"I'm bored"

You're in a queue with four people ahead of you. There's nothing to look at but a rack of cough sweets and the back of a man's coat. This is boring, and you have in your pocket a device with everything ever written, filmed or sung on it. It seems perverse not to use it.

I'll grant the premise at once. Queues are boring. So are waiting rooms, platforms, and the four minutes it takes a bath to fill. And boredom is unpleasant, more than people like to admit. In a well-known set of studies, a team led by Timothy Wilson asked people to sit alone in a bare room for between six and fifteen minutes, with nothing to do but think. Most didn't enjoy it. In one of the studies, the room contained a button that gave a mild electric shock. Everyone had felt the shock beforehand, and the people counted here had said they'd pay money not to feel it again. Left alone for fifteen minutes, 12 of the 18 men and 6 of the 24 women pressed the button at least once.

So wanting to escape an empty moment is ordinary, and it was ordinary before phones existed. The question for this chapter is whether the phone does cure the boredom.

Two pieces of evidence say it does so less well than it seems to. The first is the Dutch office study from chapter 3. People picked up their phones more when they were bored. Afterwards, they were more bored, not less.

The second is a set of seven experiments from the University of Toronto, with more than 1,200 people in all. They looked at one particular way of using a screen, which is switching. That means skipping from one short video to the next, or jumping forward within one. They found that people switch when they're bored, and that they expect switching to help. When people were made to switch, they ended up more bored than when they watched one thing through. They were also less satisfied, less attentive, and found the videos less meaningful. That held even when they were free to pick videos they liked. The result was weaker and less clear for reading articles and for people who weren't students, and the authors say so. They conclude that enjoyment seems to come from being absorbed in something, and that swiping works against being absorbed.

A reach in a gap is almost all switching. It has to be, because a two-minute gap is too short to get absorbed in anything. You sample six things in ninety seconds and none of them gets hold of you.

The boredom hasn't been removed, only covered over with something that itself becomes boring, which is why the loop has that flat, restless quality. Most people recognise the state of scrolling while bored of scrolling.

You might answer, "Fine, but two minutes of flat scrolling still beats two minutes of cough sweets." I'm not sure it does, and this is where my own interpretation comes in. Boredom in a short gap is mild, and it's over when the gap is over. It also changes if you stay in it for more than a few seconds. Your attention, given nothing, goes looking. It finds the conversation at the counter, or it drifts to what you'll cook tonight, or it lands on something you'd forgotten to do. That drifting is what chapter 11 is about. If the phone comes out at the first twinge, you never get as far as that part. All you ever experience of an empty gap is its first five seconds, which are the worst ones.

There's a second effect, and I offered it in chapter 2 as the habit feeding itself. If every gap is filled, your tolerance for an unfilled one goes down. Two minutes with nothing to look at starts to feel like a long time. It used to be just two minutes. I can't point to a study that has measured that in gaps, so treat it as a suggestion and test it on yourself.

The test is small. Once a day, for a week, leave one short gap empty on purpose. Choose an easy one, like the kettle. Put the phone in another room first if that helps. Stand there, look out of the window, and see what the two minutes are like on the first day. Then see what they're like on the seventh.