I have a tendency to space out. A lot. Whether it’s staring out the window on Amtrak or pausing at work to fixate on a blank spot on the wall instead of my screen, I often let my mind wander. When I was younger, I would often be derisively called a daydreamer, a space cadet, or just plain distracted. Obviously, one can be too absent-minded, but Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi convincingly makes the case that letting your mind wander is not only essential, but a luxury we shouldn’t take for granted in our hyperconnected age.
Zomorodi is the current host of NPR’s TED Radio Hour, but she was also the host of WNYC’s Note to Self for many years. In 2015, she did a series of episodes on Note to Self focused on removing digital distractions and the benefits of boredom. Then, in 2017, it became a book. Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self expands on those episodes, bringing in new expert voices, scientific studies, and anecdotes from Zomorodi and her audience from their own digital detox efforts.
Some of what Zomorodi shares in the book are things that we might take for granted in 2025 (phones are designed to be addictive). Or might feel like things you “knew” instinctively without necessarily having the hard evidence to back it up (daydreaming is good). But, what makes Bored and Brilliant work so well is how Zomorodi ties together the various threads, and that she is on the journey with us, the reader.
In the introduction, she talks about having to walk endlessly with her newborn, who refused to sleep unless in motion. She hated it at first. Eventually, though, she fell into a rhythm and “started appreciating the fact that [she] had no destination.” There is both a discomfort and an allure to this form of enforced boredom that can be difficult to appreciate. It’s a sort of liminality, and we’ve turned the liminal into an entire subgenre of horror. But embracing it can be restorative and an engine for creativity.
She reflects on her tendency to fire up Twitter on her commute, play Two Dots at bedtime, and obsessively update her calendar. Zomorodi sums up the problem with our modern technology addiction perfectly: “My brain was always occupied, but my mind wasn’t doing anything with all the information coming in.”
Throughout the book, she points out the challenges of choice paralysis, something anyone who has lost an evening to scrolling through Netflix instead of actually watching anything will be intimately familiar with. She highlights the subtle ways in which the presence of a phone, even if you’re not actively using it, can influence our interactions with others. And digs into studies showing that taking pictures with our phones, instead of simply being in the moment, actually diminishes our ability to remember things.
Bored and Brilliant isn’t there to chastise you for your tech usage, though. Zomorodi is up front about her own struggles. At one point, she muses that her headstone will read, “she clicked links and saved lots of articles to read another time and never actually read them.” I’ve never felt so seen.
But she also offers a way forward. Each chapter ends with a challenge from the original Bored and Brilliant series on Note to Self — meticulously document how and when you use your phone, don’t take a picture for a day, delete the app that eats up your time. Zomorodi offers some of her own insights gleaned from these experiments, as well as notes from listeners who took part.
Bored and Brilliant won’t magically make you put that phone down or turn you into a creative genius. But it does offer an approachable, scientifically-backed reason to unplug once in a while, and gives you some concrete steps to ease yourself back from the brink.
You can find it on most e-book stores, but I highly recommend you buy a physical copy at your neighborhood independent bookshop, if for no other reason than to get off your device and scribble some notes in the margins. Or borrow it from your local library, get a notebook, and take some notes by hand.
