Boredom enables genuinely new forms of activity

Evidence

If a person experiences boredom while walking and has no tolerance for this state, he will move restlessly in fits and starts or go this way and that. However, someone with greater tolerance for boredom will recognize, after a while, that walking as such is what bores him. Consequently, he will be impelled to find a kind of movement that is entirely different. Running, or racing, does not yield a new gait. It is just accelerated walking. Dancing or gliding, however, represent entirely new forms of motion. Only human beings can dance. It may be that boredom seized him while walking, so that after—and through—this “attack” he would make the step from walking to dancing. Compared with linear walking, straight ahead, the convoluted movement of dancing represents a luxury; it escapes the achievement-principle entirely. — Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, 39

Categorization

• XREF: This is Han’s account of how the new emerges from idleness — a concrete mechanism the reader can test against her own week (does tolerating bored lapse ever yield the new?). Echoes the capsule that ‘hectic rush reproduces the already available.’ — connects to: Boredom is a form of absorption that constant attention dispersal destroys — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1764; Contemporary subjects move compulsively among the boring while never feeling bored — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1765; Thoreau prized receptive idleness over productive use of leisure — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 797 (+1 more)
• FICTION: The walking-to-dancing step is a vivid, almost story-like image of transformation through boredom — could seed a scene about a character who only finds her true art after tolerating long inert boredom.