On The Death of Daydreaming

What we lose when phones take away boredom and interstitial time

Intro from Jon Haidt:

When I was nearly finished writing The Anxious Generation in the summer of 2023, I realized that I had left a gap. The book focused on the collapse of mental health, attention, and socialization of Gen Z—but again and again, older readers and friends would tell me: “this is happening to me too.” I realized that the global transition to a phone-based life is transforming everyone’s consciousness. But how? What exactly is happening to us?

I thought back to my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, which explored ten ancient ideas about how to live a good life—ideas found across continents and millennia. I began to see that the phone-based life, and social media in particular, push us to live in ways that are directly contrary to those recommended by nearly every ancient religious and philosophical tradition. These traditions tell us to be slow to judge and quick to forgive. They offer practices like meditation to quiet the mind and open the heart to deeper truths and greater communion.

In The Anxious Generation, I explored six of these contradictions in Chapter 8. A simple summary of that chapter is this: the phone-based life diminishes our humanity. Compared to the life we once lived, it degrades us morally, spiritually, socially, and cognitively.

Since writing that chapter, I’vebeen on the lookout for others who can express this loss of humanity better than I can. Here’s my short list: L.M. Sacasas for his Substack The Convivial Society; Nicholas Carr, for The Shallows and his more recent book Superbloom; and Christine Rosen, for her 2024 book The Extinction of Experience. (For a Gen Z perspective, see Freya India—especially the post we co-wrote “On The Degrading Effects of Life Online.”)

Today’s post is by Christine Rosen. Christine holds a Ph.D. in history with a focus on American intellectual history. She is a senior fellow at AEI, and she was my discussion partner when I gave a talk on The Anxious Generation at AEI soon after the book launched. That was when I learned about her book project, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World.

Cover of The Extinction of Experience.

So when her publisher invited me to consider reading an early draft and offering an endorsement, I was glad to say yes. I loved the book, and I hope the blurb I wrote captures its urgency and depth:

Rosen shows us that we are embodied creatures who are rapidly losing the analog world in which our bodies and minds evolved. She shows us that many of the technologically aided advances in convenience and efficiency exact a cost in our humanity, our civility, and ultimately our ability to live together in a democratic society. This is an extremely important book; its message is all the more urgent as AI threatens to make everything effortless and frictionless.

I invited Christine to present a section or idea from her book for After Babel. She chose one of my favorites: the loss of “interstitial time.” Interstices are the gaps between things, as with the cells in your body or the spaces between architectural columns. When applied to time, it means the many bits of time scattered throughout the day such as the five minutes that students have in between classes, or the unknown number of seconds that pass while you are waiting for an elevator. These moments used to be given over to silent reflection or conversation with whoever is around. Now, for most of us, nearly all of them are grabbed by our phones.

Christine traces out the profound consequences of losing those interstitial moments, for our creativity and for our humanity. She shows why it is so important to guard those moments for daydreaming.

— Jon

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On The Death of Daydreaming

By Christine Rosen

Source: Shutterstock

Can you remember the last time you daydreamed? Or coped with boredom without reaching for your phone? Before the era of mobile technology, most of us had no choice but to wait without stimulation, and often, that meant being bored.

But today we need never be bored. We have an indefatigable boredom-killing machine: the smartphone. No matter how brief our wait, the smartphone promises an alleviation for our suffering.

Yet the smartphone’s triumph over boredom might prove a Pyrrhic victory. As Jonathan Haidt showed in The Anxious Generation, the rapid adoption of smartphones and social media, particularly by the young, led to many negative unintended consequences such as increased rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and self-harm. So, too, our efforts to vanquish boredom have had deleterious impacts such as on our ability to let our minds wander, to cultivate patience, and to experience anticipation.

As a member of Generation X, I took boredom for granted. Without access to any kind of mobile technology more sophisticated than a Speak and Spell game, my generation was expected to fill our empty hours in other ways, which usually meant going outside and doing things with our friends. Some kids stayed inside and watched television, of course, but the options for programming were limited. Boredom was part of life, and we accepted and adjusted to this reality. Several decades later, raising my own sons in the age of mobile technology, I saw how quickly expectations had changed for how to spend one’s free time. With access to an iPad or a smartphone, children in the twenty-first century never had to be bored; in fact, everything about the platforms and apps that targeted children habituated them to the idea that they ought never to be bored. I worried about how this might change their expectations and ability to deal with delay, frustration, and empty time as adults.

