The Day We Stopped Being Bored

For students entering the season of preparation

Mughalu T Kinimi

A football season does not begin on the day of the first competitive match. Long before the referee blows the whistle, players are already running. They are rebuilding fitness, practising movements, learning tactical patterns, playing friendly matches, and getting their bodies and minds ready for the demands ahead. The preseason is not the main event, but it is where much of the preparation for the main event happens. 

Students have their own preseason. As examinations draw closer, this is the time to prepare—not simply to panic. The examination hall is the matchday. The weeks before it are the training ground. And one of the most important things students need to recover during this period is something we rarely think of as a skill: the ability to be bored. 

When was the last time you were simply bored? Not tired. Not stressed. Not busy. Just bored. Sitting somewhere with nothing to do. Waiting for someone without taking out the phone. Travelling without immediately putting on earphones. Sitting at a desk with a book and allowing yourself to remain there even when the chapter is difficult. For many young people, such moments are becoming increasingly unfamiliar. 

We have become remarkably good at eliminating boredom. Waiting for a bus? Scroll. Waiting for class? Scroll. Eating alone? Watch something. Taking a break from studying? Open social media. Feeling restless? Check the phone. The moment nothing is happening, we make something happen. Perhaps that sounds harmless. After all, why should anyone choose to be bored when entertainment is available at the touch of a screen? But boredom may have been doing something for us. It gives the mind some empty space. 

A bored child might look out of a window and notice the rain. A student waiting for a friend might begin a conversation with someone nearby. Someone travelling might simply watch the landscape. A person sitting alone might think about something that happened earlier in the day. There is a difference between resting the mind and constantly stimulating it. This matters particularly during examination season. We often tell students to study harder, make a timetable, revise their lessons, and manage their time. All of that is good advice. But concentration is not created simply by adding more hours to a timetable. 

A student can sit with a textbook for three hours and barely study if every few minutes the mind is pulled elsewhere. One notification, one message, one short video, one quick check, one reply, And then another. The interruption may take only a minute, but returning fully to a difficult paragraph is another matter. The problem is not that students use smartphones. Smartphones can be extraordinarily useful for education. Students can access lectures, dictionaries, articles, tutorials, study materials and even tools that help them understand difficult subjects. 

The question is different: Who is controlling the transition between study and distraction? Sometimes we think we are taking a five-minute break from studying. But the digital environment is very good at turning five minutes into thirty. 

This is where the football analogy becomes useful. A footballer preparing for a season does not train by playing the final match every day. Preparation is progressive. Fitness is rebuilt. Skills are sharpened. Tactical understanding develops. Friendly matches provide opportunities to test what has been practiced. The aim is not to exhaust the player before the season begins but to make the player ready when the competition arrives. Students need something similar. The weeks before examinations should not become a season of frantic cramming. They are a period for gradually building the ability to sit, read, remember, understand, and think. And that requires something the digital environment often makes difficult: staying with something that does not immediately entertain us. 

A difficult chapter will not behave like a reel, a textbook will not keep changing every few seconds, a mathematical problem will not reward us with a notification. Learning sometimes begins precisely at the point where entertainment ends. Perhaps, then, the coming examination season is a good time for students to experiment with something simple. 

Put the phone away for a while, study without notifications, take a walk without automatically reaching for a screen, sit quietly for a few minutes, look outside, talk to someone, and allow yourself to become bored. It may feel strange at first, that is because we have become accustomed to filling every available space. But an empty moment is not necessarily a wasted moment. It may be where a thought begins, It may be where an idea connects with another idea, and It may be where the mind recovers its ability to wander—and eventually to return. 

And perhaps this is something parents and teachers should remember too. When we tell students to concentrate, we should not only tell them to put in more hours. We should help them create an environment in which concentration is possible. The goal is not to make young people afraid of technology. The goal is to help them become capable of being with something without constantly needing something else. 

The examination will eventually arrive, the question paper will be placed on the desk, the clock will start, there will be no notification asking whether the student is ready, no short video will appear to provide motivation, and no algorithm will choose the answer. There will simply be the student, the question, and the ability to think. 

That ability is not built in the examination hall. Like a footballer preparing before the first whistle, it is built in the quiet days beforehand. So perhaps, as examination season approaches, students need one more piece of advice besides “study hard" learn to be bored. Because concentration is not simply the ability to study when something is interesting. It is the ability to remain when nothing is immediately rewarding. The generation that has become exceptionally good at filling every empty moment now needs to rediscover what can happen when a moment is left empty. The day we stopped being bored may also have been the day we forgot how much can happen when nothing is happening.