Nye's Digital Lab is a weekly scribble on creativity in the age of rapid change.

A few weeks ago I hit a wall.

Not a creative wall, not writer’s block. It was something more total than that. I had been running around the clock trying to absorb everything AI was throwing at the world: agentic workflows, video generators, reinforcement learning rabbit holes. Every time something new scrolled past on X or Bluesky, I grabbed it, clicked it, downloaded it, signed up, iterated. Round and round.

Investors on X were telling me that if I don’t learn it I would “fall behind.” CEOs on YouTube were warning that half of all jobs would evaporate within years. I pushed myself to explore LLMs, agents, automation, and even arduino and robots.

The whole world seemed to be screaming faster, faster, faster!

And then I broke.

…

I took a few days off.

…

However, I discovered I had completely forgotten how to stop. I couldn’t finish a chapter of a book before reaching for my phone. I couldn’t sit through a Netflix episode without flipping to YouTube. Every idle second felt like a system error I needed to patch. I wasn’t resting. I was just craving at a lower volume.

I wasn’t exhausted from working too hard.

I was exhausted from never being bored.

The discomfort you feel when there’s nothing to do is not a bug in your design. It is a feature. That restless, itchy, I need something feeling is your mind trying to metabolize its own experience. It needs to sort, to make meaning, to rest in a way that sleep alone can’t provide.

We’ve pathologized boredom.

We treat it like a gap to be filled. Every app on your phone is architecturally designed to exploit that gap. Designed to scroll before you even notice you were sitting still. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts. These services don’t create the craving, they just service it the moment it surfaces. You never have to sit with the discomfort long enough to learn anything from it.

Think of boredom like a boat in the middle of a lake with no wind. You’re set adrift, moving without direction, nothing pulling at you.

Argh! That sounds terrible!
But if you can stay in the boat and just be. If you can resist swimming for the nearest shore. That’s when something shifts. The water gets quiet. You start to hear yourself think. Not think about something, just think.

And it’s in that space that the best ideas I’ve ever had have shown up uninvited. The craving is the signal that you’ve been running too long on input.

Boredom is the system trying to breathe.

So, listen to it. Take a moment, and breathe.

Artificial intelligence is going to be very, very good at giving you exactly what you want, exactly when you want it. It will write your first drafts, answer your hard questions, generate your images, tutor you through material you’re stuck on, and hold a conversation at 2am when you can’t sleep. That is genuinely remarkable.

But there is a side effect baked into the abundance. You may never have to struggle through the slow, uncomfortable, boring work of thinking something through yourself.

And struggling through that is where you become you.

When I was coming up in VFX, you learned things by being bored at the right tasks for long enough that your brain had no choice but to figure them out. You didn’t Google the answer; you stared at the problem until the problem showed you something.

That friction was the education. It’s how complex creative reasoning develops. It’s how you learn to hold a hard idea in your head long enough to actually understand it. This goes beyond, not just recognize it.

I’m not being nostalgic. I’m being alarmed.

Because as AI handles more of the heavy cognitive lifting, the muscle you use to do that lifting atrophies. Reading a full book cover to cover. Sitting with an unresolved question for days. Having the emotional courage to ask the pretty girl out, or to start a conversation with a stranger at a party. These are skills that require tolerance for discomfort. And discomfort tolerance is built in boredom.

It is not built in the scroll.

The skill of the next decade will be reacquainting ourselves with true boredom, because that is where everything distinctly human begins.

I genuinely believe that the people who thrive in the next twenty years won’t be the ones who used AI fastest. Not the agentic workflow builders or the AI integration specialists.

They’ll be the ones who could still think without it when it mattered. Who could still feel the full weight of an idea. Who hadn’t outsourced what’s inside their turbulent mind.

My kids taught me this, honestly, though it took me an embarrassingly long time to receive the lesson.

When they were small, I’d find myself sitting on the floor doing Legos with them. Sure, I was physically present, but mentally somewhere else, running a background process on whatever was waiting for me on my laptop. I kept asking myself, how long do I need to do this before I can go back? As if being with my kids was a tax. As if boredom was a cost to endure.

So embarrassing.

The reframe that finally got through was simple and devastating: this is the important thing. Not the thing I was mentally escaping toward. This moment, right here, was the one I’d never get back. The Legos weren’t filler between the real parts of life. The Legos were the real parts of life.

Presence isn’t a personality type some people are blessed with. It’s a practice. And it requires that you develop a tolerance for moments that don’t deliver a dopamine hit.

You have to learn how to be somewhere that doesn’t feel productive.

Sure. Meditation is one formal way to train this, (and even though I suck at it), I respect it enormously. But you don’t have to meditate. It’s easier than that.

You just have to occasionally refuse the reach for your phone. Just sit in the discomfort. Notice that it doesn’t kill you. Notice what’s underneath it. I’ve started using a mantra I tell myself whenever the craving starts to spike:

boredom is healing.

It sounds almost too simple. But the repetition matters and it’s a pattern interrupt. It reminds me that the discomfort I’m feeling isn’t an error state. It’s the system doing something useful, if I’ll let it.

That pain, let’s call it the boredom pain, the “I need something” ache; it’s is not weakness. That pain is wisdom trying to get your attention. Let it.

say it with me now…

Boredom is healing.

I don’t have a ten-step framework for this.

I’m not selling you a productivity system that incorporates scheduled boredom at 9am on Tuesdays. What I’m telling you is something I had to learn through burnout, which, let’s be honest here, is not a great way to learn anything.

You are growing up in the most stimulated environment in human history, with the most sophisticated distraction engines ever built, during a technological transition that will fundamentally reshape what it means to do knowledge work. In that environment, the radical act is not moving faster. The radical act is sitting still long enough to hear yourself think.

So think…
The boat. The lake. No wind.
Stay in the boat.

Stay with it.

...

You can do this.
Make it happen.

Hey! That’s it for this time. I do this every week; if you vibe to the ideas I express, consider subscribing or sharing with friends. If you like tech-detoxing with a book like I do, I crammed some of last year’s best essays into a printed collection.

This was an improvisation on a morning walk, that became a voice note in Otter.ai, took shape in Obsidian, and was finished in collaboration with Claude Sonnet 4.6.

For more info visit: https://nyewarburton.com

We’ll see you next time.