Slow down. Stay offline. Be bored

In time, restlessness gives way to new thinking, as artists from Anish Kapoor to Grayson Perry have attested

Martha Gill fully elides the positive and creative aspects of boredom (“Riots, shooting, sadism… blame it on the boredom of social media”). Boredom usually precedes a period of creativity, and artists and authors praise its benefits, from Anish Kapoor to Susan Sontag; Grayson Perry calls boredom a “creative state”. In time, that restlessness will give way to new ways of thinking.

Gill rightly points out that the rise of boredom “is a difficult one to solve”. Digital natives are especially at risk of the negative state that philosopher Lars Svendsen calls situative boredom, where a specific situation creates the boredom, such as Gill’s stimulation-poor nightmares of the monotony of new towns, or the bored, violence-prone participants on X during the recent UK riots.

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