"I'd be bored"

Here's the plain fear, and it's the title of the book. Take the fill away and you'd be bored, and bored is a bad thing to be.

John Eastwood and colleagues, in 2012, offered a definition of boredom that most researchers in the field now work from. Boredom is the aversive experience of wanting to engage in satisfying activity and being unable to. It happens when you can't get your attention to settle on anything, inside or outside your head, you're aware that you can't, and you blame the situation for it. That's what the itch is, in a laboratory's language. Wanting to engage, not managing to, and minding.

Shane Bench and Heather Lench, in 2013, asked what boredom is for, and argued from the evidence that it's a signal. Like other emotions, it has a job. When what you're doing has stopped being worthwhile, boredom makes it unpleasant to continue, pulls your attention off it and raises your readiness to look for something else. It's the feeling that says this isn't working, do something different. Without it, people would carry on with things that had stopped paying, and miss the things that would have.

Put those together and boredom looks different. It isn't a fault in you or a failure of the minute. It's a signal that your attention wants something to settle on and hasn't found it, and the signal has a job, which is to move you toward something worth doing. The fill answers the signal by silencing it. The podcast goes in, attention settles on the podcast, the boredom stops, and the job doesn't get done, because the thing the boredom was pointing at, the unwritten thing, the unrung friend, the plan for the weekend that hasn't been made, is still there with nothing pointing at it.

A person who fills every quiet minute never hears the signal long enough to find out what it's pointing at. They know they're restless. They don't know what about, because the fill arrives before the restlessness has had time to become specific. Chapter 19's quiet stretch is partly about letting it. The itch, stayed with for a few minutes, usually turns into a thought about what you'd rather be doing, and that thought is boredom doing its job, and it's the thing the fill has been preventing.

So yes, you'd be bored. For a few minutes. And bored is fine, because bored is a signal, and a signal you can hear is worth more than one you've muffled.