Kierkegaard called boredom “the root of all evil.” But his real target wasn’t boredom itself — it was the frantic, endless running from it.

There’s a moment most people recognize. You finish something (a show, a meal) and there’s a gap. Maybe five seconds. Maybe thirty. Nothing is happening. No input. No stimulation. And before the gap can settle into anything, your hand is already reaching for the phone. Not because you need it. Because the emptiness felt like a problem that needed fixing.

In 2026, that gap should be extinct. AI generates personalized entertainment on demand. Short-form video algorithms know what you want before you do. Podcasts fill every commute, every walk, every shower. Boredom, by all reasonable metrics, has been solved.

And yet. People report feeling more restless, more distracted, more unable to sit still than at any point researchers can measure. The boredom isn’t gone. It’s been driven underground, replaced by a low-grade agitation that no amount of content seems to satisfy.

Søren Kierkegaard saw this coming in 1843. Bertrand Russell confirmed it in 1930. Both of them would look at the way we live now and say: that’s not entertainment. That’s a symptom.

The Quick Version

Kierkegaard argued in Either/Or (1843) that boredom isn’t the absence of stimulation. It’s the self’s refusal to be alone with itself. His “rotation method” described people who endlessly switch activities, relationships, and interests not because they enjoy variety but because staying still would force a confrontation with emptiness they can’t face. Russell picked up a related thread in The Conquest of Happiness (1930): the capacity to endure boredom is essential to creative achievement and a satisfying life. The restless pursuit of stimulation slowly kills the ability to be genuinely interested in anything. Recent research backs both of them up — boredom tolerance is inversely correlated with anxiety, depression, and compulsive phone use. The people who can sit with empty time are, paradoxically, the least bored.

What Kierkegaard Actually Said About Boredom

The “root of all evil” line gets quoted constantly, usually ripped from context to mean something like “boredom is bad, stay busy.” That’s almost the opposite of what Kierkegaard meant.

In Either/Or, the line appears in a section narrated by a character called “A,” an aesthete, a pleasure-seeker, someone who has organized his entire life around avoiding boredom. A is brilliant, witty, and profoundly miserable. He’s Kierkegaard’s portrait of a person who has made entertainment into a religion and found it empty.

A’s solution is what Kierkegaard calls the rotation method: never commit too deeply to anything. Switch interests before they grow stale. Keep relationships shallow enough to leave easily. Treat life like a crop rotation — new field, new season, move on before the soil gets depleted.

Strategy	What it promises	What it delivers
Rotation method (Kierkegaard’s aesthete)	Perpetual novelty, freedom from boredom	Increasing hollowness, inability to care about anything
Constant stimulation (2026 default)	No empty moments, endless entertainment	Restlessness, shortened attention span, dependency on input
Boredom tolerance (Kierkegaard + Russell)	Nothing, actually	Capacity for genuine interest, psychological resilience, creative depth

The rotation method sounds familiar because it’s basically the algorithm. Swipe. Skip. Next. The Netflix browse that lasts longer than anything you watch. The podcast you start and abandon eleven minutes in, not because it’s bad but because the idea of finishing something feels suffocating.

Kierkegaard didn’t use the word “addiction,” but his description of A maps onto what psychologists now call experiential avoidance — the compulsive flight from uncomfortable internal states. Boredom is one of those states. And the flight from it, Kierkegaard saw, doesn’t cure the boredom. It makes it structural. Permanent. Because every new distraction confirms the underlying belief: emptiness is intolerable and must be filled.

The piece on Simone Weil and attention covers a related angle. Weil argued that genuine attention — the kind that sees reality instead of projecting onto it — requires the ability to sustain contact with something even when it’s uncomfortable or unrewarding. Boredom is the first test of that capacity. Fail it, and the deeper forms of attention become inaccessible too.

Russell’s Case for Boredom as a Skill

Bertrand Russell wasn’t an existentialist. He was a logician, a mathematician, a man who valued clarity over drama. But in The Conquest of Happiness, he arrived at something Kierkegaard would have recognized: the modern world’s terror of boredom was making people incapable of the sustained engagement that meaningful work and genuine pleasure require.

