147,238 moments resolved · est. 2013
curated by hand · added often
/

SEO landing Cluster · Things to do when bored

Things To Do When Bored

Hand-picked things to do when you're bored online. Sorted by mood and time available. Curated weekly since 2013.

You're in the right place

Things to do when bored, traditionally: stare at a wall. Better options exist. This page collects our hand-picked list of things to do when you're bored online — sites, games, generators, optical illusions, and pointless interactives — sorted by what mood you're in and how long you have. Whether you've got four minutes between meetings, half an hour to procrastinate, or a Sunday afternoon to sink into Cookie Clicker, every entry below is curated, tested, and approved for absolute lack of productive value. Pick by mood. Pick by time available. Or hit the Surprise Me button bottom-right and let us decide. We've been doing this since 2013.

The grid · 16 curated for this page

Things to do when bored online, right now.

Filter
Nothing here under that filter. Press Surprise Me or pick a different one.

Editorial criteria

Why these made the cut.

Each destination on this page has earned its tab in three ways: it loads fast, it does what it promises within ten seconds, and it doesn't ask for anything in return — no signup, no email, no payment. The mix below is intentionally varied: a passive-aggressive password machine sits next to a meditative drawing canvas which sits next to a tile-merging puzzle. The variety is the point. If five minutes of one thing isn't fixing your boredom, the next destination probably will. We rotate this featured set weekly based on click data, so what you see today may differ from what you saw last week. The categories these come from are stable; what's currently top-of-list within them rotates.

For five minutes

Best for five minutes.

For the inter-meeting gap or the elevator ride, the highest-impact destinations are:

Pointer Pointer — move your cursor anywhere, a photo of a person pointing at exactly that spot appears within two seconds. The whole site is the joke.

The Bored Button — a single big red button. Each press launches a different micro-game. Useful when you can't be bothered to pick.

Find The Invisible Cow — your speakers say "cow" louder as you move toward where the invisible cow is hidden. Three minutes of confusion, a small triumph at the end.

Cat Bounce — cat GIFs that fall, jump, and bounce when clicked. Fifteen seconds of work for ninety seconds of laughter.

Eelslap — hold your mouse button down to make a fish slap a man's face on a loop. Funnier than it sounds. We don't make the rules.

For more in this register, the Useless Websites and Optical Illusions categories are where to browse.

    For thirty minutes

    Best for thirty minutes.

    For lunch breaks and the early-evening procrastination window:

    Skribbl.io — Pictionary against strangers. One game lasts fifteen minutes; the second one lasts another fifteen because you'll convince yourself one more round.

    Gartic Phone — telephone, but with drawings. Best with friends; works alone with strangers.

    2048 — tile merging. The best version of the cosy puzzle category. Five minutes always becomes thirty.

    Spend Bill Gates' Money — spend a fictional $100 billion on real items priced at real prices. You'll learn yachts are expensive, then quickly less interesting than you'd hoped.

    Drawing Garden — strangers anonymously drawing flowers together on a shared canvas. Calmer than expected.

    Quick, Draw! — Google's drawing AI plays Pictionary with you. Loses more often than you'd expect.

    For more in this register, the Pointless Games and Brain Teasers categories deliver reliably.

      For an hour or more

      Best for an hour or more.

      For the long Sunday or the no-sleep nights:

      Cookie Clicker — the canonical idle game. Eleven years on, dedicated players have spreadsheets analysing optimal building purchase orders. There is no end and that's not a problem.

      Universal Paperclips — a paperclip-making sim that quietly becomes a four-hour meditation on AI alignment. You'll start by selling paperclips. You'll finish by tiling the cosmos with them.

      Slither.io — multiplayer snake. One round is ten minutes. Three rounds is ninety minutes. Twelve rounds is your evening.

      Wikipedia Random — the original rabbit hole. Every click lands you on an entirely random Wikipedia article. Two hours can disappear before you notice the time.

      Reddit r/all — the worst version of the internet, but the most addictive. Enter at your own risk; come out three hours later wondering what happened.

      For more long-form, the Time Wasters category is the dedicated section.

        Related categories

        Browse by room.

        Pointless Games Useless Websites Optical Illusions Time Wasters Feel-Good Loops Brain Teasers

        Situational picks

        What to do if you're bored AND…

        …and alone

        The directory works as a one-person exercise. Start with Useless Websites or hit Surprise Me.

