Would Bill Gates Have Changed the World If He Grew Up With a Smartphone?

Bill Gates grew up in an analog world. Obviously.

We all know who Bill Gates is. We can Google his birth year (ironically on a Windows computer) and immediately confirm he was not endlessly scrolling Instagram or TikTok. But how often do we actually think about that? We rarely stop mid-scroll to remember that there was a world before computers. But sometimes, something pulls us back—nostalgia, a stray memory, Bill Gates’ new memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings.

Gates was your average 1950s child–aside from his privilege and all. He played cards with his grandmother, played board games with his sister, hiked hundreds of miles. He was a subpar theatre kid (his admission not mine). He snuck out of the house. He got into trouble.

He was a thinker, a tinkerer! He tried things. At one point, he even tried on Christianity. Looking back, he realizes that his hikes—long stretches of quiet time spent thinking—were part of a search for transcendence, even if he wouldn’t have framed it that way at the time.

None of this is shocking on its own—kids have always found ways to entertain themselves. But what really stuck with me was this: he was never idle.

Not in the way we are now. Not in the way that involves sitting in one place for hours, scrolling, consuming, numbing. He had free time, but it wasn’t filled with passive distractions. He didn’t get quick dopamine hits from perfectly tailored content. His mind actually had space to wander.

And then I looked at my own life.

The Importance of Boredom (And the Fact That I Don’t Let Myself Feel It)

Gates writes about working through coding problems in his head while hiking. He mentions that having free time allowed his brain to do the kind of deep thinking it needed to do. I know this is in there somewhere—I can’t find the exact page, but I remember it clearly.

And when I read that, I realized something: I don’t allow myself to be bored anymore.

I used to. As a kid, I had no choice. I’d meet friends at the park. I’d call their houses and have to make small talk with their parents before asking if they were free. I’d stare at the ceiling for what felt like hours, waiting for something to happen. And in those moments of boredom, I’d get creative. I’d think about things. I’d just exist. And, more importantly, I’d exist within the context of my own physical world. I did not have the entire world at my fingertips.

But now?

If I have five seconds of downtime, I reach for my phone. If there’s a lull in a conversation, I check notifications. If I sit in silence too long, I feel uncomfortable. My default mode of existence is escaping into a digital world.

And I don’t think it’s just me.

Psychologists argue that boredom is essential for creativity and problem-solving¹. When Gates describes letting his mind wander on hikes, he’s unknowingly describing what researchers now call productive boredom—the kind of empty space our brains need to form new ideas². But today, we fill every gap with something. We don’t even give ourselves the chance to be bored long enough to see what our brains come up with.

And that’s why reading about Gates’ childhood made me feel a deep, aching sadness. Because his childhood—so full of unstructured play, deep engagement, and actual presence in the world—feels like something that’s disappearing. Maybe already gone.

Would Bill Gates Have Been Bill Gates If He Grew Up With a Smartphone?

On page 92 of Source Code, Gates writes:

“It still amazes me how so many disparate things had to come together for me to use a computer in 1968.”

He’s right—he was lucky. But he also won the lottery in a much bigger way: he was born at exactly the right time.

No distractions. No infinite scroll. No algorithm optimized to hijack his attention. Just a brain, left to its own devices, free to get obsessed with computers.

And that raises a question I can’t stop thinking about: Would Bill Gates have become Bill Gates if he had grown up with a smartphone?

Would he have had the same laser focus? Would he have spent hours thinking about code in his head, or would he have gotten distracted by endless notifications, doomscrolling, and short-form videos?

I don’t know. And that’s kind of terrifying.

The Bleakness of Constant Stimulation

I don’t want this to turn into some tired “kids these days” rant. The digital world Gates helped create has brought incredible opportunities—kids today can learn to code, explore virtual museums, and connect with people across the globe in ways that would’ve seemed like science fiction during his childhood.

But at the same time, something feels… off.

Gates’ childhood, as he describes it, feels full of wonder. It feels like a world where people did things. And today? Today feels numbing. Passive. We don’t have to seek out stimulation anymore—it finds us. We don’t even get the chance to be bored, to be uncomfortable, to sit in silence and see what our brains come up with.

I don’t know what the answer is. I’m not about to throw my phone into a lake and go live in the woods. But reading Source Code made me realize that if I want to reclaim even a fraction of that analog childhood wonder, I have to be intentional. I have to make space for boredom. For quiet. For doing things that don’t give me an instant dopamine hit.

Alright, time to go back on Instagram. See ya!

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1. Mann, S., & Cadman, R. (2014). Does Being Bored Make Us More Creative? Journal of Experimental Psychology, 42(6), 431-448. This study explores how engaging in boredom-inducing activities can increase creativity and cognitive flexibility. ↩︎

2. Eastwood, J. D., Frischen, A., Fenske, M. J., & Smilek, D. (2012). The Unengaged Mind: Defining Boredom in Terms of Attention. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(5), 482–495. This research suggests that boredom can enhance problem-solving by encouraging cognitive exploration. ↩︎