The Lost Art Of Watching Flies

My wife and six-year-old daughter were on the couches recently, sick with coughs, their quiet stillness a rare thing in a busy house. They weren’t watching a screen. They were watching flies. Two of them, tracing odd quadrilaterals in the middle of the room. A straight cruise, a sudden, sharp turn, another cruise, then another seemingly random change in direction. They would speed up, then slow down, mesmerising the spectators with their infinite, puzzling loop.

Hearing my wife describe this scene struck me with a powerful sense of recognition, a jolt of connection that went back decades. Years ago, she and I discovered we’d both spent countless "empty" childhood hours lost in the exact same pastime. It wasn't a graceful ballet; it was more like a chaotic dogfight. Sometimes it was just two flies, but often it was a squadron of five or six, all switching altitudes in the middle of the room. You would watch, almost willing one to misjudge a turn and crash into another—a rare but thrilling event. To learn that on opposite sides of the planet, in vastly different households, we had both been spectators at these same miniature dramas was one of the small, shared threads of a common humanity that first connected us.

The Disappearance of Doing Nothing

That our daughter was now doing the same felt like a minor miracle. But it also made me realise how radical her quiet observation was in today’s world. In any moment of pause—in a supermarket queue, at a bus stop, in the moments before sleep—our modern instinct is not for stillness. It is to reach for a device. We have become relentlessly, tragically efficient at eradicating boredom. Every empty space in our day is immediately filled with content, with communication, with stimulation. We have, in effect, engineered "doing nothing" out of existence. But in our quest to eliminate boredom, I fear we are losing something far more valuable.

What Your Brain Does When You Do Nothing

As a former psychologist, I know that what we call "boredom" is not an empty state for the brain. It is actually a doorway to one of its most vital and productive modes of operation. When our minds are not focused on a specific, external task—like reading an email or scrolling through a feed—a network of brain regions called the Default Mode Network (DMN) quietly hums to life.

This is not the brain being "off"; it is the brain doing a different, and arguably more important, kind of work. Think of it as a company’s annual strategy away day. To an outsider, it might look like people are just talking and not doing "real work," but this is where the most critical thinking happens. The DMN is your brain’s strategy away day. This is when it sifts through memories, connects disparate ideas, stress-tests future plans, and reflects on our sense of self. It is the engine of our creativity and the seat of our introspection. The insights that famously arrive in the shower or on a long walk are the products of a healthy, functioning DMN.

By constantly feeding our brains with external stimuli, we are starving this essential network of the downtime it needs to function. We are cancelling the strategy meeting, day after day. The consequences are subtle but significant. Our ability to form a coherent narrative of our own lives can fray. Our capacity for deep, innovative problem-solving can shrink. Even our empathy can be affected, as the DMN is also involved in our ability to imagine what others might be thinking and feeling.

The Tyranny of the Optimized Moment

The modern world seems to abhor a vacuum, especially a mental one. The twitch to pull out a smartphone has become an almost unconscious reflex, a cognitive dummy for the slightest discomfort of being alone with our own thoughts. This isn’t just about avoiding boredom; it's about a deep-seated cultural pressure to optimise every single moment. Our leisure time, like our work time, must now be "productive." We listen to educational podcasts while walking the dog, we track our sleep with apps, we turn hobbies into side hustles. In the relentless attention economy, our focus is a commodity to be mined, and unstructured, unprofitable boredom is the enemy.

This pressure extends to our parenting. We feel an intense anxiety when our children complain of being "bored." We see it as a personal failure and rush to fill their schedules, to provide entertainment, to solve their "problem" of having nothing to do. In doing so, we are denying them the very same gift my wife and I were given by circumstance: the gift of empty time, the permission to let their minds wander and, in doing so, to build their own rich, inner worlds.

An Invitation to Do Nothing

The solution isn't a dramatic "digital detox" or unplugging from modern life entirely. It is smaller, gentler, and more sustainable. It is the conscious decision to create small, sacred pockets of unstructured time. To go for a walk and intentionally leave the headphones at home. To stare out the window on the train instead of at a screen. To simply sit in a chair for five minutes and let your mind go where it will. It is about reframing these quiet moments not as wasted time, but as essential time for our minds to breathe, to connect, and to create.

Which brings me back to the flies. That shared moment of quiet observation between my daughter and my wife was not in spite of the boredom. It was because of it. It was a space free from stimulation, where a connection could be forged, where a small, "useless," and beautiful moment could unfold. And I hope, in that moment, my daughter’s brain was doing what mine did all those years ago: quietly building a world all of her own. Perhaps that is what we truly find when we finally allow ourselves to do nothing at all.

A short note on this piece.

This article was accepted for publication by one of New Zealand's major newspapers.

Unfortunately, they were unable to offer payment for it.

While I value the platform, I also believe in the value of creative work and the importance of being paid for it. After some reflection, I decided that publishing it here, on my own terms, was the right path.

If these ideas resonated with you, the best way you can support this work is by sharing it with someone you think might also enjoy it.

With gratitude,

Sarb