Russell’s argument was simple. A generation that cannot endure boredom, he wrote, “will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase.”

Cut flowers in a vase. Written in 1930. It reads like a description of someone doom-scrolling at 1 AM — alive in appearance, disconnected from anything that feeds them.

Russell distinguished between two kinds of boredom. Stultifying boredom — the restless, itchy, need-something-now variety — is what most people mean when they say they’re bored. It’s the kind that sends you to your phone. But there’s another kind, what he called fructifying boredom: the quiet, understimulated state where the mind, deprived of input, begins generating its own. Ideas. Connections. The slow gestation that precedes creative work.

The problem, Russell argued, is that escaping stultifying boredom also kills fructifying boredom. You can’t have the creative silence if you never let the silence happen.

The Josef Pieper piece on leisure and total work culture makes a parallel argument from a different tradition. Pieper distinguished between leisure as receptive openness and leisure as mere time off. What Russell called fructifying boredom and what Pieper called genuine leisure are close to the same thing — a state of alert emptiness where something can emerge because you haven’t pre-filled the space.

What the Research Says Now

Here’s where Kierkegaard and Russell stop being abstract and start being measurable.

A 2024 study published in Personality and Individual Differences examined 542 university students and found boredom proneness was significantly negatively correlated with both resilience and mental well-being. The less someone could tolerate being bored, the lower their resilience scores and the higher their rates of rumination. Boredom proneness, rumination, and low well-being together accounted for 34% of the variance in resilience.

That’s not a small number. A third of what predicts psychological resilience is tangled up with whether you can sit still when nothing is happening.

A 2025 study in Personality and Individual Differences — “Beyond the Scroll” by Turk-Kurtca and Kocaturk — found that psychological resilience acted as a direct protective factor against doomscrolling. People with higher resilience didn’t just scroll less. They experienced less anxiety from the scrolling they did do. The researchers at Texas A&M studying boredom’s effects put it plainly: people who learn to tolerate and respond effectively to boredom are less driven to meaningless distractions like doomscrolling.

Why Can’t We Just Be Bored?

The question sounds ridiculous. Of course you can be bored. Just put the phone down.

Except it’s not that simple. And Kierkegaard understood why. The flight from boredom isn’t about entertainment preferences. It’s about the self. When the stimulation stops, what’s left is you — your thoughts, your anxieties, the unresolved things you’ve been drowning out with noise. Boredom strips the cover off whatever you’ve been avoiding.

This is what Kierkegaard meant by calling boredom the root of all evil. Not that empty time causes harm. That the desperate need to escape empty time drives people into increasingly hollow pursuits — relationships entered for distraction, careers chosen for busyness, substances consumed to muffle the quiet. The evil isn’t the boredom. It’s what the flight from boredom makes you willing to do.

The Schopenhauer piece on pessimism and contentment gets at the underlying mechanism from a different angle. Schopenhauer’s “Will” — the blind, insatiable drive that keeps wanting — sounds a lot like what Kierkegaard’s aesthete experiences: one craving replaced by the next, each satisfaction dissolving before it solidifies. Both philosophers diagnosed the same disease. Both pointed toward the same counterintuitive treatment: stop running.

How to Practice Boredom Tolerance

This isn’t self-punishment. It’s closer to strength training. You’re building a capacity that atrophied because the environment made it unnecessary — like a muscle you stopped using once the elevator was installed.

Practice 1: The Ten-Minute Sit

Pick a time. Sit somewhere without your phone, a book, music, or any input at all. Ten minutes. Not meditation (that gives you something to do — watch the breath, scan the body). Just sitting. No technique. No goal.

The first few minutes will be fine. Around minute three or four, the agitation usually kicks in. The mind starts shopping for something to think about, plan, worry over. That agitation is what you’re building tolerance for. Not fighting it. Not observing it with mindful detachment. Just coexisting with it.

