We treat boredom like a deficiency to fix. It’s actually the delivery mechanism for every interesting thought you’ve ever had. Take it daily.
Interesting thoughts arrive in the dead air: the walk, the bath, the queue that is not moving, the ten minutes before someone is ready. They rarely turn up in the middle of anything interesting.
That air used to be part of the day. Now it is the first thing we fill, and the phone is a very good machine for making sure nothing ever lands.
The phone is very good at its job, and its job is to make sure you are never bored for a single second. That is a service until it is not.
Boredom is a room, and a room has to exist before anything can be put into it. Take the room away and you get a day that is full and somehow empty, the particular tiredness of our age.
You do not need a technique for this. You need to leave one gap alone, sit there feeling unstimulated for a few minutes, and see what turns up. Give it ten minutes, because nothing interesting arrives in the first two.
Leave one queue, walk or kettle unfilled today. No podcast, no scrolling. Just the gap.