When Silence Became Uncomfortable.

On boredom, attention, and the moments we no longer let linger.

A group of people stand together in an elevator. Suits, ties, office wear. Each headed to a different floor, a different meeting, a different version of the same day.

For a brief moment, nothing can be done. The doors haven’t opened yet. The work hasn’t started. There’s no task to complete or problem to solve.

Phones come out.

Maybe a few people are responding to emails or reviewing notes, but let’s be honest—that’s usually not what’s happening. The workday hasn’t really begun yet. We’re still half-awake, waiting for coffee, waiting to sit down, waiting to arrive.

What used to be a normal silence now feels uncomfortable.

The elevator ride, once an unremarkable pause, has become “boring.” An empty space that needs filling. A moment that feels wrong simply because nothing else is happening.

When everything goes still, we itch. We feel the urge to do something, anything. And we carry the solution in our pockets.

But silence was never a problem. It wasn’t broken. It was just space.

A small window of time with no immediate demand. A moment where thoughts could surface on their own. Where you might remember something you’d forgotten, replay a conversation, notice how you were actually feeling, or let your mind wander without direction.

Those moments used to exist everywhere. Now they rarely last.

We fill them almost automatically. Not always because we want to, but because we’ve grown unused to letting them remain empty. We scroll, check, refresh. We trade unstructured time for content made by someone else, shaped somewhere else.

In the process, we quietly give away time that once belonged to us.

These moments seem insignificant on their own—a minute here, two minutes there. But they add up. They used to be places where reflection happened. Where ideas formed. Where something personal could emerge without effort.

Even remembering something small—a grocery item you forgot, a thought you meant to follow, a message you meant to send—often required nothing more than a moment of uninterrupted silence.

Now, when that silence appears, we rush to replace it before it has the chance to become anything else.

I’m reminded of the movie Click, where the main character fast-forwards through the boring parts of his life. At first, it feels efficient. Convenient. Harmless. But eventually, he realizes he’s skipped the very moments that made his life feel like his own.

That’s what these small silences were. Not wasted time, but small opportunities. They stitched moments together. They gave shape to thought. They made room for a self that wasn’t reacting, performing, or consuming.

Silence didn’t disappear because it lost value.
It disappeared because we stopped trusting what it might contain.

Now, when unclaimed silence shows up, we treat it like something to escape.

And most of the time, we do.