Deep boredom is the source of culture and creation

Evidence

We owe the cultural achievements of humanity—which include philosophy—to deep, contemplative attention. Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention. A rash change of focus between different tasks, sources of information, and processes characterizes this scattered mode of awareness. Since it also has a low tolerance for boredom, it does not admit the profound idleness that benefits the creative process. Walter Benjamin calls this deep boredom a “dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.” If sleep represents the high point of bodily relaxation, deep boredom is the peak of mental relaxation. A purely hectic rush produces nothing new. It reproduces and accelerates what is already available. — Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, 38

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces and defines the key contrast hyperattention vs deep, contemplative attention, with Benjamin’s ‘dream bird’ as the load-bearing image for deep boredom.
• XREF: Benjamin’s dream bird / warm gray fabric echoes the reader’s prior capsule on creative thought requiring initial silence. The ‘hectic rush reproduces what is already available’ line also anticipates Han’s later claim that achievement-society produces only ‘the Same.’ — connects to: Exhaustion makes tabloid culture’s degraded content irresistible despite boredom — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2489

Related

• Boredom is a form of absorption that constant attention dispersal destroys (similarity 0.82)
• Boredom with the thoroughly-studied past is a reliable catalyst for cultural innovation. (similarity 0.79)
• Boredom is a symptom of one’s own cultural and ideological limits (similarity 0.79)
• Exhaustion makes tabloid culture’s degraded content irresistible despite boredom (similarity 0.78)
• Boredom results from compelled labour, not from human nature (similarity 0.78)