We have declared war on boredom, and we are losing something important in the process.

The smartphone was the final weapon. Every gap — the queue, the commute, the wait for someone who’s running late — is now immediately filled. We have become intolerant of empty moments, and so empty moments no longer exist.

But boredom was never the enemy. Boredom was the incubator.

Some of the best ideas in history arrived in moments of enforced idleness. Newton and the apple. Archimedes in the bath. Einstein describing his theory of relativity as having arrived during a daydream. The default mode network — the part of the brain that activates during rest — is not idle. It is connecting distant ideas, processing experiences, generating the unexpected associations that constitute creativity.

When we fill every moment, we deprive the brain of the conditions it needs for this work. We outsource our inner lives to content. We consume other people’s creativity instead of incubating our own.

Children understand boredom differently. Given nothing to do, they invent something. They make games from nothing. They disappear into imaginative worlds that require no screen, no battery, no subscription.

Let yourself be bored sometimes. Resist the reflex. Sit with the discomfort for a few minutes and see what the brain does when you stop telling it what to look at.

It usually has something to say.