On consuming and creating: why one without the other leaves nothing behind

Think about the last time you were genuinely bored. Not the kind of boredom that arrives mid-meeting or during a long commute, when there is technically something happening, but your mind has decoupled from it. Real boredom, like a Sunday afternoon with nowhere to be and nothing pressing, the kind where time moves slowly, and the mind starts to wander without a destination.

For most people, that experience is increasingly rare. And when it does arrive, the phone is out within milliseconds.

This pattern matters more than it might seem. Let's have a cup of tea and discuss what we know about it.

What boredom actually does

Researchers studying the default mode network, or the set of brain regions active when the mind is not engaged with a specific external task, have found that this state is far from idle. Mind-wandering, daydreaming, and unstructured thinking are associated with creative insight, the formation of long-term memories, and the ability to imagine future scenarios. Jonathan Smallwood at Queen's University has spent years studying what the mind does when left alone, and his work suggests that an undirected mind is often a productive one. It is where ideas connect in new ways, something that directed attention usually prevents.

Boredom, in other words, is the condition in which creativity becomes possible.

What we replaced it with

The average person now spends somewhere between six and seven hours per day consuming digital content. This is not a single block of time; it is threaded through almost every available pause. The video is playing while you eat breakfast. The music or podcast layered together during a commute, with a side of conversation or feed scrolling. The latter opened at the desk whenever concentration slips, which, as Gloria Mark's research at UC Irvine found, happens roughly every three minutes.

None of this feels excessive in the moment. Each piece of content is small. But the cumulative effect is a state of near-continuous low-level stimulation that leaves almost no space for the mind to be genuinely unoccupied.

The boredom that used to arrive naturally simply doesn’t have a room in your mind even to hang a hat.

Where the content goes

Now, let us share something worth sitting with. Think back to this morning, the first few hours of your day. Can you recall, specifically, what you watched, read, or scrolled through? Can you name the subject of each content piece and the plot of each story?

A few items, perhaps. The rest has gone.

It’s not a memory flaw; moreover, the memory in the question is working exactly as it should. Short-format content, whether it is the post, the clip, or the headline, is processed through working memory, which has a limited capacity and does not automatically route information to long-term storage. For a memory to consolidate, something has to happen with it: it needs to be reflected on, connected to something already known, or encoded through repetition or emotion. Most of what we consume does none of these things.

A 2008 study by Nicolas Carr, drawing on research by cognitive scientists including Maryanne Wolf, described how reading online trains a pattern of shallow, non-linear processing that becomes, unfortunately, a habit. Like chain-smoking, but for your neurons. The brain adapts to the mode of consumption it practices most. Sustained, deep engagement with a single piece of content becomes harder the more it is replaced by rapid skimming across many.

You are not forgetting what you consumed because your memory is poor. You are forgetting it because the mode of consumption was never designed to make it stick. This feeling of numbness alone allows you to almost enjoy this process because you don’t actually feel or process every piece of content you give your precious time and attention to. 

Creating as a way of processing

There is a different relationship available with the same material. When you move from consuming to producing (even something small, even something nobody will ever read), you engage a different set of cognitive processes.

Writing a response to something you have watched or read requires you to form an opinion, which requires you to know what you think, which requires you to actually engage with the material rather than let it wash through. The psychologist Roediger and Butler's research on the testing effect, the well-documented finding that retrieving information strengthens memory far more than re-reading it, points toward the same mechanism. The act of producing something based on what you have encountered is a form of retrieval. It tells the brain that this information is worth keeping.

There is also something that happens to the material itself when you write about it. Connections appear that were not visible during the initial encounter. A film you thought you understood turns out to have been doing something you only notice when you try to describe it. A book that felt merely pleasant reveals, when you attempt to articulate why, that it was doing something quite precise. The act of writing does not just record your response. It completes it.

Why reviews specifically

A review is the most accessible form of this. The subject is given already: you encountered something, and now you are simply writing about it. You do not need to generate a topic, construct an argument from nothing, or produce something original in the conventional sense. The creative work is interpretive: what did this do, and why, and what does your reaction to it say about what you value or notice?

This interpretive confidence, or the trust that what you think and feel in response to something is worth examining, is a skill. It atrophies without regular practice, and it needs some time and patience to be built initially. Most people have been trained, by years of consuming without producing, to treat their own responses as passive and unimportant. A review, even if it is being kept private, is the practice of disagreeing with that.

It also gives you something to return to. The feeling a film left you with fades within days. The review you wrote about it stays with you for longer. Reading back through even a few months of short responses to things encountered creates something unexpectedly useful: a record of what moved you, what you disagreed with, what you could not stop thinking about. That is not a small thing to have.

In the world, driven mostly by algorithmic feeds, being aware of your opinion is a new meaning of luxury. To know that you like something not because it is a trend, but because it touches you deeply – priceless. 

A few prompts to start with

Reviews do not need to be long, formal, or intended for anyone else. A few sentences written by hand in a notebook, or typed anywhere, you will find them again, is enough to begin.

Some starting points:

The last thing that made me stop scrolling was...

I was thinking a lot after I saw/read/heard...

I was surprised to learn that...

I think I felt ____ after reading / watching / listening to / learning about ____. I am not entirely sure why.

The thing I keep coming back to is...

I disagree with this, and the reason is...

This reminded me of ____. I had not thought about that in a long time.

 

None of these needs to go anywhere. The point is not the review itself but the habit of pausing, before the next thing begins, to notice what the last thing left behind.

What can you take from this skill? An ability to regain agency over your attention and finally assess where your focus is, why you don’t feel as creative, capable or productive anymore. And, most importantly, to learn more about what actually brings you joy and what doesn’t, to live a more meaningful life.

A notebook and a pen are, at their most basic, a place to put what your mind has been working on. Scriveiner makes writing instruments for daily use — for the moments worth staying with a little longer.