Boredom has a purpose. To understand and harness it, we need to give our minds more opportunities to experience it. In the rest of this post, I will explore the many ways our efforts to conquer boredom through technology have produced unintended consequences, including the near-total capture of our attention, the death of daydreaming, and the end of a healthy sense of anticipation in our daily lives.

We Used to Just Stare Out the Window

“Shepherds do it, cops do it, stevedores and merchants in their shops do it,” technology critic Marshall McLuhan observed in Understanding Media when discussing Greek men’s use of komboloi, or worry beads. The beads, which look like amber-­colored rosaries, were used throughout the day to pass the time, a secular version of praying the rosary. Their use of worry beads also reflects the deeply felt human need to fill interstitial time. We all engage in these weird little rituals: Some people doodle or fidget, others knit, a lot of people used to smoke. The late Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called these “the ‘microflow’ activities that help us negotiate the doldrums of the day.” These “small automatic games woven into the fabric of everyday life help reduce boredom … but add little to the positive quality of experience.”

Though the experience of boredom is deeply human, what we reach for when we experience it is socially structured, unique to our moment in time. The worry beads and cigarettes of previous eras have given way to smartphones. Ours is a less carcinogenic but more commodified distraction, with long-term impacts which we’re only beginning to fathom.

According to Pew Research, nine out of ten Americans own a smartphone, and 95 percent of teenagers have access to one. A 2024 Pew survey of teens ages 13-17 found that half said they were online “almost constantly.” The average person spends the vast majority of his or her free moments looking at a screen. For decades, Americans have spent a considerable amount of their leisure time watching television; what has declined significantly is the amount of free time they spend with other people. One recent study found an increase in social isolation and significant declines in social engagement with family and friends as well as shared leisure time. We spend more of our free time alone, staring at screens, which habituates us to reach for our phones whenever we have a moment alone to ourselves. Screens have become the dominant means for us to alleviate boredom, whether during long stretches of time alone or in fleeting moments throughout the day.

This is not just a challenge for the young. Pew Research found that Americans over the age of sixty “now spend more than half of their daily leisure time. . . in front of screens.”

Lately I’ve seen more people in their cars thwarting stoplight boredom—­that is, unable to sit unmediated for even the few moments that it takes a red light to turn green, they reach for their smartphones. Kids post on social media about boredom throughout the school day (#bored). The space between the time when they experience boredom and when they broadcast it has disappeared.

A World That Never Lets You Be Still

What happens when we replace boredom with constant distraction and stimulation? Warnings about the harmful effects of too much stimulation are nothing new. “For a living organism, protection against stimuli is an almost more important function than the reception of stimuli,” Sigmund Freud observed. But given the range and speed of stimuli at our disposal, we might need a new way of thinking about their effects. Stimulation seems too quaint a word.

It is a reasonable human impulse to seek distraction from the uncomfortable experience of boredom. What is new about our present moment is that the method we have chosen to alleviate boredom in the short term has negative long-term impacts on our attention spans and our ability to practice patience. We have created a machine for stimulation far beyond anything imaginable in Freud’s time. We might believe that our attempts to fill our interstitial time with mediated distractions qualify as an effort to optimize our experiences under less-than-optimal conditions. But in fact, we have become more like gambling addicts, habituated to the temporary escape our digital technologies provide.

A fascinating study of machine gambling in Las Vegas notes that “flow,” that state of being in which someone is so involved in an activity “that nothing else seems to matter,” as Csikszentmihalyi describes it, is precisely the state gamblers seek and attain at the machines, and precisely what machine designers seek to exploit when people initiate play. Yet, while gamblers are experiencing flow, they are not having the kind of optimal long-­term experiences psychologists had in mind when they advocated pursuing activities that put you “in the zone.”

In a less intense way, we all enter this less-than-optimal state when we turn to our devices to alleviate the experience of boredom. The distractions we seek don’t only consume our time, however. They also degrade many habits of mind that require time and patience to form, such as empathy, awareness, and emotional regulation.

