Our collective obsession with boredom: Interview with a boredom lab researcher

Summary

They sit alone in a room, expressionless, doing absolutely nothing, giant timers clocking down the hours and minutes. No books, no devices, no food, no distractions, no sleep. It’s a challenge some Gen-Zers are setting for themselves on TikTok—the “Do Nothing” challenge. The idea is to deliberately court boredom to restore depleted attention spans, a salve for the frantic overstimulation of our distracted age. Some of these videos accumulate millions of views. It’s a new twist on an old idea. Over a decade ago, South Korean artist Woopsyang started the “Space-Out Competition” to combat burnout. Since then, the urge for stillness has evolved in many forms, including the recent mania for rawdogging, a term that’s come to mean enduring any mundane activity without aids, particularly long flights. That trend became such a sensation that the American Dialect Society chose rawdog as its Word of the Year in 2024. ADVERTISEMENT Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . But the Do Nothing challenge and the rawdogging trend suggest a fundamental misunderstanding of how boredom and disconnection work, says James Danckert, a researcher in the Boredom Lab at the University of Waterloo. Boredom is closer to hunger than to holiness, he argues, and forcing it on yourself for hours on end doesn’t by itself have restorative power. Instead, the feeling suggests something about your attention, agency, or meaning is out of alignment.I spoke with Danckert about why we’re so fascinated with boredom in this cultural moment, why some people have more trouble with boredom than others, and his frustration with the stubborn idea that boredom is fertile territory for creativity.Why do you think we’re so fascinated by boredom of late?In the early 2000s, we’d start all of our scientific papers with “boredom is an understudied phenomena,” but we can’t do that anymore because in the last 20 years, a lot more people have begun researching it. Some of the recent work aims to ...