Modern life is characterized by a paradox. We live in an age of unprecedented stimulation: smartphones, streaming services, social media—screens that serve as portals to infinite digital novelty. And yet we are bored and listless. There is mounting evidence that chronic boredom is on the rise, especially among young people.[1] Many studies have observed a strong and troubling connection between boredom and digital media use, with some recent research showing that smartphone use intensifies rather than relieves boredom.[2] Boredom, of course, is not a new phenomenon. But in a digital age, boredom’s presence reflects a surfeit, not an absence, of stimuli.
The word boredom is a relatively recent arrival to the English language. Boredom entered common usage only in the mid-nineteenth century, gaining cultural currency when Dickens used it memorably in Bleak House (1853) to describe an enduring state of unhappy listlessness. Prior to this, a person could be said to be a bore—meaning, that a person could be uninteresting and make you yawn. But Dickens seemed to describe a new phenomenon: a chronic condition of malaise.[3]
Historians and philosophers debate whether and to what extent boredom is a universal human experience rather than a particular response to the conditions of our modern, industrial, and post-industrial western nations. The classicist Peter Toohey, in Boredom: A Lively History, offers a helpful distinction here. He separates “simple boredom”—the peasant resting on his scythe, sighing at how much of the field remains to be cut—from “existential boredom”—a deeper sense of emptiness and alienation that extends beyond momentary tedium.[4] The former has probably always been part of human experience; the latter is a distinctly modern condition, one that entered our emotional vocabulary only in the last few centuries, as philosophers, novelists, and social critics gave it a name. We moderns suffer from both.
But what exactly is boredom? The phenomenon is both capacious and complex, notoriously difficult to define. Psychologists and neuroscientists tend to view it in functional terms, as an evolutionarily driven signal to engage the world in some task. In Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom, James Danckert and John Eastwood argue that boredom is neither inherently negative nor positive. It is simply a message that we are failing to satisfy our basic need to be engaged and effective.[5] What you do with that message is up to you. You could rob a bank or serve the poor. In Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self, journalist Manoush Zomorodi argues that boredom is not merely neutral but potentially generative: It is the gateway to mind-wandering, the cognitive state in which the brain forms new connections, solves problems, and generates creative ideas.[6] On this account, the real danger of the digital age is not boredom itself but our refusal to tolerate it. We have a self-defeating habit of reaching for the phone at the first twinge of discomfort, crowding out the very mental space in which our best thinking happens.
A Theology of Boredom
Before psychologists, historians, and philosophers studied boredom, theologians wrestled with the subject, and not just in theory but in practice. Christians who devoted their life to the meditation of scripture, prayer, and service often found themselves plagued by bouts of boredom. This was especially true for the monks who went into the desert to engage in spiritual warfare through, among other things, fasting and prayer, in the 3rd and 4th centuries. They had a special name for boredom: “the noon-day devil.” Here’s a description of the noon-day devil from Evagrius, a 4th-century Christian monk and theologian:
He attacks the monk about the fourth hour and besieges his soul until the eighth hour. First he makes the sun appear sluggish and immobile, as if the day had fifty hours. Then he causes the monk continuously to look at the windows and forces him to step out of his cell and to gaze at the sun to see how far it still is from the ninth hour, and to look around, here and there, whether any of his brethren is near. Moreover, the demon sends him hatred against the place, against life itself, and against the work of his hands, and makes him think he has lost the love among his brethren and that there is none to comfort him. He stirs the monk also to long for different places in which he can find easily what is necessary for his life and can carry on a much less toilsome and more expedient profession.[7]
Notice that much more than boredom and procrastination are at work here: inattentiveness, dissatisfaction, restlessness, wanderlust, hatred for place, and frenetic activity.
Theologically speaking, boredom is a universal spiritual experience because it is the manifestation of particularly devastating sin with which human beings must contend—the sin of acedia. In English, this word has been rendered sloth, but this meaning is largely misleading. Sloth does not denote laziness as opposed to industriousness, hard work, and personal dedication. Sloth, traditionally understood as acedia, is the rejection of two things.
First, it is the rejection of our calling—God’s personal call to be who he’s created us to be in Christ and to participate in his mission to bless all peoples. Jesus Christ bids us to love him and our neighbor in our work, our friendships, our families, and in our place. Acedia resists engagement with what Jesus Christ has called us to do in this moment, in this task, in this place. Our sin is that we’d rather just be left alone to our own devices and amusements rather than be the person God has created and called us to be.
