This paper explores and exemplifies the complex interplay between boredom and media practice in the everyday life of young people in Sweden. Being bored is a fundamental aspect of youth culture and experience, as well as a common theme in the narratives and imageries of youth popular culture. Yet the issue of boredom remains inexplicably underexplored in both youth cultural studies and media and audience research. Though boredom has long been acknowledged as an integral part of the lived realities of young people (Corrigan, 1979; Willis, 1977), including their everyday media practices (Hjort & Richardson, 2009; Livingstone, 2002), boredom is rarely the main analytic focus, and it generally tends to be taken for granted rather than explored in-depth. At the same time, the last couple of years has seen the emergence of a new multidisciplinary research field called “boredom studies” (Gardiner & Haladyn 2017), dealing explicitly with the many facets of  boredom, but apart from Paasonen’s (2021) ambitious treatment of the relationship between media and boredom there has so far been little exchange between boredom scholars and media scholars.

Theorizing boredom as a socially constructed emotion (Thoits, 1989) emanating from perceived lack of meaningfulness (Barbalet, 1999), this paper puts the boredom in young people’s lives at the center of analytic attention and explores the ways in which their media practices both relieve and reinforce emotional experiences of boredom in digital life. Taking inspiration from media ethnography and drawing on original empirical material from in-depth qualitative interviews with four Swedish university students (18–20 years old), the paper sets out to revive boredom as an issue in the study of youth culture and everyday media practice. By showing how emotional experiences of boredom are always embedded and shaped in everyday life contexts and situations, intersected with other emotions such as loneliness, and actively regulated through a variety of both media and non-media practices, it also makes a much-needed empirical contribution to the growing body of mainly theoretical literature on the relationship between boredom and digital media (Hand, 2017; Kendall, 2018; Paasonen, 2021).