Blaise Pascal said that all of humanity’s suffering comes from being unable to sit quietly alone in a room. That was over three hundred years ago, back when there were no phones, no algorithms, no app demanding a refresh every few minutes. Pascal probably never imagined that later generations wouldn’t solve this problem so much as route around it entirely. The kind of boredom he was talking about simply doesn’t exist anymore.

In the 19th century, European doctors would prescribe “rest cures” for patients with nervous exhaustion — confining them to sanatoriums, forbidding reading, writing, even conversation, just lying there. That was boredom dispensed like medicine. Simone Weil said attention is the purest form of prayer; Kierkegaard wrote somewhere that boredom is both the root of all evil and humanity’s only true rest. But the “boredom” people need no longer exists in the present, nor in some objective void out there. Every gap in time is now stuffed with stimulation — on the subway, in the bathroom, in the five minutes before sleep… people increasingly resemble a spinning top running on empty, appearing to move while going nowhere at all.

The disappearance of boredom isn’t, as those relentlessly upbeat self-management books would claim, a sign that “humanity is advancing, efficiency is improving.” Its exit, from a personal standpoint, comes because we can no longer tolerate the emptiness within; from a social standpoint, because capital discovered the value of attention and turned every blank second into something sellable. Because of this, people no longer drift aimlessly through an afternoon, no longer suddenly recall some small thing from three years ago… all that’s left in memory is a lazy afternoon, and a question mark we can never return to.

I recently heard a bit from comedian Des Bishop: for his generation, “meditation” was nothing more than staring at a water droplet sliding down a bus window. Back then nobody called it “mindfulness” — it was just boredom, just an afternoon, just water on glass. As a kid riding the old green-painted trains, you could spend hours counting railway ties going by… Without boredom, we seem to have drifted further from ourselves.