“I’M BORED”. You likely remember announcing this refrain as a child. A call for direction that was equally likely not to be answered. And yet, as parents today, we are befuddled us as to why our kids are in this state. They just have so many things they could do.
But sometimes doing nothing is the right thing to do.
Boredom is our brain saying, “I’m not occupied right now, please could you do something interesting?” And that “something” is often the best thing that can happen to a child - or us, for that matter.
When our mind wanders, the Default Mode Network ( the cerebral connection between the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate/precuneus, angular gyrus/TPJ and the hippocampus - all a lot simpler than they sound) lights up like Home Depot’s Christmas decorations department. This neural home of daydreaming, creative recombination, self-reflection, and internal storytelling is where imagination is built, and identity is formed.
It’ll come as no surprise to you that quiet, internally focused time with ourselves is where new ideas bubble and germinate.
The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy once called television the drug of the nation; they said prophetically that “imagination is sucked out of children by a cathode ray nipple”. That was 35 years ago… nothing much has changed. Except the analogue nipple is now digital. Back-to-back notifications and machine-curated content give no quarter to the DMN. We’re all outsourcing our inner lives to algorithms.
An electrifying 2014 study led by Timothy Wilson, Emeritus Professor of the Information School at Sheffield University, defined just how uncomfortable many of us are with a little mental stillness: participants left alone for 15 minutes, with nothing except a button that delivered a mild electric shock, often chose the shock rather than sit with their thoughts. We’d rather hurt ourselves than sit with ourselves. FFS. This isn’t right.
Boredom isn’t idle time — it’s when minds drift into “big questions”: Who am I? What matters? What could I make of this day (or this box of LEGO)? Avoiding those questions flattens inner life and narrows the mental palette we use for problem-solving, planning and self-regulation.
We risk raising children who are excellent at consuming content but under-practised at making ideas, tolerating discomfort, solving real problems, or forming a coherent inner life, leaving them more vulnerable to anxiety, poor self-regulation, and a weakened capacity for meaningful, independent thinking. We may be anaesthetising the very processes that help us make meaning and manage ourselves. And all this in the context of the technological takeover being foisted upon us from Sillycon Valley.
In the age of AI, this capability is even more important. And that scares the shit out of me.
As routine information-processing and pattern-matching tasks are automated, uniquely human capacities — critical thinking, creativity, metacognition, moral reasoning, and self-directed problem-solving — become the premium skills. The DMN underpins many of those capacities by enabling slow, internally driven processes: mental simulation, narrative construction, making sense of lived experience, perspective-taking, and reflective self-monitoring. Those processes train children to ask better questions, tolerate uncertainty, generate original solutions, and evaluate AI outputs instead of accepting them uncritically.
If all that degrades, then we’re closer to midnight than the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says.
But we can sort it. Give children unapologetic, unstructured time. Provide tools — bricks, pencils, sticks — and then step the fuck away. Resist the urge to click auto-fill with content whenever they pause. The tolerance of boredom is an incubation chamber for creativity and the rehearsal space for all that follows.
No boredom, no DMN, no DMN, no Critical Thinking, no critical thinking, no future. Literally.
Doesn’t seem a hard call to make. Does it?
