If boredom is good for creative solutions, what other “negative emotions” should we be sitting with more?

Do you feel like compared to 10 years ago, you’re more restless but also in more need of rest? In 2025, do you feel like you get bored and antsy easily while also feeling tired more often?

I’m sure it’s not just me who experienced a shift in the timbre of day-to-day life as smartphones and social media (SNS) “revolutionized” (I think “disrupted,” that buzzword from the 2010s, is more eerily apt) life.

Studies have tracked the correlation between compulsive phone-pickups and emotional burnout, ultimately affecting interpersonal relationships. I only got my first smartphone 10 years ago, in 2015. Back then, society was still transitioning from analog to digital.

Studies have tracked the correlation between compulsive phone-pickups and emotional burnout, ultimately affecting interpersonal relationships

As a college student then, phones were for recording audio, but we still wrote the paper on a library PC and printed it out at a hallway Xerox shop, delivering it ourselves to the cubbyhole of a professor.

While seemingly “a hassle,” looking back, there was a whole ecosystem of small interactions with relative strangers that somehow filled a hole, which I find increasingly gaping in today’s “convenient” world.

During last Christmas season’s family reunion, a younger cousin in their early 20s asked me how to stop picking their phone up moment-to-moment. They wanted to go back to hobbies like reading or learn new things like boxing, but a quick pick-up and promise to “just research for 10 minutes” often turned into lost hours.

I wish I could answer them honestly, but it’s a struggle I find myself revisiting constantly, thanks in part to the ease and access of smartphones, coupled with the slot-machine-like design of social media, designed to keep users on the platform for as long as possible: When we log in, what in the real world are we logging out of?

It seems today, we’re afraid of just being with our raw, uncurated selves, and SNS, initially promising of novelty and connection, seemingly became a black mirror of the human psyche.

Perhaps that could explain the steady popularity of practices like yoga and meditation that make people sit with and work through whatever (harmless) discomfort they’re feeling. Ideally, after enough (controlled) exposure to what we normally sweep under the rug, our emotional intelligence gets developed, much like a muscle built through controlled tearing in the gym.

Writers like Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky extolled boredom’s values. Psychologists have also contributed studies confirming these. If boredom is good for creative solutions, what other “negative emotions” should we be sitting with more

It seems today, we’re afraid of just being with our raw, uncurated selves, and SNS, initially promising of novelty and connection, seemingly became a black mirror of the human psyche

As the Persian poet Rumi wrote in “The Guest House,” The dark thought, the shame, the malice / meet them at the door laughing / and invite them in. / Be grateful for whoever comes / because each has been sent / as a guide from beyond. I find it comforting to think that our “dark thoughts” aren’t “the enemy” per se but misunderstood helpers.

Similarly, meditation teacher and author Jack Kornfield did describe the psyche as a “village of selves” born through experiences across life stages: Kid Jack, Adolescent Jack, etc. He proceeds to describe emotions like fear as warning signs, the brain trying to protect us.

At this point, he encourages us not to view such emotions with hostility but gratitude, thank you for trying to help, and in doing so, the adult voices can now say their peace and we can respond rather than simply react to a situation.

Maybe our seeming addiction to SNS has many roots, and one of them is our relationship to boredom under the larger umbrella of our unwillingness to sit with psycho-emotional discomfort.

As much as I wish I could go back to a more analog time when the internet was a space you could leave rather than something omnipresent connecting even lightbulbs and refrigerators, we’re here now. Yogis too work with givens.

What should a Buddha do in 2025? Halfway through the 21st century’s quarter-life? Is it really a crisis or a call to re-evaluate what matters?

Because while compulsively picking one’s phone up can be unhealthy, there’s no denying the benefits also brought by social media and digital technology: Democratized information, and well, actual democracy, like when on-the-ground movements against oppressive regimes were first facilitated online.

Maybe our seeming addiction to SNS has many roots, and one of them is our relationship to boredom under the larger umbrella of our unwillingness to sit with psycho-emotional discomfort

And then there’s also connection: How many times have our niche interests helped us feel less weird, healing the inner child who believes liking anime or K-pop makes you a loser? And the best part? Realizing you’re not alone, and actually meeting in-person the people who share the same passions.

So it’s up for debate whether tech’s pros outweigh the cons, but so long as human agency never leaves the equation, hope isn’t lost.

The Center for Humane Technology (CHT) is a nonprofit media group that often calls attention to issues relating to how digital technology affects society. One of their guests was Maria Ressa, and they discussed how social media algorithms were weaponized and how disinformation was used to manipulate people and condition minds.

A senior colleague who also works in advertising once mentioned off the cuff during downtime that most advertising works because people aren’t in control of their emotions. And today, emotional intelligence, as shown by shows like “Adolescence,” is increasingly in dire need en masse.

As the CHT mentions in many of its podcasts: Are we developing technology to augment the best of human behavior or profit off the worst of it?

Think about it: Isn’t it easier to manipulate a perpetually angry, distracted populace already dealing with an economy forcing people into survival mode when the initial promise of a minimum wage was that people could raise a family, attend school, and vacation?

Think about it: Isn’t it easier to manipulate a perpetually angry, distracted populace already dealing with an economy forcing people into survival mode when the initial promise of a minimum wage was that people could raise a family, attend school, and vacation?

And even if the most-used tech today hijacks the baser aspects of our nature to profit (again, we yogis work with givens!), our last recourse is to work on ourselves. To develop our inherent self-awareness, empathy, and compassion.

Perhaps our refusal to sit with boredom and other uncomfortable emotions has also led to chilling phenomena where the bereaved families of the victims of extrajudicial killings are bullied online, by pundits and regular folk alike; after finding the courage to speak up, they’re met with derision and laugh-reactions.

We may have seemingly beat boredom for a while, but at what cost?