When Idleness Became a Problem to Solve

In a letter Aldous Huxley wrote to George Orwell in 1949 he argued, “I feel that the nightmare of 1984 is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.” What did Huxley believe would bring about this dystopia? Not a global world order or a charismatic despot: “The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency.”

Huxley’s warning has merit. We enjoy the efficiencies and distractions technology brings, but they leave us less skilled at patience. They teach us to value efficiency above all and to be suspicious of idle time, when we should see idle moments as opportunities for reflection and renewal.

Today you rarely see the word “idle” except when used as a pejorative; to be idle is to be wasteful, and several of the most popular Internet startup companies have targeted underutilized resources such as idle cars (Turo, ZipCar), household equipment (SnapGoods), or empty bedrooms (Airbnb), allowing people to make use of them by renting them out when they aren’t in use.

Some technologists have set their sights higher. Max Levchin, a cofounder of PayPal and investor in many Silicon Valley technology companies, gave a speech at a conference in Munich in which he lamented, “The world of real things is very inefficient.” Harnessing the network effects of big data, he foresees a future where we can more efficiently do many things: “We will definitely see dynamically priced queues for confession-­taking priests and therapists,” he said.

Moments of idleness and daydreaming used to be prized for the unexpected pleasure they brought. As Wordsworth wrote, “For this one day we’ll give to idleness . . . One moment now may give us more than fifty hours of reason.” He advocated straying about “voluptuously” through rural fields, asking “no record of the hours given up to vacant musing.” We might not spend our free time lolling about rural glens, but idleness of this variety is the opposite of the instrumental, practical use that our culture encourages us to make of our time. Technologists like Levchin would have us hire out our voluptuous spare time on TaskRabbit. To borrow an image from Wordsworth’s rural fields, we should embrace this fallow time. To be fallow is not the same thing as to be useless; it is to let rest so that cultivation can occur in the future. When mediated experiences co-opt our idle time, we are left with fewer and fewer of these fallow moments, moments that are central to the experience of being human.

With rates of anxiety rising in the U.S., particularly among teens, it is also worth considering how the frenetic pace of the online world, where so many of us spend so much of our time, contributes to our sense of feeling overwhelmed and out of control. Reclaiming our idle time and reorienting ourselves away from screens is one of many small yet radical acts that have the potential to improve the quality of our daily experiences.

The Unfortunate Death of Daydreaming

A culture without boredom, focused on efficiency, also undermines the act of daydreaming, another thing interstitial time used to be given over to. Daydreaming seems a fusty term in an age when productivity and usefulness are prized. But as psychologists and neurologists have found, a wandering mind––often the first signal of impending boredom––is also a creative mind. In the 1960s, psychologist Jerome Singer, the grandfather of daydreaming studies, identified three kinds of mind-­wandering: the productive, creative “positive constructive daydreaming,” obsessive “guilty–­dysphoric daydreaming,” and “poor attentional control.” Singer believed daydreaming was a positive adaptive behavior—­a bold departure from the conventional wisdom at the time, which linked daydreaming to other psychopathologies such as excessive fantasizing. As one student of Singer’s noted, Singer’s work found strong associations between daydreaming and the personality trait “openness to experience,” which demonstrates sensitivity, curiosity, and willingness to explore new ideas and feelings.

Since then, researchers have found numerous positive effects of a wandering mind. Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman summarized them:

“self-awareness, creative incubation, improvisation and evaluation, memory consolidation, autobiographical planning, goal driven thought, future planning, retrieval of deeply personal memories, reflective consideration of the meaning of events and experiences, simulating the perspective of another person, evaluating the implications of self and others’ emotional reactions, moral reasoning, and reflective compassion.”

Daydreaming is also a prompt to memory. As Stefan Van der Stigchel argues in Concentration: Staying Focused in Times of Distraction, “When you are daydreaming (or mind-wandering, as it is referred to within scientific circles), memories that you thought were lost forever can come to the surface again.” He adds, “The neural activity that can be observed when you are daydreaming is very similar to that found in the ‘default network,’ a network of regions in the brain that are active during periods of rest.”

It can be a challenge to find those periods of rest throughout our day, and when we do, if we are habituated to the stimulation technology provides, it is difficult to quiet our minds. As Moshe Bar argues in Mindwandering, “the greater challenge is freeing ourselves from the distractions within, which disrupt our attention and intrude on the quality of our experience even when we are in a perfectly quiet place." In other words: we must cultivate habits that allow for mindwandering and daydreaming. We must, every day, try to reclaim the time that technology has colonized.

