Comment: Put down your phone and engage in boredom Published on: 5 September 2025 Writing for The Conversation, Mehmet Sebih Oruc discusses how philosophy can help with digital overload. , It feels like there are so many things constantly vying for our attention: the sharp buzz of the phone, the low hum of social media, the unrelenting flood of emails, the endless carousel of content. It鈥檚 a familiar and almost universal ailment in our digital age. Our lives are punctuated by constant stimulation, and moments of real stillness 鈥� the kind where the mind wanders without a destination 鈥� have become rare. Digital technologies permeate work, education, and intimacy. Not participating feels to many like nonexistence. But we tell ourselves that鈥檚 OK because platforms promise endless choice and self-expression, but this promise is deceptive. What appears as freedom masks a subtle coercion: distraction, visibility, and engagement are prescribed as obligations. As someone who has spent years reading philosophy, I have been asking myself how to step out of this loop and try to think like great thinkers did in the past. A possible answer came from a thinker most people wouldn鈥檛 expect to help with our TikTok-era malaise: the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger argued that modern technology is not simply a collection of tools, but a way of revealing 鈥� a framework in which the world appears primarily as a resource, including the , to be used for content. In the same way, platforms are also part of this resource, and one that shapes what appears, how it appears, and how we orient ourselves toward life. Digital culture revolves around speed, visibility, algorithmic selection, and the compulsive generation of content. Life increasingly mirrors the logic of the feed: constantly updating, always 鈥渘ow鈥� and allergic to slowness, silence and stillness. What digital platforms take away is more than just our attention being 鈥渃ontinuously partial鈥� 鈥� they also limit the deeper kind of reflection that allows us to . They make us lose the capacity to inhabit silence and confront the unfilled moment. When moments of silence or emptiness arise, we instinctively look to others 鈥� not for real connection, but to fill the void with distraction. Heidegger calls this distraction or 鈥渢hey鈥�: the social collective whose influence we unconsciously follow. In this way, the 鈥渢hey鈥� becomes a kind of ghostly refuge, offering comfort while quietly erasing our own sense of individuality. This 鈥渢hey鈥� multiplies endlessly through likes, trends, and algorithmic virality. In fleeing from boredom together, the possibility of an authentic 鈥淚鈥� disappears into the infinite deferral of collective mimicry. Heidegger feared that under the dominance of technology, humanity might lose its capacity to relate to 鈥渂eing itself鈥�. This 鈥渇orgetting of being鈥� is not merely an intellectual error but an existential poverty. Today, it can be seen as the loss of depth 鈥� the eclipse of boredom, the erosion of interiority, the disappearance of silence. Where there is no boredom, there can be no reflection. Where there is no pause, there can be no real choice. Heidegger鈥檚 鈥渇orgetting of being鈥� now manifests as the loss of boredom itself. What we forfeit is the capacity for sustained reflection. Boredom as a privileged mood For Heidegger, profound boredom is not merely a psychological state but a privileged mood in which the everyday world begins to withdraw. In his 1929 to 1930 lecture course , he describes boredom as a fundamental attunement through which beings no longer 鈥渟peak鈥� to us, revealing the nothingness at the heart of being itself. 鈥淧rofound boredom removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals beings as a whole.鈥� Boredom is not absence but a threshold 鈥� a condition for thinking, wonder, and the emergence of meaning. The loss of profound boredom mirrors the broader collapse of existential depth into surface. Once a portal to being, boredom is now treated as a design flaw, patched with entertainment and distraction. Never allowing ourselves to be bored is equivalent to never allowing ourselves to be as we are. As , only in the totality of profound boredom do we come face to face with beings as a whole. When we flee boredom, we escape ourselves. At least, we try to. The problem is not that boredom strikes too often, but that it is never allowed to fully arrive. Boredom, which has paradoxically in countries drowning in technology like the US, is shameful. It is treated like an illness almost. We avoid it, hate it, fear it. Digital life and its many platforms offer streams of micro-distractions that prevent immersion into this more primitive attunement. Restlessness is redirected into scrolling, which, instead of meaningful reflection, produces only more scrolling. What disappears with boredom is not leisure, but metaphysical access 鈥� the silence in which the world might speak, and one might hear. In this light, rediscovering boredom is not about idle time, it is about reclaiming the conditions for thought, depth, and authenticity. It is a quiet resistance to the pervasive logic of digital life, an opening to the full presence of being, and a reminder that the pause, the unstructured moment, and the still passage are not failures 鈥� they are essential. Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. . , PhD Researcher in digital media and philosophy, This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the . 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