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.
