Sitting in the barber’s chair with a cape around your neck and clippers buzzing near your ear isn’t exactly prime entertainment territory. Can’t check your posture, can’t really chat without moving your head, and staring at yourself in the mirror gets old after about 30 seconds.
Good thing phones exist, and good thing some apps were basically designed for exactly this sort of captive boredom.
1. Reddit
Reddit’s a goldmine when you’re stuck somewhere. Not because it’s particularly well designed or pleasant to use, but because it’s basically infinite. You can read three comments about someone’s neighbour who keeps stealing their bins, get bored, swipe over to a thread about whether hot dogs count as sandwiches, then end up watching a video of a bloke in Arkansas who’s trained his chickens to play football. None of it connects, none of it matters, and you can bail on any of it whenever your barber tells you to stop moving.
The thing about Reddit is how little it asks of you. Nobody’s expecting thoughtful responses or even upvotes. You’re just there, absorbing whatever nonsense the internet decided to serve up that day.
Could be relationship drama, could be someone explaining why Victorian sewers were architectural marvels, could be a 47-year-old man asking if it’s weird that he still eats Coco Pops for dinner. You’ll never run out of things to read, and you’ll never remember any of it an hour later, which somehow makes it perfect for killing 20 minutes under fluorescent lights.
2. Casino Apps
Slots and card games on your phone used to be pretty grim, but they’ve sorted themselves out over the last few years. The best online casinos in the UK actually look decent now, load fast, and pack in hundreds of games that range from basic fruit machines to elaborate themed slots about ancient Egypt or Vikings or whatever else gets people pressing buttons.
What makes them work during a haircut is how they’re built around quick rounds. Spin three times, get interrupted because you need to lean forward, spin three more times, repeat until you either win something or don’t.
Live dealer tables have proper croupiers on video feeds, real cards, real wheels, and you can throw down bets between the moments when your barber’s fussing with the back of your head. Beats staring at the poster about beard oil, anyway.
3. TikTok
TikTok’s algorithm is either brilliant or sinister, depending on your mood, but either way, it’s absurdly good at figuring out what’ll keep you scrolling. Feed it a few days of watch history and it’ll serve up an endless parade of exactly the sort of videos you didn’t know you wanted. Recipes that’ll never get made, arguments about whether pandas deserve to exist, football clips from leagues you’ve never heard of, someone’s nan doing karaoke in Benidorm.
Each video’s over before you’ve had time to get bored with it. Swipe up, next one starts, swipe again if it’s rubbish. You don’t need sound for most of them because the captions do enough, which helps when there’s a hairdryer going two chairs over and clippers doing their thing right above your left ear. People post everything on there now. You can find things about a woman who’d accidentally joined a cult in Brighton and didn’t realise for three months. Or about a bloke who’d been pronouncing “quinoa” wrong his entire adult life and only found out at a work lunch.
4. Twitter (X)
Twitter’s a mess most days, but it’s unbeatable for short, sharp content that doesn’t ask much of your attention span. Everything’s crammed into a few lines, so you can rip through 40 posts in the time it takes to get your fringe sorted. News breaks there first, arguments happen there fastest, and jokes get run into the ground there within about six hours.
Football fans practically live on Twitter during matches. Goals get posted seconds after they happen, red cards spark 300 angry responses before the replay’s even finished, and pundits tear into managers before the final whistle’s blown. Follow enough football accounts and your feed becomes this chaotic stream of opinions, clips, and hot takes that updates faster than you can read it.
Journalists break transfer news, fans lose their minds over VAR decisions, and someone’s always got a thread about why their club’s defensive shape is falling apart. You’ll never catch up with it all, but that’s sort of the point. Dip in, read what’s there, move on when your barber spins the chair around.
5. Instagram
Instagram’s turned into a strange hybrid of everything at once. Photos from your mates, sponsored posts for protein powder, Reels that are basically TikToks, Stories that vanish before you’ve had a chance to care about them.
Somehow it all works when you’re killing time, maybe because there’s no pressure to engage properly with any of it. Double-tap a photo, move along. Watch a Reel, swipe to the next one. Tap through Stories from people you barely remember following.
Stories are weirdly compulsive because they disappear. Your brain tricks you into thinking you’re missing something if you don’t check them, even though it’s usually just someone’s breakfast or a sunset that looks identical to every other sunset ever posted. Reels have taken over most of the app now, and they’re just TikTok with a different name and slightly worse recommendations.
You’ll end up watching cooking videos, travel clips, some influencer talking about their morning routine, and a dog that’s learned to open doors. Then your haircut’s done and you’ve somehow spent 30 minutes looking at content you won’t remember tomorrow.
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