Boredom Used to Flatten Procrastination

I sometimes wonder whether procrastination has truly increased because of social media, or whether we’ve always had this natural human tendency to delay things.

When I think back to my own youth, especially during school holidays, I certainly didn’t jump immediately when my parents gave me tasks. But something was different back then. There usually wasn’t a punishment hanging over my head, and rarely any real urgency. Yet those tasks stayed somewhere in the back of my mind. At some point — sometimes simply out of boredom — I just did them.

Boredom had a flattening effect on procrastination. When there was nothing else to do, delaying lost its appeal. Tasks didn’t disappear — they slowly moved from the background to the foreground until doing them became the easiest option.

• There was space to think.
• Space to wait.
• Space to be bored.

Today, that empty space barely exists.

Algorithms make sure there is always something new, something tempting, something designed to pull you back in. Whether it’s a phone, a tablet, or a TV doesn’t really matter. The moment a task becomes slightly uncomfortable or boring, distraction is instantly available. Not tomorrow. Not later. Now.

It’s easy to label this as laziness. That’s the simplest explanation, and probably the most comfortable one.
But laziness assumes a lack of willingness. What we’re seeing looks more like a constant state of interruption. A mind that rarely gets the chance to settle, to wander, or to be bored long enough for something meaningful to form.
Procrastination used to be passive. You delayed, stared out of the window, waited.
Now it’s interactive. It talks back. It feeds you.

What changed isn’t our ability to focus, but the cost of choosing not to.

Doing nothing now requires effort. It requires resisting something. Silence has become an active choice, while distraction has become the default.
That makes me question whether we’re dealing with a discipline problem at all, or whether we’re simply fighting systems that are engineered to win the battle for attention.

And then there’s gaming.

I increasingly wonder whether gaming itself hasn’t evolved into another form of social media. It’s no longer just about the game. It’s about interaction with friends, interaction with strangers, sharing tips, showing off skins, constant feedback loops.
Interaction is one of the core pillars of social media. Without interaction, social media doesn’t exist. By that definition, many modern games tick all the boxes.
We were also still allowed to be bored.

Truly bored.

And out of that boredom, things emerged. Ideas. Curiosity. Sometimes even brilliant ideas — not because we were smarter, but because there was nothing competing for our attention. Many choices that later shaped our lives started there. Quietly. Unannounced. Not during moments of productivity, but during moments of waiting.
So maybe the issue isn’t that people have become lazier.

Maybe it’s that boredom — once a fertile state — has been almost completely engineered out of our lives.
And maybe that’s something we should be more worried about than procrastination itself.

Cheers,
Peter