We Are Raising a Generation That Cannot Sit With Boredom. I Worry About the Cost.

I watched a child at a family function the other day, maybe six years old, handed a phone the instant his face showed the first flicker of restlessness. Within seconds the restlessness was gone, replaced by the slack, lit-up stillness we all recognise now. The adults looked relieved. I felt something I could not immediately name, and it took me the rest of the evening to find the word. It was loss.

I am old enough to remember boredom — real, aching, unfilled boredom. The long bus journey with nothing to do. The afternoon when no friend was free and no screen existed to rescue me. I hated those hours then. I understand now that they were doing something. In the emptiness, I made up games, invented stories, learned, without knowing it, how to be alone with my own mind.

That is the quiet skill I worry we are deleting. Boredom is not a problem to be solved; it is the soil where imagination grows. A mind that is never under-stimulated never learns to generate anything of its own. It only learns to consume what others have made.

This is not a sermon against technology. I am writing this on a device, for people reading on theirs. But there is a difference between a tool we pick up and a reflex we cannot put down, and we have crossed that line without deciding to.

I do not have a tidy answer, and I am suspicious of anyone who claims one. I only know that the next time a child near me grows bored, I am going to resist the urge to fix it instantly. I am going to let the silence sit a little longer, and see what he does with it.

Maybe nothing. Or maybe, in that small unfilled space, the beginning of a thought that is entirely his own.