There is a series of memes going on about Middle Ages peasants working less hours than a modern white collar worker. The claim states that the church was ensuring peasants are happy and fulfilled by keeping them away from work for most of the year.
This claim is well debunked in a masterful series on the medieval peasant, by Dr. Bret C. Devereaux, particularly in part IVb. My thoughts are on the perceived modern need to be entertained at all times. Or, if you want to feel better about yourself, the grinding culture can help you feel productive at all times by consuming books, podcasts, courses, videos…Entertainment nonetheless, even if it's shit packaged as self-help.
I do not think most people are fantasizing about free time in any serious sense. They are fantasizing about free time available for consumption. That is a different thing. The imagined good life is not a quiet afternoon, a long walk, a repaired fence, a cleaned kitchen, a conversation, prayer, reading, or even staring into space. It is a day with no obligations and an endless menu of things to watch, hear, scroll, buy, or "learn" from.
That is the distinction people keep flattening, Leisure is not the same thing as entertainment, but much broader. It includes rest, wandering, reading, lifting, talking, cooking, cleaning, writing, praying, fixing things, or doing nothing for a while. Entertainment is narrower. It is input designed to occupy attention.
I am not pretending music, films, novels, games, or long conversations are worthless. I am saying modern people have let entertainment become the default shape of free time itself. Once that happens, every empty minute starts looking defective unless it is filled. Waiting in line? Get the phone out. Commute? Get the podcast out, the Audiobook. Lunch? Let's get the perfect Youtube video. A walk needs headphones. The gym needs music, my own personal one. Are you ambitious and want to get ahead in life? Well, why are you not listening to these marvelous productivity podcasts, market news, book summaries, self-help content... just entertainment while feeling less guilty.
I notice the cost in the smallest, most embarrassing places. If I let myself bring input into every walk, every chore, every idle stretch of the day, then silence starts feeling like a problem. Mopping the floor feels like i'm wasting my time unless I also listen to an audiobook. A short drive feels wasted unless I am consuming one of my books.. That is not because mopping, driving, or sitting became worse activities. It is because I trained myself to expect a stronger hit than ordinary life can deliver.
That is why I think people are usually lying when they say they are bored by real life. What they often mean is not that life is empty. They mean they have trained their attention so badly that ordinary life no longer clears the stimulation threshold. A kitchen, a sidewalk, a backyard, a stretch of thought, a calm human conversation, a repetitive household task, all of it feels mundane compared with the infinite, personalized, source of entertainment in our pockets.
That's what boredom is for!
I do not mean burnout, depression, or dead exhaustion. Those are different problems. I mean the ugly little gap that opens when external input stops and our own mind has to start producing, or at least listens to itself. And, at the beginning, is awfully uncomfortable. A lot of useful things begin there. If you kill it every time it appears, you never find out what might have shown up after it.
When you get bored, you question. I am not talking about mystical breakthroughs, nor existential questions. I mean the ordinary thoughts that actually govern a life. Why am I still tolerating this job? Why do I keep avoiding that conversation? Why has this friendship gone away? Why do I keep telling myself I care about something I never act on? What do I even want to do this afternoon if nobody serves me a menu? Those thoughts usually do not arrive while attention is occupied. They arrive in the short stretch after occupation stops and before the next hit comes in.
That is also why I dislike most dopamine-detox talk. If you spend all day feeding yourself louder input, quieter parts of life will often feel weaker by comparison. That much is visible before anyone starts abusing half-understood neuroscience. But internet self-improvement culture cannot resist dressing plain human observations in brain jargon bullshit. I can already see what happens when I spend weeks filling every quiet gap with content. Quiet things get harder to enjoy. When I stop, they become livable again.
There is an even more annoying version of the same habit that ambitious people almost never admit. A lot of self-improvement content is just entertainment for people who want to feel superior while remaining passive. Another podcast. Another book summary. Another course. Another clip about habits, money, crypto, masculinity, productivity, or whatever the feed has learned to wrap in respectable packaging. It's as useful as doom-scrolling through memes, still just passive consumption. It feels better than gossip because it flatters you while it distracts you from the fact that, while listening to productivity podcasts, you're still not doing anything. But it leaves you in the same condition: observing instead of doing, consuming instead of deciding, staying occupied instead of becoming clearer.
You: jefferson, you're absolutely mad, I'm not dropping my music!
Nor do you have to! Of course some entertainment is good. I am not arguing for fake purity, and I am not interested in monastic posturing. Plenty of people are tired, overworked, lonely, or trying to survive repetitive labor. Music does help. A podcast/audiobook can make a commute bearable. A film can be worth much more than another hour of low-grade brooding. The problem is saturation. A life with no unfilled space stops feeling like leisure and starts feeling like captivity to entertainment.
I also think people lie when they pretend all input is equal. Reading a serious book is not the same as grazing on twenty short clips. Listening to one long conversation is not the same as autoplay. Watching a film you chose for a reason is not the same as letting the feed throw the next thing at you. Some leave residue. Others leave agitation.2 One deepens your relation to life, the other keeps you skimming across its surface. One requires you to pause and reflect, the other just to consume more.
The reason I believe this so strongly is not theoretical. I have tested the worst version on myself often enough. The first time I tried doing literally nothing for ten minutes, no phone, no music, no reading, no productive audio, it felt stupid. Then irritating. Then almost insulting. My brain kept trying to bargain its way out. A few weeks later the feeling changed. Walking without headphones felt normal again. Cleaning the garage stopped feeling like punishment and more like an opportunity to think deeper thoughts while my body is occupied. Even mopping the floor became oddly satisfying. Nothing mystical had happened. I had just stopped forcing ordinary life to compete with an amusement park in my pocket
That is the point I care about most. The goal is not to consume better. The goal is to live a life in which consumption is not required to make every hour feel occupied. If you cannot sit in a quiet room for ten minutes without reaching for input, that is not a harmless modern habit. It is one reason your own kitchen, your walk, your thoughts, and eventually your whole life start feeling less vivid than the feed.
1 Relevant adjacent literature includes Sandi Mann on boredom and creativity, Erin Westgate on boredom's structure, Kalina Christoff on mind-wandering, and Marcus Raichle on default mode research. The article uses these as directional support, not as proof of one settled mechanism.
2 Jonathan Haidt's writing on the smartphone generation is relevant to the broader claim that constant digital occupation changes attention and mood, though the argument here is narrower and more experiential than generational.