Russell would say this is where the fructifying part starts. Once the mind stops panicking about the absence of input, it sometimes — not always, not reliably — starts producing something interesting. A connection you hadn’t made. A question you’d been too busy to ask. Or nothing. Nothing is also fine. The point is the sitting, not the output.

Practice 2: The Commute Without Input

Pick one commute per week — driving, bus, train, walking — and do it without headphones, podcasts, or music. Just the commute. The traffic sounds. The other people. Your own thoughts, unmanaged.

This one is harder than it sounds because commutes are where most people’s stimulation habits are strongest. The podcast starts before the car moves. The playlist begins before the walk does. Removing the input for one commute a week creates a small, recurring encounter with the emptiness Kierkegaard was talking about.

The digital detox piece covers related strategies for reducing screen dependency. But boredom tolerance is more specific than a detox. You’re not removing technology because it’s bad. You’re practicing being unstimulated because the capacity to be unstimulated turns out to be load-bearing for the rest of your mental life.

Practice 3: The Boredom Journal

This one comes from the research side rather than the philosophy. When you notice yourself reaching for stimulation — phone, fridge, TV, whatever — pause and write one sentence about what you were feeling before the reach. Not an essay. Just: What was the feeling that made stillness intolerable right now?

Over a week or two, patterns emerge. For some people, it’s anxiety. For others, loneliness. For others, a kind of formless dread that doesn’t have a name but shows up reliably at 4 PM on Sundays. Naming the feeling takes some of the urgency out of the escape. You’re not fleeing “boredom” anymore. You’re fleeing something specific, and specific things can be addressed.

Practice 4: The Long, Boring Thing

Read a book that’s longer than it needs to be. Watch a slow film. Listen to a piece of classical music that takes twenty minutes to get where it’s going. Do something that requires patience you don’t currently have and see what happens when you stay with it past the point where the rotation-method instinct says skip.

Russell argued that sustained engagement with difficult material was both a symptom and a cause of a well-functioning mind. The capacity to stay with something boring long enough for it to become interesting is, he thought, one of the skills that separates a rich inner life from a restless one.

When This Doesn’t Help

Boredom tolerance is a practice for garden-variety restlessness — the chronic low-grade agitation that comes from too much stimulation and too little stillness. It’s good for that.

It’s not a treatment for ADHD, which involves neurological differences in attention regulation that “just sit with it” doesn’t address. If you can’t tolerate boredom because your brain literally cannot sustain attention without adequate stimulation, that’s a clinical question, not a philosophical one.

It’s also not appropriate for people in acute mental health crises. If the silence you encounter when you stop scrolling is filled with suicidal ideation, intrusive thoughts, or overwhelming dread, the answer isn’t boredom tolerance. It’s professional support. Kierkegaard and Russell were writing for people who had the basic psychological stability to benefit from discomfort. If that stability isn’t there right now, get help first. The philosophy will wait.

And there’s a class problem in the boredom discourse worth naming. Both Kierkegaard and Russell were writing from positions of material security. The “boredom” of a person working two jobs with no time for reflection is categorically different from the boredom of someone with leisure they don’t know how to use. This practice assumes you have time that you’re filling compulsively. If you don’t have the time in the first place, the prescription is different.

The Empty Room

There’s a line often attributed to Pascal (probably a loose paraphrase, but the idea is real): all of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Kierkegaard would add: and we’ve built an entire civilization around making sure we never have to.

The algorithm knows you’re afraid of the empty room. It’s designed to. Every autoplay, every infinite scroll, every notification is an answer to a question you didn’t ask: what if you had to be alone with yourself for sixty seconds?

The philosophers covered here — Kierkegaard, Russell, and the research that’s finally catching up with them — suggest the same uncomfortable answer. The empty room isn’t the problem. It’s the place where the problem becomes visible. And visible problems, unlike the ones you’re drowning out with noise, can actually be addressed.

Ten minutes. No phone. Just the room.

See what’s in there.

---

Philosophy offers perspectives on boredom, restlessness, and attention — it doesn’t replace professional support. If you’re experiencing persistent anxiety, depression, or attention difficulties that interfere with daily life, a therapist or counselor is the right first step.