We may be losing the conditions that make us wise.

The office is unusually quiet.

A few weeks ago, I found myself checking Instagram while waiting for a lift. Not once. Three times. Nothing had changed between refreshes. No urgent message had arrived. No new information was waiting for me. Yet the moment there was nothing to do, my hand moved almost automatically towards my phone. 

It was only a few seconds, but the moment stayed with me. Because it wasn’t really about Instagram. It was about how uncomfortable we have become with doing absolutely nothing. 

We scroll while waiting for coffee. We check messages at traffic signals. We watch videos while eating alone. We reach for our phones before we’ve even fully opened our eyes in the morning. Somewhere along the way, boredom stopped being a normal part of life and became something we needed to eliminate. Lately, as conversations around artificial intelligence, attention spans and digital dependency have intensified, a familiar claim has begun circulating again: that the current generation is becoming less intelligent. 

It is an easy argument to make. 

Students use AI for assignments. Children spend hours on tablets. Adults struggle to focus on a single task without checking their phones. Teachers speak about declining reading stamina. Employers complain about distraction. Yet the more I hear the claim, the less convincing it feels. The problem may not be that we are becoming less intelligent. The problem may be that we are spending less time in the conditions that allow intelligence to deepen into wisdom. Because intelligence has never been just about knowledge. If knowledge alone were enough, the internet would be the wisest thing humanity has ever created. 

Intelligence is also attention. 

Curiosity. Judgment. Reflection. The ability to sit with complexity instead of rushing towards certainty. And all of those things require something increasingly difficult to find: space. Not physical space. Mental space. Technology itself is not the villain. The concern is not that screens make people incapable of thinking. The concern is that attention has become one of the most contested resources in modern life. Every platform wants it. Every notification competes for it. Every spare moment presents another opportunity to capture it.

There is research behind the anxiety, although it is far more complicated than the headlines suggest. In a 2023 analysis of nearly 400,000 American adults tested between 2006 and 2018, researchers found declines in several measures of reasoning and verbal ability, while some spatial skills, including three-dimensional rotation, improved, something they termed as the “reverse Flynn effect”. This goes to show that it is not that human beings have suddenly become less intelligent. It may be that different kinds of thinking are being practised, rewarded and measured differently. We are becoming exceptionally quick at navigating interfaces, processing visual information and locating answers. But perhaps we are becoming less practised at sustained reasoning, mental patience and the slower work of making sense of something before someone else has made sense of it for us.

A much larger Norwegian study, involving around 730,000 cognitive-test records, found that the long twentieth-century rise in IQ scores had reversed among younger cohorts. Its authors found evidence that the shift was environmental, not genetic. They did not prove that phones were responsible. They did not prove that social media was responsible. They did not prove that young people had become less capable. They found a change. And they found that we do not yet fully understand it. That seems important in itself.

Because the world in which most of us now think is radically different from the world in which our parents learnt to think. We have more information than any generation before us. We can settle arguments before they become conversations. We can look up a fact before we have had the chance to wonder about it. We can ask an artificial intelligence tool to structure an essay before we have sat long enough with the question to discover what we actually believe.

Finding an answer is not the same thing as thinking. Understanding usually arrives more slowly.

In the United States, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data show that, compared with roughly a decade earlier, scores were down about 7 points in reading and 14 points in mathematics.

The declines accelerated during and after the pandemic, when schools, routines and childhood itself were disrupted. It would be simplistic to blame technology alone. But it would be equally simplistic to pretend that attention has nothing to do with learning.

UNESCO has warned that digital technology can help learning in the right conditions, but that its benefits disappear when use becomes excessive or when it replaces meaningful teaching. Its 2023 report noted that even the proximity of a mobile phone had been found to distract students and negatively affect learning in fourteen countries.

A phone is not the villain. A phone can be a library, a map, a classroom, a lifeline, a source of friendship and work. But it can also become an escape hatch from every uncomfortable thought. That is the difference.

