How Your Smartphone Is Robbing You of Your Best Life

On September 14, 2024, 6:00 AM

Smartphones are everywhere and they are wonderful. They help us connect, navigate, learn, and accomplish everyday life tasks. But we are also using them to avoid feeling bored. And that could be robbing us of living better, more fulfilling lives.

In fact, boredom is now thought to be useful. The idea is that boredom, just like other negative emotions, serves a function by addressing challenges we face as humans. The emotion of boredom signals that our current situation is irrelevant to our goals and what is important to us.

So people can feel equally bored in an empty room or in an active party, as long as what is happening is not relevant to what they care about. Similarly, people can be relaxing in an empty room without feeling bored if that relaxation is congruent with their goals.

When nothing relevant to our goals is happening, boredom prompts us to seek out new opportunities, challenges, or goals. It makes us want to do something that matters.

This is where smartphones come in. Many of the apps on smartphones are designed to make us feel like we’re accomplishing something meaningful. Many make us feel like we’re connecting with people or that we’re accomplishing goals. But most of what is happening on an app is probably not relevant to your life goals or meaningful to you. Very few people have a life goal of spending more time scrolling through Instagram or hitting an all-time-high score on Candy Crush. These apps trick our brain into thinking we are doing something meaningful, and our boredom fades.

Even though boredom might fade in the short term, smartphones are not a long-term solution. After a few hours spent on smartphone apps, we often feel regret over the wasted time. That was time we could have spent doing things that actually matter to us. Spending time building a great relationship with our spouse. Or curing cancer. Or writing a novel. Or exercising. Or any of the number of life goals that are actually important to us.

Boredom prompts us to take on new challenges and accomplish great things. But only if we permit boredom to direct us to activities that have meaning to us. If we fill the gap with a smartphone, we’re missing out on the best that boredom has to offer.