Do we need more boredom?

3.1. Boredom as an important part of creativity

Due to all of the input we receive, it is comprehensible that we need some time in exchange, to digest it. And in my opinion scrolling through facebook or watching movies is an inappropriate option. It may serve a purpose in order to idle, but for being creative it requires an alternative choice. In the words of Walter Benjamin:

This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation which is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.

Benjamin, Walter: The Storyteller, 1936

This excerpt of a text about storytelling could be transferred to all creative tasks. These are hard to obtain in a world where it seems that craft has become a label for expensive beers.

2.2. As an alternative to overproduction and increase of desires

Apparently, we would have everything we need: Enough food to feed everybody on the planet, an economy producing masses of consumer goods, a breathable atmosphere. I admit, most of it is not fairly shared. But let us imagine just for a moment it would be.

And it is even getting better. Technical innovations as computers, artificial intelligence and machines are promising us the prospect of a bright future without any tedious work to be done by humankind.

And if we expand on that notion, there occurs one big question. We will have to ask ourselves: Then what we shall we do the whole day?

I am not trying to say, that we will all be horribly bored. But asking this question might in some way protect us from steering Spaceship Earth into a doomed, dark future. We can start right now: Do we need all the things that marketers are trying to make us believe we do? Will doing nothing automatically drive us into madness, depression or drug abuse? Can we not just allow ourselves to be happy?

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