This can look like inactivity, but it can also look a lot like busyness. Because as we all know, when we avoid the work that we ought to be doing—when we procrastinate—we often find ourselves occupied with all sorts of distractions and tasks—even noble ones like catching up with a friend or re-arranging the sock drawer. (In fact, I’m convinced that’s the only reason why we even have a sock drawer in the first place.) Procrastination means I’m doing everything but that one thing I should be doing—the very thing that Christ has called me to do. So, I have no interest in the immediate task before me but am drawn to all sorts of other kinds of things.
Second, acedia is the rejection of the goodness of God’s created order. When we are bored, we deny the dazzling beauty and delightfulness of God’s creation. In the book of Genesis, the seven days of creation teach us that the goodness of this world lies in the fact that it is ordered by limits and boundaries that help us live as God intended. This is the world in which God rests and delights on the seventh day of creation. When we find the world to be dull, we are in effect saying to God: “You’re deluded to delight in this world. We see it more clearly than you do—and it is not worthy of our attention or a cause for our joy.”
Taken together, the rejection of God’s calling and God’s creation spells the end of purpose, meaning, joy, and gratitude. It dulls the senses to the reality of Christ and to the reality of creation. This creates a crippling deficit of meaning, which induces boredom. Our default stance toward the world becomes such that the world is not interesting, compelling, or meaningful.
Bored in a Secular Age
All of us moderns, believers and non-believers alike, are especially susceptible to boredom because we live in a two-dimensional secular universe rather than a three-dimensional divinely ordered cosmos.[8] We no longer see the world as our forebears once did, as a “theater of God’s glory,” as John Calvin put it. The psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist describes our predicament this way:
At the core of the contemporary world is the reductionist view that we are—nature is—the earth is—“nothing but” a bundle of senseless particles, pointlessly, helplessly, mindlessly, colliding in a predictable fashion, whose existence is purely material, and whose only value is utility . . . . Not only do I think it is mistaken, I believe, but actively damaging—physically to the natural world; and psychologically, morally and spiritually to ourselves as part of that world. It endangers everything that we should value.[9]
Our default posture is that life is meaningful only insofar as we can make moments of meaning. Because we live in a modern secular age, it is hard to recognize the call of Christ and the good order of creation.
In a world without intrinsic meaning, we should not be surprised that we try to numb the ache of boredom with digital noise. As Michael Hanby observes, our modern culture “assumes that our lives are innately and intrinsically meaningless without the constant stream of ‘stimulation’ and distraction, a stream inevitably subject to the law of diminishing returns.”[10] We despise ordinary, everyday life and prefer digital stimulation to stillness, quiet, and contemplation. Screens and devices shimmer and shine, but the real world has lost its luster. A culture of boredom promotes busyness over stillness, distraction over contemplation, entertainment over rest. Above all else, it prioritizes choice—the freedom to choose—and so seeks to minimize obligation, commitment, and limits. Why? Because only those things that we choose have meaning. A culture of boredom is one that assumes that the world and our work are just means to some other end—the purpose of education is a job, the purpose of a job is money, the purpose of money is pleasure and fun, the purpose of fun and pleasure is to, well, forget that we are bored.
I’m not saying that every moment of boredom is a deep spiritual sin. Some things can be quite boring and tedious, like making the bed and doing the dishes. Much of life is, in fact, ordinary and mundane. What I am saying is that it matters how we engage the mundane, ordinary, and even the boring tasks of the day.[11] Our posture towards monotonous and repetitive activities matters. We prefer to avoid these things at all costs. And we struggle to imagine why they are good in the first place. But it is precisely through engagement with the ordinary that we are called by Christ to love him and to love our neighbor. And these ordinary tasks are shot through with significance as they draw our attention to God’s good world and the ways in which God actively loves it.
