The boredom we grew up with — and why it mattered

Time of India

25-06-2025

As the Business Head for The Times of India, I lead strategic initiatives and drive growth for one of the nation's most influential media organisations. My journalist friends believe I've crossed over to the proverbial dark side. Living on the edges of a dynamic newsroom, I dabble infrequently into these times that we live and believe in the spectatorial axiom – 'distance provides perspective'. LESS ... MORE
The other day, my 17-year-old niece looked my wife dead in the eye and said, 'You grew up bored.'
It wasn't an insult. It was said with the clinical certainty of someone who's watched two TikToks on attention spans and half a YouTube explainer on dopamine loops. But I saw my wife turn a few shades of crimson, like someone just accused her of growing up without WiFi. Which, of course, she did.
I, being the supportive husband I am, guffawed.
Because let's call it what it is—we were bored. Spectacularly so. Long summers without AC. Doordarshan reruns. The excruciating 30-minute wait for Windows 95 to boot up. The thrill of finishing a library book and waiting a whole week to borrow another. And oddly, we turned out okay.
But we now live in an age where boredom is treated like a bug in the human operating system—something to be fixed, optimized, swiped away.
We are a generation that remembers waiting. For the dial-up to connect. For the train to arrive. For the film to develop. Today's world, however, spins on the axis of immediacy. There's an app for everything—sometimes two. Waiting is for chumps. And effort? That's for people who didn't buy the premium plan.
Homework? Ask ChatGPT. Content? Let the algorithm decide. Love? Swipe till the dopamine hits. Hunger? Ten-minute delivery and not a single utensil dirtied. What was once activity is now choreography—perfected to the beat of thumb taps and real-time notifications.
We've converted every task into a verb, and every verb into a transaction. But somewhere in this efficiency opera, we forgot: verbs were meant to carry weight. To do something. To feel the doing.
Now, we don't really act. We tap. Then wait.
And in that silence between intention and gratification, something quietly unravels.
What we've gained in speed, we've lost in soul. Instant delivery, instant validation, instant everything. It's convenient, yes. But it's also cheap. The high fades, the craving lingers. It's like eating candy when what we needed was a meal.
The pleasure is immediate. The emptiness? That comes later.
Because true satisfaction doesn't come preloaded. It takes work. It comes from burning your fingers trying to learn the guitar, from screwing up a dish and then getting it right, from talking to someone without the crutch of emojis and WiFi. The kind of effort that doesn't guarantee success—but guarantees you'll feel something.
And that's what we're losing—the ability to feel.
We're raising a generation fluent in multitasking but foreign to focus. They can FaceTime from anywhere but dread phone calls. They can get everything faster, yet feel slower inside. Peace isn't elusive—it's just never been modelled.
We've made them so reliant on their devices that, frankly, if you wanted to kill Gen Z, you wouldn't need a weapon. Just turn off their phones and watch them dissolve into existential dust.
This isn't nostalgia for a better time. It's an SOS from one that remembers what effort felt like.
So maybe the answer isn't more innovation. Maybe it's intentional friction. The kind that slows you down just enough to notice. That makes you pause long enough to care.
Because in the race to make life easier, we risk forgetting how to live it.
Let's not just build faster tools. Let's build fuller lives.
Before boredom becomes the last thing that made us human.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.