Why? Anecdotally, history provides many examples of scientific breakthroughs—­“aha!” moments—­that arose during moments of daydreaming or downtime: René Descartes in bed staring at a fly on the ceiling and coming up with coordinate geometry; Albert Einstein’s glimpse of the Bern tower on a streetcar ride prompting the theory of special relativity; the walk in the woods that prompted Nikola Tesla to devise alternating electrical current.

Unstructured, unmediated time is especially important for the development of creativity in children. “In the space between anxiety and boredom was where creativity flourished,” wrote Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in their examination of declining scores on the Torrance Test for creativity among American children. They hypothesize that one of the reasons creativity scores might be declining is children’s increased use of screen-­based technologies during downtime. Rather than being left to their own imaginative devices, their wandering minds are often captured by devices—­smartphones and other screens that grasp their attention and, in the process, prevent all other possible uses of those moments of idle time.

No More Anticipation

Now that we have so many ways to fill even the smallest fragments of time, a subtle shift in our psychology of expectation also follows. We are more likely to experience waiting as an unpleasant delay rather than as anticipation. Waiting has become a problem to be solved, rather than a normal human experience. When we are accustomed to easily filling time, opportunities for anticipation, like opportunities for daydreaming, disappear.

Anticipation is a kind of preparation for the future. Actively embracing anticipation is also important for one’s emotional health. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls this practice the “imagination response,” and in many ways it resembles daydreaming in its power to prepare the mind for new experiences. Damasio describes an unusual patient, Elliot, who could rationally think through positive and negative likely outcomes for his behavior and could experience happiness or disappointment once something happened to him. What Elliot couldn’t do was imagine or preview those future feelings. Without a functioning imagination response, he could think about the future rationally, but he couldn’t feel it emotionally. As a result, he was usually indecisive and impulsive, which caused him unhappiness.

Try Being Bored

Does it matter if we no longer tolerate boredom, let our minds wander, cultivate a sense of anticipation, and practice patience? Our demand for immediate answers is voracious, and not entirely a bad thing. It drives innovation and commerce and has allowed for communication on a scale barely imaginable a century ago. But living a full meaningful human life means coping with the liminal, those in-­between moments of life when we must endure uneasy or uncomfortable experiences, from boredom during a meeting to bearing witness to another’s illness, to simply being stuck on a bus. In everyday life, we can all try, however modestly, to shift our individual perceptions and behavior by embracing a more generous sense of anticipation and a healthier attitude about delay, by reframing waiting as an opportunity for daydreaming and idle time rather than an excuse for distraction, and by trying to be more patient with one another. Such advice does at least have a long pedigree. Aristotle is said to have warned, “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”

Parents have a crucial role to play in teaching children how to deal with boredom, and it can be as easy and as old-school as simply telling them: “Go outside and play.” Instead of handing a child a slot machine of distraction, encourage them to come up with their own game or activity. Rather than structuring and organizing an activity for your children, let them figure that out for themselves, or with their peers. Children are extraordinarily creative when given the space and time to indulge their wandering minds, but this often requires first overcoming the immediate challenge of handling their frustration and boredom. Placing the burden of alleviating one’s boredom back on a child isn’t a punishment; it’s an opportunity for them to find creative solutions to their discomfort and, as they mature into adults, to identify and cope with feelings of frustration.

As well, parents should model better behavior by resisting the temptation to pick up our phones whenever we are bored. Try this experiment: For one day, do not pick up your smartphone during small breaks in your routine, such as waiting for the train, or sitting in your car at a stoplight. If you find yourself in a doctor’s waiting room, or waiting for a friend at a restaurant, don’t pick up your phone to fill those few minutes. Pay attention to what is around you, or let your mind wander. This sounds like a simple experiment, but as someone who repeatedly tries and often fails to do this, it is revealing of our own bad habits and a useful prompt for thinking more critically about how we spend our time. Reaching for the phone every time is the easy fix, but it is one that has damaging long-term consequences for individuals and for society.

In other words: a bit of boredom is good for us, so the next time you have a minute to spare, instead of reaching for your phone, be rebellious: Daydream.