anything to make the moment feel filled, and it’s strange that the moment is allowed to be full, but it is not allowed to be empty.
There’s a specific kind of discomfort that shows up when nothing is playing, a small itch that says this is wasted time, fix it, add something, and the fastest fix is always the same object, the phone, because it contains every possible distraction and it delivers them with no effort. The more often I do that, the more automatic it becomes, and after a while the baseline shifts, because silence stops feeling neutral and starts feeling like deprivation.
If you make software that lives or dies by engagement, you need that itch to be loud, you need the empty moments to feel like a problem only your product can solve, you need someone to reach for a screen the second they feel bored or unsure or socially tired, because that is the pocket of time where the numbers come from. This is what every tech CEO loathes: a person who can sit there unentertained and unbothered, a person who does not need a feed to carry them through the day, a person whose attention cannot be harvested in one minute increments.
A musician I follow described how entertainment has colonized her day, how the urge to be stimulated shows up the second she’s bored or unsure, and how that reflex slowly makes her feel less creative, less resilient, and less present, so she tried a month of “no entertainment”, no scrolling, no podcasts, no solo YouTube, no background TV, screens only as tools, movies only if it was communal, audiobooks only if she would sit and listen like it was reading. She framed it as practice more than punishment, using three tools, commitment when the inner bargaining starts, noticing what’s actually underneath the urge to reach for a screen, and gentleness when the day is heavy and you need something that helps without turning the rule into self harm, and by the end the point was simple: when the noise is removed you make space for creativity, community, and honest self knowledge, and the change comes from doing something different long enough that your feelings catch up.
The part that interests me is not the month, the month is the story wrapper, the part that interests me is the list of small moments that only exist when you remove the default option, asking a stranger a question because Google is not available, noticing you are tired instead of hiding behind a scroll, taking a break that is actually a break, discovering that you are lonely because there is no podcast pretending to be company, watching yourself become a person who can just sit there.
There’s a way this all sounds like a purity thing, screens bad, scrolling bad, and it’s not that, it’s closer to saying that the products are working as designed and your brain is responding normally to them, because of course you want the thing that is optimized to be compelling. The interesting question is what happens when you stop outsourcing every empty moment to the algorithm, because the algorithm will always choose more algorithm, and the only thing it cannot do is decide what you actually want your days to be made of.
Tech CEOs are not afraid of your phone, they are afraid of your boredom, because boredom is where you notice your life, boredom is where you feel the mismatch between what you’re doing and what you want to be doing, boredom is where you call a friend, boredom is where you make something, boredom is where you stare out the window and admit you need help, and none of those things are measurable as “time spent”.
I like the image of the person sitting in a waiting room with nothing playing, not because it’s virtuous, but because it looks like someone whose attention is not being traded away in real time, someone who can let a pause be a pause, someone who can be where they are long enough to notice what they want next.