Bathe yourself in boredom...

On the radical, terrifying act of doing nothing on purpose.

I was standing in my kitchen the other morning, waiting for the coffee to revive my aching corpse, and I caught myself reaching for my phone.

Nothing had happened. No buzz, no notification, no summons from the wider world. The coffee-maker simply had the audacity to take ninety seconds, and my hand went for the phone the way a smoker’s hand goes for the pack: not a decision, a reflex. A small, sad, fully automated reach toward a glowing rectangle, because the alternative, standing in my own kitchen with my own thoughts, had become genuinely unbearable.

I put the phone down. Then I picked it back up. Then I put it down again and watched the coffee maker, as if it owed me money.

This, I have come to understand, is what I do now. I do not have moments. I have content gaps.

For most of last year, I had earbuds in for roughly ninety per cent of my waking life. Walking back from the gym: podcast. On the subway: more podcasts, or a man called Tim explaining how to live. Or the NYT Crossword app. Colouring a cartoon at the drawing board? Netflix going in the background, doing nothing but flickering, a televised nightlight for a grown adult. The remaining ten per cent of the day, the bit where my brain might actually catch up on the firehose of input I’d been aiming at it, did not exist. I had outsourced all of that processing to sleep, which is presumably why I spent the year sleeping like a guilty man being interrogated by detectives.

I did not think of this as a problem. I thought of it as being efficient. Optimised. A productivity hack, which is a phrase I have used unironically and out loud, in front of other adults, and for which I can only apologise.

Then, in one of those productivity newsletters I was almost certainly listening to instead of experiencing my own life, I came across the computer scientist Cal Newport, who had a phrase that lodged itself in me like a splinter: embrace boredom.