An Empty Mind Isn’t Always the Devil’s Playground
- Simranjit Sokhi
- 22 hours ago
- 5 min read
We’ve forgotten the fruits of boredom.
There’s always something within reach now. There’s a phone on the table, a video waiting to be watched, a notification that can be answered, a song that can fill the silence. The moment nothing is happening, we make something happen. We’ve become so accustomed to constant stimulation that being left alone with an empty stretch of time can feel almost uncomfortable.
A few weeks ago, I stood in line at a bagel shop when my hand reached for my phone before I had even picked a spot to stand. There was nothing of use that I wanted to check. No message I was waiting for. My hand simply moved toward it, almost involuntarily, as though boredom were a problem that needed to be corrected before I had even experienced it.
So I did what I suspect a lot of us could do more often. I put my phone back in my pocket and made myself stand there.
The line wasn’t very long, maybe three or four people ahead of me. It was a busy Sunday, though, so that still meant roughly ten minutes of standing there. Ten minutes is not objectively very long. Without my phone, it felt considerably longer.
I read the menu board four times. I read the laminated signs about allergens. I started scanning the refrigerators along the wall, hoping my eyes would land on something interesting enough to distract me from the fact that I was still standing in the same line.
This bagel shop belonged to the same branch as the one I used to buy a bagel from almost every day when I was studying at Berkeley. I had spent enough time in that location that the owners knew my order by heart. They would smile when I walked in and again when I left. That probably sounds insignificant, but it meant something to me at the time, especially because they were owners who rarely gave away their expressions. Without my phone in my hand, I started noticing how different this location was. The system was slower, and their employees moved differently.
I wondered if the Berkeley owners remembered me. If I went back, would they still know my order? I wondered what made them so serious in the first place. Whether they had always been that way or whether life had simply made them a little harder around the edges. I had never actually asked. I had just built my own understanding of them from a few minutes of conversation at a time.
And I knew they weren’t rude. Just people who seemed to take a little longer to let you in.
“Next in line!” I heard the woman behind the counter say.
And that broke me out of my series of questions. I had made up a completely unnecessary theory about the lives of two shop owners outside their bagel shop. Two people hidden in memory, whose faces I hadn’t seen in months.
It was a random thought, but it was mine. And that distinction, now more than ever, has started to feel important.
We’ve become so good at preventing boredom that it rarely lasts long enough to become something else. The moment it appears, we reach for something to fill it. Our screens give us endless loops to scroll through. Constant music fills the space in our imagination that might have opened up during a silent walk or a quiet drive. There’s nothing inherently wrong with consuming media. I do it all the time. But how often are we actually choosing to reach for it? How often are we simply following a habit before we’ve even had the chance to notice that we’re bored?
Being bored used to be a fairly ordinary condition of being alive. There were stretches of time when nothing was happening, and no one expected them to be interesting. When I think about my childhood, I remember why being a child felt so alive. I let my boredom bore me. I would lie on the carpet and stare at the ceiling fan until its movement became hypnotic. I would look through drawers and rearrange things that didn’t need rearranging. I’d stare out the window and make up stories about people who didn’t even know I existed. I’d let my mind wander wherever it wanted to go. There was no need to fill every empty moment. Eventually, my mind would find something to do with it. That kind of wandering becomes much harder when every moment is immediately occupied.
There’s an old saying that an empty mind is the devil’s playground. It has always struck me as an interesting way of understanding boredom. The assumption is that an unoccupied mind is something to be wary of, something that needs to be filled before it gets itself into trouble. We’ve built an entire culture around that instinct without necessarily realizing it. To an extent, I agree with the saying. But I also believe that not all boredom is bad.
There’s an enormous amount of other people’s thinking available to us now. We wake up and enter a world already filled with opinions, arguments, conversations, and interpretations of things we haven’t even had the chance to think about ourselves. Our attention is constantly directed toward something outside of us. It’s become entirely possible to spend a day absorbing other people’s thoughts without giving our own enough uninterrupted space to develop. Other people’s ideas can inspire your own, challenge them, even change them, but there is a limit to how much of yourself you can discover by constantly looking outward. And for this reason, when we pray and meditate, it’s often when we find it hardest to focus. The moment everything becomes still, every thought we’ve suppressed, pushed away, or tried to kill has a way of resurfacing. There’s suddenly nothing left to distract us from it.
Your time doesn’t always have to be converted into entertainment, information, or some measurable improvement in yourself. We’re so accustomed to asking our time to produce something that leaving it unoccupied can almost feel irresponsible.
“Make the most of your time.” Yes, but don’t let it consume you.
Let the thought come to you while you drive. Notice the sky while you wait for someone. Become curious about a stranger’s life for no particular reason. None of these things have to be useful. They happen because your attention is available enough to wander. We give our attention away so easily that we can start to feel guilty for allowing it to belong to us.
Let your boredom bore you. Let the line feel long. Let the car ride be silent sometimes. Let yourself sit somewhere without immediately giving your mind something to consume. You don’t need to turn every experience into a lesson. Boredom will run its course if you let it. It may give you nothing for a while, and then it may give you a thought, a memory, a question, something you would have missed if you had reached for your phone instead.
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Truly amazed every time. Loved this.