The doors of the lift slide together and, before they have quite finished meeting, the phones come out. Nobody in a lift is expecting urgent news in the next eleven seconds; the hand simply moves first, and the intention catches up later, if it bothers to. The same reflex fires at pedestrian crossings, in the last twenty seconds of a microwave cycle, while a card machine communes with a bank. Every gap now has content in it, the way every crevice in a reef has something living in it.
The comfortable explanation is weak willpower — millions of us individually flunking the same tiny test, over and over. But what feels like a hundred small daily choices is better understood as one choice, made once, on your behalf, and repeated. Nobody ever decided that no empty moment should remain. There was no vote, no debate, no afternoon on which boredom got to argue its case. There was only a market doing what markets do when they find an unpriced asset. To the attention industry, your queue, your red light and your wait for the kettle are not pauses. They are inventory, and unfilled inventory is the one thing a market cannot leave alone.
Neuroscientists, as it happens, have their own name for what the mind does when nothing is demanded of it. In 2001, a team led by Marcus Raichle at Washington University described a network of brain regions that quiets when you concentrate and brightens when you don't, and they called it, fatefully, the brain's default mode. The double meaning is almost too tidy. The people who built your phone also think in defaults: the setting that ships, the box pre-ticked, the behavior that happens unless someone objects. Over the past fifteen years, one default has been laid over the other. The brain's idle state now comes with factory settings, configured by people who sell advertising.
And the idle state turns out not to be idle. Kalina Christoff, a neuroscientist at the University of British Columbia, has estimated that mind-wandering takes up somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of waking mental life — less a glitch than a second occupation. Mostly, what it's doing is the future. In a 2011 paper in Consciousness and Cognition — genuinely titled “Back to the Future” — Benjamin Baird, Jonathan Smallwood and Jonathan Schooler reported that when minds wander, they wander predominantly forward: rehearsing conversations, re-ranking plans, quietly project-managing a life. They called it autobiographical planning, which is the clinical term for what you were doing all those years at bus stops, when it looked like you were doing nothing.
The gaps also chew on problems. In 2012, the same UC Santa Barbara lab published the study in Psychological Science that became the standard citation for the usefulness of boredom. Participants wrestled with the Unusual Uses Task — invent purposes for a brick — and then took a break. Those whose break was filled with a deliberately tedious, undemanding task returned roughly 40 percent better on the problems they'd already attempted, compared with people who got no break; resting or doing something demanding produced far smaller gains. Brand-new problems got no benefit at all. The effect is specific: an unglamorous task, plus a problem already lodged in the head. This is not a mystical case for boredom. It is a mechanism, and it runs, inconveniently, on exactly the kind of time we no longer keep.
Now the awkward part, because any honest defense of the gaps has to admit they were frequently miserable. In 2010, Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert used an iPhone app — savor the instrument — to ping 2,250 people at random moments and ask what they were doing, thinking and feeling. Minds were wandering in 46.9 percent of the samples, and the wandering minds were the unhappier ones, whatever the activity. Jerome Singer, the psychologist who spent the 1960s taking daydreaming seriously, wouldn't have been shocked: he sorted daydreams into three styles, only one of which — “positive constructive daydreaming” — is the pleasant, planful kind. The other two boil down to anxious self-reproach and static. Nobody should have to ride a delayed night bus alone with styles two and three, and this is where the phone is genuinely, blessedly better company than boredom. The feed in the dentist's waiting room is not a character flaw. It's an anesthetic that works.
So the case for the gaps can't rest on their being enjoyable, since often they weren't. It has to rest on something less sentimental: they did work nothing else does, and we lost them without being asked. Pew's surveys track American smartphone ownership from 35 percent in 2011 to 91 percent today; in little more than a decade, the gap-filler went from gadget to anatomy. Earlier eras filled their pauses too — cigarettes, crosswords, the sports pages — but those fillers ran out. The cigarette burned down, the newspaper ended. The feed is the first gap-filler with no bottom, tuned continuously to the person holding it, which is why the old ones feel like hobbies and this one feels like weather.
No one conspired to abolish waiting. It's only that an attention market prices every moment it can reach, and the interstitial moments were the last unpriced ones — the final minutes of the day not yet sold to anyone. A bored person holding a phone is, from the industry's side of the glass, an impression going unserved. The winning apps are not better than boredom in any cosmic sense; they were simply present, infinitely, at the precise instant each gap opened, offering something calibrated to be marginally more interesting than your own thoughts. Marginally is all it takes, eleven seconds at a time.
Which is why it's worth being precise about what was in the gaps, because it was never peace and rarely pleasure. It was the future tense. It was the half-solved problem quietly turning itself over. It was the standing appointment with the default mode — the one meeting that never appeared on any calendar, which is exactly why it was so easy to sell. The lift still takes eleven seconds. What fills them now is somebody else's business. What used to fill them was, as near as neuroscience can measure, you.