Can I Have Your Attention, Please?

Late last year, Michael Inzlicht, a U of T Scarborough psychology professor, was visiting Krakow, Poland, a city that felt to him like many other European cities he’d visited. With some free time before a meeting, he thought he’d get some extra work done rather than go wandering. He figured the city wouldn’t offer him anything new.

“But then,” Inzlicht says, “I thought, ‘Wait a minute, why am I assuming I’ll be bored?’ Instead, he set himself a goal: to observe. He ventured out to actively look, absorb and take mental notes – to discover Krakow.

Inzlicht shares this story because it ties into his ongoing research into the nature of effort and meaning. For much of his career, he’s been exploring a connected set of ideas around boredom, self-control and the relationship between work and play. In other words, how we choose to spend our time – and why.

In recent years, Inzlicht has been intrigued by why we make an effort for some things but not others. Why do we frequently fail to meet our goals, and why do we so often get bored along the way? We live in a world where more diversions than ever compete for our attention and yet people, especially young people, say they are bored. Inzlicht’s research asks what we think we’re looking for and whether we’re using the right tools to find it.

Inzlicht believes part of the answer has to do with a lack of goals. When we’re scrolling, we often have no specific purpose. “We are goal-setting and goal-seeking animals,” he says. “We thrive when we have goals. It helps organize our lives and gives us purpose. Not having goals is a recipe for unhappiness and probably poor health.” In a 2025 paper in the journal Cognition, Inzlicht and his colleagues reported that adding effort to a task makes it more meaningful. They are now looking into how pairing effort with personal goals helps offset boredom and disengagement.

The goal does not have to be work-related. It could be socializing with friends more often, gardening or fixing up the house. “Some people even set goals to have sex with their spouse and create schedules!” he adds. “It’s about finding ways to make your leisure time more meaningful and yourself less prone to boredom. Because when we set a goal, engage in an effort and make progress toward that goal, we feel more satisfied.”

This matters because boredom can quickly become aversive and maladaptive. Inzlicht refers to a well-known study in which subjects chose to give themselves an electric shock rather than have nothing to do. “What studies like this tell us,” says Inzlicht, “is that boredom can lead to self-inflicted pain and even cruelty toward others. But the problem is that it takes real effort to offset boredom. You may want to do something else, but that something else might be hard. It might be risky.”

In another study, published in Communications Psychology in 2024 with colleague Katy Y.Y. Tam, Inzlicht examined the consumption of digital media on our phones. Their research showed that over the past 20 years, our baseline level of boredom has increased: we now expect to be entertained all the time. This heightened expectation paradoxically leaves us feeling more bored than past generations even though we are, on average, more stimulated overall. The ultimate paradox, Inzlicht argues, is that spending time on our digital devices – what he refers to as “modern engagement patterns” – makes us more bored, not less. To be interested in something you have to sit with it and engage with it. This takes time. Scrolling discourages depth and encourages superficial engagement. You never land on anything satisfying because you always think something even more satisfying is just a click away.

“So, you skip to the next thing, then the next, and pretty soon you’re more bored than when you started. But how often do we look up at the sky or the trees and really see them?” Inzlicht notes that digital media is just another form of media, and that people have worried about its effects before. “But on the other hand, we run to our phones at even the slightest dip in stimulation.” The problem, he argues, is that this modern engagement pattern makes everything seem boring, and yet is instantly available to us all the time.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Inzlicht views effort as one of the keys to imbuing something with meaning and importance. “Things that are effortful bring us a greater return in terms of well-being.”

It all sounds easy enough. Everyone knows it’s healthier to eat a piece of fruit than a bag of potato chips, but recent research (my trip to the grocery store last week) reveals that potato chips claim as much shelf space at the supermarket as fruit. The same principle applies to how we engage with the world. Convenience often wins out over depth, but the real rewards come from the effort we put in. Perhaps the key to escaping boredom is less about finding something new than putting in more effort to truly see what’s already there.