↓ Skip to main content
NCW
  1. Habit/

Get Bored on Purpose

·607 words·3 mins· loading · loading · ·
Attention Discipline Habits & Systems
Neo W.
Author
Neo W.
Writing about things that intrigue me.
Table of Contents

Get Bored on Purpose
#

Eleven habits for climbing out of doom-scrolling, from someone who makes videos about digital minimalism and still catches himself scrolling. That admission is worth more than expertise would be.

The eleven
#

  • Leave a gap in the day. Ten or fifteen minutes with no phone, no music, nothing. Washing up or driving in silence works well. It’s practice at tolerating being unstimulated.
  • Delete one high-dopamine app. You may not miss it at first, then notice how much room it was taking. Even deleting the app while keeping the account works, because you won’t re-download and log back in just to have a look.
  • Rewatch things. Shorts and Reels run on novelty specifically. Going back to music and shows you already love breaks that, and the stretches of his life spent on more considered content were, looking back, better ones.
  • Put the phone further away. Another room, or a bag. The walk to fetch it gives you time to ask why you’re fetching it, and that question alone often ends the trip.
  • One thing at a time. Not watching something while eating, not two screens at once. Days feel slower and better, and things you enjoy get properly enjoyed rather than half-noticed.
  • Stop treating boredom as an emergency. Most of us can’t sit in a waiting room any more. Catch the automatic reach and just be bored — a lot of what gets consumed isn’t even enjoyed, it’s just filling something that felt uncomfortable.
  • Choose slower content deliberately. Curate the subscriptions and playlists. Slower doesn’t mean dull — books, drawing, walking, lower-stimulation games. What surrounds you sets your baseline mood.
  • Fewer windows open. Finish one thing before opening the next. One or two tabs. The overhead of switching is larger than it feels.
  • Have one offline hobby. Not monetised, not content, not for an audience. Walking, the gym, sketching, reading. Something that exists purely because you like it.
  • Stop the background audio. It usually starts as “at least I’m learning while I do chores” and degrades into noise. The problem is what it does over time: anything that isn’t enhanced starts to feel unbearable.
  • End the night without an algorithm. Don’t let an app pick what you watch before bed. Choose something, or read. If you only take one of these, do tonight without the phone and see how tomorrow feels.

The single thread
#

Every one of them is the same move: rebuilding your tolerance for not being stimulated.

The empty fifteen minutes, the silence in the car, sitting bored in a waiting room, dropping the background podcast — none of them are about screens exactly. They’re about the fact that a brain kept at a constant high level stops registering anything quieter, and then ordinary life feels flat through no fault of its own.

Which reframes the whole thing. It isn’t self-denial or a digital detox with a finish line. It’s slowly lowering the volume until normal things are audible again.

Why the admission matters
#

He isn’t claiming to have solved it, and that makes the list more usable than a triumphant version would be.

Anything framed as a cure invites you to fail once and quit. Something framed as ongoing maintenance survives a bad evening, which is the only realistic standard for a habit that competes with software engineered by very well-paid people to defeat exactly this.

A few small things to try
#

  • Do one daily task in silence — no podcast, no music
  • Move the charger out of the bedroom
  • Sit through one wait without reaching for anything
  • Pick tonight’s viewing yourself instead of taking what’s offered

Related

Sort People Into Allies and Acquaintances

·563 words·3 mins· loading · loading
Relationships Attention Habits & Systems
Sort People Into Allies and Acquaintances # You can’t cut everyone difficult out of your life. Some of them are your colleagues, some are family. What you can do is stop being confused about which category someone’s actually in. The seven worth spotting # Gossips. If they’re talking about someone else to you, they’re talking about you to someone else. Worth stopping early — “I’d rather not hear that” does it. Listening either drags you in or quietly poisons how you see the person being discussed. Jealous ones. They shrink your good news the moment you share it. Odd thing is a lot of them do want you to do well, they just can’t say it. Reframe that helps: critics make you do it better, haters make you do it faster. Time wasters. Not usually deliberate. They ramble, they want your attention without a reason. Redirecting kindly works — ask for the short version, say you’ve got something you need to get to. Money wrappers. The ones always asking, always vanishing when the bill lands. Worth actually checking your statements for. Are you buying things for people who need it, or people who just ask? Oversensitive people. Carrying enough that they feel got-at most of the time. They can be in your life. They shouldn’t have a big role in it if you’re trying to go somewhere, because the emotional bandwidth they need is the same bandwidth direction needs. Excuse makers. Always tired, always broke, always a reason it won’t work. Sometimes they’re actually shielding you from their own fear. Doesn’t mean the fear is right. Miseducated people. Not unintelligent — just holding wrong ideas about what actually gets you somewhere, and degrees don’t protect anyone from that. The tricky version is the friend who uses supportive language while quietly getting in the way. The bit that actually matters # The list is less useful as a hit list than as a sorting tool.

When You're Stuck, Think Less

·613 words·3 mins· loading · loading
Simplicity Attention Habits & Systems
When You’re Stuck, Think Less # Feeling stuck is usually a signal that you’re overloaded, not that you haven’t tried hard enough. Which means the instinctive response — think about it more, sleep on it, run it again in the shower — reliably makes it worse. Trap one: thinking harder # Working memory is a workbench, and everyone’s is small. When a problem has more moving parts than fit on the bench, adding effort doesn’t add capacity — it just adds fatigue, and clarity drops the longer you push.

Becoming Ideal Is Still Waiting

·558 words·3 mins· loading · loading
Confidence & Self-Concept Relationships Discipline
Becoming Ideal Is Still Waiting # 45% of men aged 18–25 have never approached a woman in person. 62% of Gen Z men have stepped out of dating altogether. Underneath that is a strategy that feels like effort but isn’t: become impressive enough that the thing you want arrives on its own. The passive fantasy # Jack Reacher is the clean example. Hugely capable, obviously masculine, and romantically completely passive — the women in those books make the first move, and the second, and the third.