Stirring Point

Picture Albert Camus sitting with his elbows dug into a marble cafe table and his nose buried in a cell phone. His notebook is empty, with its clean pages staring toward the sky. His pen remains untouched.

Think of Pablo Picasso resting on a weathered stool at the foot of a cluttered easel. A large canvas, stretched tight over its wooden frame, is clean and colorless. His brushes and paints are arranged just so, while the perfect light spills in through his studio window. Instead of reaching for his brush, he slides his thumb along the surface of his iPhone while his eyes scroll through social media reels. An hour passes, then another. His mind takes shot after shot of dopamine before crashing against the comedown of reality. The brush never touches the surface of the canvas. The creative moment is lost.

Our brains: are they equipped to handle this firehose of stimulus? In the last two decades, the novelty of the cell phone has shifted from a useful tool to a full-fledged addiction. A ride on the subway, a visit to any airport, a trip to the doctor’s office—the ubiquity of cell phones has turned us into rudimentary cyborgs. Gone are the days of a crisply folded newspaper on the train or the simple act of sitting and being lost in thought. 

Allow me to clarify. I’m no luddite or table-thumping nostalgic. I have a daily habit of using my cell phone for reading articles, listening to music, consuming audiobooks, and mapping directions. While traveling in Algeria, I used Google Translate to hold countless conversations with people who, in years past, would have remained strangers due to mountainous differences in language. The problem is not our phones. The problem is how perfectly our minds plug into the content we encounter—content specifically created to capture every grain of our attention.

I’m strict with how I use my phone, implementing app timers, grayscale, and focus mode. Yet I still find myself lost in the sea of internet nonsense. We all know these moments, and we recognize how they cannibalize our time with unfulfilling, mindless scrolling. Yes, a weary mind requires moments of mindlessness. But have we grown this weary? Are we this overwhelmed? All those minutes and hours of distracted scrolling? They’re gone. And like moths to flames, we’re drawn in by the blue light of algorithms purposely constructed to steal our boredom and sell us shit. 

Boredom may be the wrong word here, but let’s run with it. I’m not suggesting listlessness or dissatisfaction, like walking around the house and searching for something to do. I mean “quality” boredom, where little is present to distract our minds from their natural desire to wander. Mental itinerancy is a gift of evolution, and while it carries its own baggage for crafting narratives, it gives our minds a runway to take off and soar through our catalog of amassed ideas. A screen that shells out dopamine like a PEZ dispenser steals any chance of steering our minds onto that runway. Undistracted minds are deep wells of creativity, problem-solving, and imagination, yet we blunt their potential by picking up our phones and diving headfirst into the unending escapism our devices promise us. 

The quantity of time spent on our phones concerns most of us (especially parents), and monitoring that time is a strong intervention. But focusing on “why” we turn to these devices with such frequency is of greater concern. What are we losing with each attempt to distract ourselves? What will this cost us? Many of us fear an undistracted mind. Our thoughts may run to the land of hyperanalysis, fear, resentment, indignation—you name it. Living with those raw emotions can be deeply unsettling. For generations, booze, drugs, and work have been great ways to muffle the never-ending mental chatter. Now, we have a device resting in our pocket with endless entertainment and spiderwebs of connections to anything in the world. But to understand those raw emotions, shouldn’t we spend time with them? Shouldn’t we inspect them for what they are?

A 2022 article (Thinking About Thinking: People Underestimate How Enjoyable and Engaging Just Waiting Is) in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Experimental Psychology: General highlighted this fear in its abstract:

“The ability to engage in internal thoughts without external stimulation is a unique characteristic of humans. The current research tested [sic] the hypothesis that people metacognitively underestimate their capability to enjoy this process of “just thinking.” Participants (university students; total N = 259) were asked to sit and wait in a quiet room without doing anything. Across six experiments, we consistently found that participants’ predicted enjoyment and engagement for the waiting task were significantly less than what they actually experienced. This underappreciation of just thinking also led participants to proactively avoid the waiting task in favor of an alternative task (i.e., Internet news checking), despite their experiences not being statistically different. These results suggest an inherent difficulty in accurately appreciating how engaging just thinking can be, and could explain why people prefer keeping themselves busy, rather than taking a moment for reflection and imagination in our daily life.”

We’ve built a fear of boredom. We treat the undistracted mind like a black hole that may consume us the moment we’re pulled into its mass. But letting the mind wander, if only for a moment, functions like a form of mental recess. The mind can run circles around the playground, traversing monkey bars, shooting down the slide and spinning like a centrifuge on a nearby merry-go-round. And while quietly wandering through our thoughts may feel aimless, action is taking place. Creativity, problem solving and imagination—these are the benefits that await us. They were there when we were children, in a time before our phones, and we’ve managed to train our way out of that style of thinking.

The sound of silence isn’t always deafening. Taking 5 minutes on a Sunday to close our eyes or stare at the wall shouldn’t induce anxiety. What if we put down our phones for a moment and let our minds run wild? What’s the worst that can happen? Maybe we’ll find inspiration to write something we find meaningful. Or maybe we’ll capture an artistic idea and reach for that paint brush.