For most of human history, boredom was unavoidable. Children stared out of windows during long journeys. Adults sat quietly on trains. People waited for things. They walked without podcasts. They ate without photographs. Their minds wandered because there was little else competing for them. Today, almost every pause has been filled. Silence appears and a video starts playing. A question arises and a search engine answers it. An uncomfortable feeling surfaces and a feed distracts from it. The empty moment disappears.

And perhaps something disappears with it. This became clearer to me because of grief. I lost my father when I was young. At the time, I was too young to fully understand what loss meant. I understood absence before I understood grief. I knew he was not there, but I did not yet have the language to explain what that absence would do to a person over time.

Years later, I lost my boyfriend in a car accident. The circumstances were different. I was older. I understood what grief was supposed to look like. Yet the experience felt strangely familiar. Both losses left behind questions that nobody could answer entirely for me. Not an article. Not a conversation. Not even therapy, helpful as it could be. Some questions belong, for a while, to the person carrying them.

For a long time, I kept searching for clarity. What I found instead was reflection. Long walks. Late nights. Conversations with myself that had nowhere to go and no deadline by which they needed to be resolved. There were periods when my mental health suffered. Anxiety would arrive unexpectedly. Some days felt heavy for reasons I could not explain.

Everyone talks about grief as sadness. What surprised me was how much of it felt like confusion. I wanted answers. Instead, I got silence. Looking back, that silence changed me. Not because silence is inherently healing. It is not. Silence can be painful. Reflection can be uncomfortable. Sitting alone with difficult thoughts is rarely enjoyable. But it taught me something important: not every question is meant to be solved immediately.

Some questions need time. Some emotions need space. Some forms of understanding emerge only when we stop trying to escape discomfort long enough to listen to it. That is what worries me about a culture increasingly designed to remove every pause from our lives. Mental-health conversations today rightly focus on diagnosis, treatment and recovery. But we speak less often about the everyday conditions that help people understand themselves. Reflection is one of those conditions. 

Solitude is another such condition. Not loneliness, not isolation, simply the ability to spend time with your own mind without immediately reaching for distraction. The same may be true of creativity. We often imagine creativity as a burst of inspiration: a brilliant idea arriving fully formed, out of nowhere. In reality, most creative breakthroughs arrive much more quietly. During a walk. While staring out of a window. During a long shower. In the middle of a conversation that drifts somewhere unexpected.

Psychologists have found that simple, undemanding activity which allows the mind to wander can sometimes help people return to unresolved creative problems with fresher ideas. This does not mean boredom is magical. It means that boredom may not be as empty as we have been taught to believe.

Boredom is not wasted time. It may be mental space. A child who never experiences boredom may become exceptionally skilled at consuming stimulation, but less practised at generating it. The same is true for adults. Every empty moment now has a business model waiting for it.

Which brings us to artificial intelligence. The question is not whether AI will make us less intelligent. It is too early, and too simplistic, to claim that. AI can save time, reduce repetitive work, support accessibility and make knowledge more available than ever before. Those are real gains. The more interesting question is whether it will reduce our willingness to wrestle with uncertainty.

After all, original thought rarely emerges from immediate answers. It emerges from living with a question long enough for a new perspective to form. There is a difference between using a tool to sharpen an idea and using it to avoid having one.

The challenge is not to reject technology. It is to decide what parts of human life should remain deliberately unoptimised. A classroom may need moments when nobody is searching for the answer. A family may need meals without screens. A child may need an afternoon with no activity planned for them. An adult may need a walk without a voice in their ear. These are not nostalgic gestures. They are forms of cultural design.

Because what many people describe as a crisis of intelligence may actually be a crisis of attention. Or perhaps a crisis of inner life. Not because people have become less capable. But because the world has become exceptionally good at keeping us occupied. The future is unlikely to belong to those with the fastest access to information. Machines are becoming increasingly good at that. The future may belong to those who can still tolerate silence. Those who can sit with uncertainty. Those who can think deeply when everything around them encourages speed.

Perhaps we are not becoming less intelligent. Perhaps we are becoming less available to thought. And in a world determined to fill every empty moment, protecting time for reflection may become one of the most important forms of human development we have left.