My generation is bored.
It’s not the quiet, porch-swing boredom our grandparents knew. Not the kind that sends you outside just to see what happens or forces you to make up games. It’s not the boredom that arises in the absence of entertainment but the boredom that comes when entertainment no longer entertains.
It’s boredom after you’ve scrolled every feed, binged every show, streamed every song, and chased every thrill. We Gen Zers are pioneers of this new boredom: overstimulated yet underwhelmed. What happens when every craving is instantly met and we’re still restless? When you’ve been handed dopamine on a silver platter your whole life and it leaves you wanting?
We’ve grown up in dopamine heaven—and it’s boring as hell.
Bored by Dopamine
We’ve become boring people too. No more nights with neighbors and fireflies, just doomscrolling under blue light. No more silent daydreaming, just noisy distraction. No more quirky hobbies, just algo-driven brain rot. No more clumsy first kisses, just fake sex. No more friendships, just chatbots. No more watching the game with eight friends, just watching eight games with a gambling addiction.
Our boredom isn’t about having nothing to do. It’s about having nothing that matters. We’ve been raised on short bursts of pleasure, little chemical hits that never add up to happiness. The more we feed, the less we feel.
Our boredom isn’t about having nothing to do. It’s about having nothing that matters.
We know it too. You can sense it in ironic humor, the fascination with rural living, and dopamine detoxes. We’re a generation haunted by our own indulgence. We’ve seen the end of the pleasure experiment, and it’s empty.
C. S. Lewis writes, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” You could reframe that for today: If dopamine can’t satisfy me, the most probable explanation is that I was made for something more.
Search for the Sacred
My generation is beginning to recognize this. In the United Kingdom, the number of young adults attending church weekly has quietly risen according to recent surveys. In the United States, many who once left religion are drifting back—not to trendy TED-Talk churches that promise self-improvement but to ones that feel unapologetically supernatural.
Trevin Wax notes two unexpected movements among the young: one toward high-church liturgy, another toward charismatic worship. They seem like opposites, but they share the same appeal—the “churchiness” of it all. The ritual, the mystery, the sense that something otherworldly is happening here.
In a world of infinite spectacle, what stands out isn’t another performance but something sacred. Young people are intrigued by incense, robes, and raised hands. They don’t want a church that mimics a coffee shop; they already have a coffee shop. They want a church that feels like church.
In a world of infinite spectacle, what stands out is not another performance but something sacred.
Because when everything else feels algorithmically engineered, the weirdness of the holy feels real.
It’s what the psalmist meant when he said to God, “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Ps. 16:11). Our generation has tasted every lesser pleasure. What we want now is fullness.
What if the real antidote to our overstimulated age isn’t less religion but more transcendence?
We think excitement is found in consuming constant novelty. But what if the real thrill is encountering an unchanging God and worshiping him in much the same way Christians have for centuries: praying to him even if he doesn’t audibly respond, reading an ancient text written in a dead language, kneeling in silence before a mystery we can’t control?
You’d expect these things to bore a generation raised on dopamine. But I’m not bored with prayer; I’m bored with scrolling. I’m not bored with reading my Bible; I’m bored with comment sections. I’m not bored with silence; I’m bored with podcasts.
Boredom is what happens when this miraculous world stops surprising us. Faith is what happens when we realize that “what is seen was not made out of things that are visible” (Heb. 11:3). What we can’t see has always been the real story.
We Want Weird Christianity
This is the moment for the church to stop apologizing for its strangeness. Don’t dim the lights to compete with the screen’s glow. Don’t soften the mystery to make it more palatable.
When the world is flat and predictable, the church’s job is to be deep and holy. Offer the sacraments, not self-help. Teach ancient truth, not algorithmic wisdom. Give us mystery over marketing, confession over branding, transformation over technique.
When the world is flat and predictable, the church’s job is to be deep and holy.
This hunger is everywhere. Young women dabble in astrology, yoga, and witchcraft. Young men dabble in conspiracy theories and stoicism. It’s all the same: a sense that the material world can neither explain nor fulfill all their longings. They’re trying to name the ache.
The church should stop tiptoeing around spiritual realities as if our belief in angels and miracles might be stumbling blocks. For my generation, they won’t. My peers are already reaching for transcendence, often in dangerously misguided places. Let’s not be too timid to show them the real thing. As Paul tells the Athenians, “The God who made the world and everything in it . . . [is] not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:24, 27). The church’s task isn’t to make God more relatable or “normal” but to remind the world that he’s real—and near.
That’s why so many young people are returning to silence, prayer, liturgy, and passionate worship. It makes them feel alive again. These practices pull us out of the feedback loop of self. They give us what the digital world never can: awe.
Boredom Is a Clue
Our boredom, in the end, might be a divine clue. It’s the hunger pang of the soul reminding us we were made for joy beyond chemicals, screens, and algorithms. The restlessness that drives us back to our phones could one day drive us back to God. We’re starting to see this in the spiritual awakening of digitally native generations.
We’ve scrolled to the end of pleasure and found no meaning there. But in the stillness of faith—in the weird, wonderful quiet of a church service that refuses to entertain us—we might find something better than dopamine.
We might find delight. Pleasures forevermore.
The Gospel Coalition