The Way Out: Leisure and Contemplation
If boredom stems from a loss of the apprehension of God’s presence and creation’s intrinsic meaning, then the antidote to acedia lies in cultivating contemplative practices that attend to reality, such as prayer, gratitude, self-examination, and sabbath-keeping. The Christian philosopher Josef Pieper argues that the foundation of this contemplative posture is leisure—which he defines not as idleness or entertainment but as “a receptive attitude of mind” that enables genuine attentiveness to God and to reality. Leisure is a capacity to rest in God and to affirm his gifts in creation.[12] He considers the modern world’s chief values of productivity and efficiency to be diametrically opposed to the contemplative life. He writes, “The vacancy left by the absence of worship is filled by the mere killing of time and by boredom, which is directly related to the inability to enjoy leisure; for one can only be bored if the spiritual power to be leisurely has been lost.”[13]
This culture of boredom—and the posture toward ordinary life that it promotes—is exacerbated in the digital age by the fracturing of the attention that is necessary for contemplation. The threat is not merely the ubiquity of internet access, though that is real enough. It is that we are constantly bombarded by external stimuli and pulled by the smartphone’s relentless demands into the concerns of people and tasks in other places and at other times. We are, in a sense, never fully present anywhere. Whether we welcome it or not, we live in a state of hyperactive attention that produces its own exhaustion: cognitive overload, anxiety, depression, and impaired executive function—the very capacities for memory, planning, and decision-making that the contemplative life requires.[14]
What, then, is to be done? There is no simple remedy. But it seems to me that Christians need to incorporate practices of digital asceticism into their lives—a set of deliberate, disciplined limits on technology—in order to cultivate the stillness in which God’s voice can be heard and creation’s goodness noticed. For example, it probably means that we need to guard the first and last hours of the day by making them screen-free in order to establish contemplative rhythms to be receptive to God’s call to begin a day and to practice gratitude and prayer at its conclusion. I can foresee a future where many Christians ditch their smartphones altogether, as a growing number of young people are opting for dumb phones and landlines.[15] What seemed extreme a decade ago now strikes many as necessary. Whatever form it takes, some measure of digital discipline is not optional for those who wish to resist the noonday devil—who is, after all, as ubiquitous as our devices.
It is also worth asking whether this is a battle we can fight alone. The desert monks who named acedia did not fight it in isolation. They fought it in community, under a rule of life, with brothers who could call them back when the noonday devil began its work. There is something to be said for finding or forming communities—a small group, a household, a circle of friends—willing to articulate and hold to a common set of limits around technology, based on a shared conviction that attention is a gift to be guarded and directed.
None of this is easy. It requires swimming against a very powerful current. But the need to resist conformity to the pattern of the world is nothing new (Rom 12:1–2). Paul’s exhortation to the church in Rome takes on fresh urgency in our own age: “Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in the Spirit, serve the Lord” (12:11). And just as the challenge remains, so does the promise—nothing less than the embrace of who God is calling you to be and the recovery of delight in a world that shimmers with meaning.
References
[1] Katy Y.Y. Tam and Michael Inzlicht, “People Are Increasingly Bored in Our Digital Age,” Communications Psychology 2, no. 106 (2024): https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00155-9.
[2] Tam and Inzlicht, “People Are Increasingly Bored.”
[3] Rye Dag Holmboe and Susan Morris, eds., On Boredom: Essays in Art and Writing (UCL Press, 2021), 1–2.
[4] Peter Toohey, Boredom: A Lively History (Yale University Press, 2011).
[5] James Danckert and John D. Eastwood, Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom (Harvard University Press, 2020).
[6] Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self (St. Martin's Press, 2017).
[7] Cited in R. J. Snell, Acedia and its Discontents: Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire (Angelico Press, 2015), 62.
[8] For in-depth arguments for this position, see Michael Hanby, “The Culture of Death, the Ontology of Boredom, and the Resistance of Joy,” Communio 31 (Summer 2004): 181–99; Snell, Acedia and Its Discontents.
[9] Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (Perspectiva Press, 2021.), 5.
[10] Hanby, “The Culture of Death,” 185.
[11] For an excellent account of how our engagement with the mundane is formative, see Brent Waters, Common Callings and Ordinary Virtues: Christian Ethics for Everyday Life (Baker Academic, 2022).
[12] Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. Alexander Dru, intro. T.S. Eliot (Ignatius Press, 1952), 46–47.
[13] Pieper, Leisure, 69.
[14] Ahmed Mohamed Fahmy Yousef, Alsaeed Alshamy, Ahmed Tlili, and Ahmed Hosny Saleh Metwally, “Demystifying the New Dilemma of Brain Rot in the Digital Era: A Review,” Brain Sciences 15, no. 3 (2025): 283, https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci15030283.
[15] Matthew Shaer, “Is There Life After Smartphones?” The New York Times Magazine, March 31, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/03/31/magazine/quit-smartphone-addiction-social-media.html.