They want to influence you to do… nothing

“Life, friends, is boring,” poet John Berryman wrote in one of his haunting Dream Songs, which was published in 1964.

He may have come to an entirely different conclusion if a small device in his pocket, or on his wrist, had thrummed endlessly with updates, notifications, a change to the terms of service of a rarely used gardening app and slop generated by artificial intelligence.

Life, some have come to believe, is not boring enough.

Seemingly banished in this age of digital saturation, boredom is the unlikely star of a social media fad that has young people sharing videos of themselves doing … absolutely nothing. Some last 15 minutes. Others hold out for hours. It’s all part of a bid to reclaim deteriorating attention spans that incessant alerts and dings have gradually eroded.

In keeping with the currency of the internet, sitting with one’s thoughts for a stretch of time is another “viral challenge” spurring users to make content and try to outdo one another. Creators, though, say they are not merely doing it for clicks but to spread a timely gospel as well.

“After the challenge is over, I feel a good boost of energy in a weird way,” said Mr Sean Panjsheeri, a student at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

In one video, Mr Panjsheeri, 20, sits with a laptop facing away from him, its screen filled by a running digital clock. He stares into the camera while the Flower Duet from the Léo Delibes opera Lakmé plays in the background.

The time-lapsed video compresses into 36 less-than-thrilling seconds Mr Panjsheeri’s successful six-minute foray into the heart of blankness. (He had intended to reach a full 24 hours, but that mountain proved too steep.) According to the informal rules of the challenge, he is not allowed to use a phone, or to break for food and drink, or any other amusements.

His boredom videos are intended to be a break from more stimulating fare, a miniature version of the reset he experiences while filming, Mr Panjsheeri said. “If we don’t take action,” he said, “then our phones are going to overtake us.”

In the fall, Mr Wing Toh Wong, the founder of a smartphone mindfulness app, spent eight hours sitting on a plastic stool, leaning against a door.

“The first two hours were manageable,” Mr Wong, 24, wrote in an e-mail. “I felt like a monk. The remaining six hours were much harder.”

Boredom has a growing fan base beyond TikTok. Lifestyle gurus like Arthur C. Brooks and Robert Greene have extolled its virtues in social media posts and essays. In a November post on Substack titled The Quiet Rebellion Of Doing Nothing, writer Helen Russell described boredom as a “lost art”.

Ms Angel Zheng, who writes a newsletter called Our Cafe, blamed a culture of productivity for our incessant need to occupy ourselves in her article, We’re Not Bored Enough.

Scientists widely agree that smartphones are wreaking havoc on our brains, but is boredom the way to restore attention spans and mend frayed nerves? It could be, said Ms Morgan Starr-Riestis, a therapist with a background in neurology who recently posted an approving explainer of the boredom challenge on Instagram.

Shutting down stimuli activates the brain’s default-mode network, which Ms Starr-Riestis described as a “creativity launching pad” that allows for reflection, introspection and daydreaming – cognitive functions that are often hard to retrieve when devices can easily swoop in as diversions.

“Boredom has become such a villain,” Ms Starr-Riestis said. “Some of these generations have never been without a phone or the internet.”

Now, boredom is the unlikely hero of an overwhelmed society. The trend that has taken off online is sometimes referred to as “rawdogging boredom,” borrowing a once-vulgar term that has come to mean stripping down an activity – like air travel – to its essentials, unmediated by devices.

Mr James Danckert, who runs a “boredom lab” at the University of Waterloo in Canada, where he studies the psychological and neurological roots of boredom, cautioned new practitioners not to assume boredom to be a de facto good.

“Boredom is signalling for you a lack of meaning, a lack of purpose in your life,” he said, calling the TikTok challenge in particular “a misguided approach”. The goal, he explained, is not to wallow in feelings of disinterest and malaise but to find some way to alleviate them.

There are better ways for people to cope, Mr Danckert said, by going outside or finding a new hobby, for instance. Reading also works. “You don’t have to do nothing.” NYTIMES