Ideas are cheap they say, but haven't seen a whole lot of new ones lately!
We have accidentally engineered boredom out of our lives and we are paying for it by having by having very few new ideas.
Think about the last time you had a genuinely good idea. Not at your desk, not in a meeting. In the shower. Or mowing the lawn. Or staring out a window with nothing in particular on your mind. That's not a coincidence. That's your brain's default mode network — the background processing system that only activates when you stop throwing information at it. Great ideas don't come from thinking harder. They come from thinking less.
For most of human history, people had no choice but to be bored. Shepherds spent entire days alone with their thoughts. Families stared at fires for hours. There was no radio, no screen, no feed to scroll. Out of that enforced quiet came philosophy, mathematics, poetry, and religion the deepest thinking our species has ever done. We didn't create those things despite the silence. We created them because of it.
Then came the radio. Then the television. Then the phone in your pocket that means you never have to be alone with yourself again not in a waiting room, not in an elevator, not even in bed. Each invention quietly stole another pocket of silence.
Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has a useful idea about food: stop relying on willpower and instead divide what you eat into fuel and entertainment. That reframe changes everything. You stop fighting yourself and start asking a simpler question: is this nourishing me, or just passing the time?
The same question applies to what we feed our minds. Boredom isn't a bug. It's a nutrient. The uncomfortable, itchy, nothing-to-do feeling is your brain asking for space to do its best work. What we're living on instead the endless scroll, the autoplay, the podcast for every commute is junk food for the mind.
The shower is the last surviving pocket of forced silence in modern life. We can't bring our phones in. We can't multitask. And so, almost accidentally, we think. The question worth asking isn't how to be more creative. It's how to build more showers into your day and a good enough net to catch what surfaces when you do.