        …and with friends

        Multiplayer browser games are the move. Skribbl.io and Gartic Phone work over a video call.

        …and with no money

        Everything on BoredomBash is free. Always has been. The whole point.

        …and without internet

        Close this tab. Find a book. We can't help you.

        More about this · tap to expand

        What works depends on what kind of bored What to do when you're bored online. Read more

        Boredom is famously useful — psychologists since the 1990s have linked occasional boredom to creative thinking, problem-solving, and mental rest. Boredom is also unbearable in the moment, which is why people search for things to do when bored more than 135,000 times every month. The internet has been the obvious go-to for at least twenty years.

        What works depends on what kind of boredom you're in. The five-minute version (waiting for a meeting, in line, riding a bus) wants quick gratification — a one-tap site that delivers a joke and lets you close it. The thirty-minute version (between tasks, lunch break, the gap before bed) rewards something with slightly more depth — a game with a hook, a deep-dive site, a specific category to browse. The hour-or-longer version (Sunday afternoon, can't sleep, intentionally avoiding work) calls for the long-form options — idle games, infinite-scrollable content sites, things you can stay in.

        This page is organized around those three time windows. The featured grid below mixes destinations across BoredomBash's twenty categories, weighted toward the ones that match common "bored online" search intent — useless websites, free online games, optical illusions, parody generators, weird internet classics, feel-good loops. If you want a deeper browse by topic, every category page is one click from here.

        If you don't want to choose, the big yellow Surprise Me button bottom-right will pick a destination at random, weighted by what's currently popular. The average BoredomBash visitor presses that button four-and-a-half times per session. We don't know why. We just know it's true.

        Cultural context A brief note on boredom. Read more

        Researchers have studied boredom seriously since the 1980s, and the consensus is genuinely interesting: occasional boredom is good for you. A 2014 study by psychologists Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman at the University of Central Lancashire showed that participants who completed boring tasks before a creative exercise produced significantly more creative outputs than the unbored control group. Subsequent research has linked moderate boredom to better problem-solving, increased autobiographical reflection, and higher motivation toward meaningful goals.

        The catch is that "occasional" part. Acute boredom — the kind you feel waiting in line or sitting through a meeting — is unpleasant in the moment, and humans will reliably do almost anything to escape it. A 2014 study by Timothy Wilson at the University of Virginia found that 67% of male participants and 25% of female participants would rather administer a mild electric shock to themselves than sit alone with their thoughts for fifteen minutes.

        The internet's solution is, to put it mildly, comprehensive. There are now hundreds of millions of websites built explicitly to keep you from feeling bored, ranging from social media (which exploits this tendency for advertising revenue) to useless websites (which exist for no reason at all). BoredomBash sits squarely in the second camp.

        The implicit deal we offer: if you must escape your boredom, escape into something that isn't trying to monetize your attention indefinitely. Press a button. Open a tab. Spend four minutes. Close the tab. Be slightly less bored. Move on. The destinations on this page won't keep you for hours unless you want them to. The Surprise Me button has no algorithm trying to predict what you'll engage with next; it picks a random thing.

        Everyone gets bored. The internet has answers. Some of them are worth the click.

        Related searches Bored at work, at home, on your phone. Read more

        "Things to do when bored" is the broad search, but there are several common variants with slightly different intents.

        Things to do when bored at work — typically wants screen-only, small, deniable. Our useless websites directory and optical illusions work; the pointless games category is risky if your monitor is visible.

        Things to do when bored at home — bigger time window, more permission. The 30-minute and hour-plus sections above all apply. Time Wasters and Feel-Good Loops are the categories built for it.

        Things to do when bored online — the version this page targets directly. Everything on BoredomBash qualifies.

        Things to do when bored on your phone — most BoredomBash destinations work on mobile. The exceptions are the drawing tools (Drawing Garden, Patatap) and Hacker Typer, which want a real keyboard.

        Things to do when bored at night — the long-form options. Cookie Clicker, Universal Paperclips, Wikipedia, anything in Feel-Good Loops for sleep-adjacent calm.

        Things to do when bored alone — most of the directory. The exceptions are the multiplayer games (Skribbl, Gartic, Slither.io).

        Recently added Fresh picks. Read more

        The newest entries in this category.

