Having nothing to do is a great way to get thinking done.
Life has always had distractions, from the Black Plague to television, but these days distraction feels like a way of life. "It's hard to be bored almost anywhere," cultural anthropologist Genevieve Bell said in a 2011 Tedx talk. Digital devices seem designed to "prevent us from ever being bored"--they connect us at to everything but our idle thoughts. It's not entirely a stretch to say that smartphones are to boredom what the asteroid was to dinosaurs.
