Put down your phone and engage in boredom – how philosophy can help with digital age overload

Digital Age

Contributed by Mehmet Sebih Oruc, a PhD Researcher in digital media and philosophy, Newcastle University.

It feels like there are so many things constantly vying for our attention: the sharp buzz of the phone, the low hum of social media, the unrelenting flood of emails, the endless carousel of content.

It’s a familiar and almost universal ailment in our digital age. Our lives are punctuated by constant stimulation, and moments of real stillness – the kind where the mind wanders without a destination – have become rare.

Digital technologies permeate work, education, and intimacy. Not participating feels to many like nonexistence. But we tell ourselves that’s OK because platforms promise endless choice and self-expression, but this promise is deceptive. What appears as freedom masks a subtle coercion: distraction, visibility, and engagement are prescribed as obligations.

As someone who has spent years reading philosophy, I have been asking myself how to step out of this loop and try to think like great thinkers did in the past. A possible answer came from a thinker most people wouldn’t expect to help with our TikTok-era malaise: the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger argued that modern technology is not simply a collection of tools, but a way of revealing – a framework in which the world appears primarily as a resource, including the human body and mind, to be used for content. In the same way, platforms are also part of this resource, and one that shapes what appears, how it appears, and how we orient ourselves toward life.

Digital culture revolves around speed, visibility, algorithmic selection, and the compulsive generation of content. Life increasingly mirrors the logic of the feed: constantly updating, always “now” and allergic to slowness, silence and stillness.

What digital platforms take away is more than just our attention being “continuously partial” — they also limit the deeper kind of reflection that allows us to engage with life and ourselves fully. They make us lose the capacity to inhabit silence and confront the unfilled moment.

When moments of silence or emptiness arise, we instinctively look to others — not for real connection, but to fill the void with distraction. Heidegger calls this distraction “das man” or “they”: the social collective whose influence we unconsciously follow.

In this way, the “they” becomes a kind of ghostly refuge, offering comfort while quietly erasing our own sense of individuality. This “they” multiplies endlessly through likes, trends, and algorithmic virality. In fleeing from boredom together, the possibility of an authentic “I” disappears into the infinite deferral of collective mimicry.

Heidegger feared that under the dominance of technology, humanity might lose its capacity to relate to “being itself”. This “forgetting of being” is not merely an intellectual error but an existential poverty.

Today, it can be seen as the loss of depth — the eclipse of boredom, the erosion of interiority, the disappearance of silence. Where there is no boredom, there can be no reflection. Where there is no pause, there can be no real choice.

Heidegger’s “forgetting of being” now manifests as the loss of boredom itself. What we forfeit is the capacity for sustained reflection.

Boredom as a privileged mood

For Heidegger, profound boredom is not merely a psychological state but a privileged mood in which the everyday world begins to withdraw. In his 1929 to 1930 lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, he describes boredom as a fundamental attunement through which beings no longer “speak” to us, revealing the nothingness at the heart of being itself.

“Profound boredom removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals beings as a whole.”

Boredom is not absence but a threshold — a condition for thinking, wonder, and the emergence of meaning.

The loss of profound boredom mirrors the broader collapse of existential depth into surface. Once a portal to being, boredom is now treated as a design flaw, patched with entertainment and distraction.

Never allowing ourselves to be bored is equivalent to never allowing ourselves to be as we are. As Heidegger insists, only in the totality of profound boredom do we come face to face with beings as a whole. When we flee boredom, we escape ourselves. At least, we try to.

The problem is not that boredom strikes too often, but that it is never allowed to fully arrive. Boredom, which has paradoxically seen a rise in countries drowning in technology like the US, is shameful. It is treated like an illness almost. We avoid it, hate it, fear it.

Digital life and its many platforms offer streams of micro-distractions that prevent immersion into this more primitive attunement. Restlessness is redirected into scrolling, which, instead of meaningful reflection, produces only more scrolling. What disappears with boredom is not leisure, but metaphysical access — the silence in which the world might speak, and one might hear.

In this light, rediscovering boredom is not about idle time, it is about reclaiming the conditions for thought, depth, and authenticity. It is a quiet resistance to the pervasive logic of digital life, an opening to the full presence of being, and a reminder that the pause, the unstructured moment, and the still passage are not failures – they are essential.

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