          FAQ · People also ask

          Things to do when bored · the questions Google sees.

          What can I do when I'm bored?

          Plenty. The fastest options online include playing a free browser game like 2048 or Cookie Clicker, visiting a useless website like Pointer Pointer or Falling Falling, exploring an optical illusion archive, or pressing the Surprise Me button on this page to land somewhere random. Offline, walking, reading, or calling someone you haven't spoken to in a while are all underrated.

          What are some things to do when bored at home?

          At home, you have more time and permission to commit. Long-form online options include idle games (Cookie Clicker, Universal Paperclips), infinite-scroll sites (Wikipedia Random, Reddit, Pudding Cool), or learning something new through a fact site like Atlas Obscura or Mental Floss. Offline options include cooking something new, reorganising one shelf, or starting a long book.

          What are good websites for when you're bored?

          The directory you're reading is built for this. Pointer Pointer is the cleanest five-minute distraction. Cookie Clicker is the best long-form one. The Useless Web's button is good if you can't decide. For deeper browsing, every category on BoredomBash (useless websites, optical illusions, fake generators, feel-good loops, time wasters) is one click away.

          How do I stop being bored?

          Acute boredom usually fades within twenty minutes if you give it something low-stakes to focus on. Pressing the Surprise Me button or picking a destination from the featured grid above is enough for most people. Chronic boredom is different — that's a signal worth listening to, not a problem to solve with a website. If you're bored most days for weeks, talking to someone helps more than a directory does.

          What's the most fun thing to do online?

          Subjective, but the most-clicked destinations on BoredomBash are Pointer Pointer (one-shot joke), Cookie Clicker (long-form game), The Useless Web (random discovery), and Slither.io (multiplayer). All four are free and require no signup. For a personalised pick, the Surprise Me button picks one based on current popularity.

          Why am I always bored?

          Boredom is your brain's way of saying the current activity isn't engaging — or that nothing is engaging enough. If you're bored constantly across different activities, that's worth examining: it can signal under-stimulation (you need harder challenges), over-stimulation burnout (you've used your novelty budget), or sometimes just a need for rest. A directory of useless websites can help in the moment but won't fix it.

          What can I do when I'm bored at work?

          Keep it screen-only, quiet, and finishable in five minutes. The optical illusions category, useless websites, and most parody generators on BoredomBash work for this. Avoid anything with sound (Hacker Typer, Eelslap) or anything that locks your screen. The single-tab, single-tap, single-joke sites are made for the work-bored case.

          What are things to do when bored on phone?

          Most BoredomBash destinations work on mobile. The mobile-best ones are 2048, Cookie Clicker, Skribbl.io, Cat Bounce, and Pointer Pointer. The drawing and music tools (Drawing Garden, Patatap, Incredibox) want a tablet or larger screen. Use the search bar at the top of any BoredomBash page to filter for mobile-friendly destinations.

          How do I entertain myself when bored?

          The cheapest and fastest option is the directory you're on. Press Surprise Me. If that doesn't land, pick a category that matches your mood — Useless Websites for absurdist, Brain Teasers for mental, Feel-Good Loops for calm, Pointless Games for active distraction. Most sessions sort themselves out within five to ten minutes.

          What's a good free thing to do when bored?

          Every destination on BoredomBash is free. So is most of the weird-internet space generally. The most-recommended free options are: any of our top-clicked destinations (see the trending section on the homepage), Wikipedia (a genuinely infinite source of free distraction), and old-internet archives like Albino Blacksheep or Newgrounds. None of these will ask you for money or an email.

          What is BoredomBash?

          BoredomBash is a hand-curated directory of pointless internet. Twenty categories of fun, useless, funny and weird websites, browser games, parodies, and feel-good loops. We've been running since 2013. There are no signups required, and a Surprise Me button when you can't pick.

          How do I use BoredomBash?

          Three ways. Press the Surprise Me button (bottom-right) to land on a random destination. Pick a feel from the chip row in the hero (Fun, Cool, Funny, Things to do when bored, etc.) to land on a curated themed page. Or browse the full directory by scrolling through the twenty category cards. Each link opens in a new tab. Come back when you're done.

          Or hit Surprise Me.

          Land somewhere random. Same idea, less choosing. The directory is right there if Surprise Me overshoots your patience.

          Back to homepage