Bored usually means you stopped looking, not that there’s nothing to see.

Boredom feels like a fact about the room and it is usually a fact about your attention. After enough fast input, anything at normal speed reads as empty, so a long bus ride or a quiet afternoon registers as nothing happening. Plenty is happening. It is just not arriving pre-edited with a hook in the first two seconds.

Next time it hits, stay in it for ten minutes before reaching for something. Look at one thing properly: a face, a building, the way somebody talks. Boredom is often the last few seconds before your own thinking starts, and most people never find that out because they swipe first.