Boredom is often a sign you are doing the job correctly. Markets spend long stretches without high-quality opportunities, so a calm, uneventful session is frequently healthier than a busy one. The urge to “make something happen” leads to forced trades, lower standards, and a slow leak of capital. Professionals treat inactivity as part of the process rather than a problem to be solved with more clicks. In practice, learning to tolerate boredom without manufacturing action is one of the rarest and most valuable skills a trader can develop.

"Boredom is the enemy of the attention economy. We have been taught to fear it." Robert Macfarlane makes the case for boredom: "I always wonder about the phrase 'paying attention.' It seems to bring attention into the capitalist economy: we pay attention, and in return, something is paid back to us." "Maybe we give attention. That feels truer to the idea of unselfish and unselfing attention." "We're in an attention fracking economy, which is always shattering and mining our attention for each monetizable unit." "Boredom is an opening of possibility. It's when the mind starts to wander and starts to notice things that were latent in the painting or the landscape or the person."