The right to boredom

Opinion Artmental healthtechnology The right to boredom The Right To Boredom Relevant News The right to boredom 29 June 2026 Man facing Hamas terrorism and murder conspiracy charges remanded in Cyprus after bail overturned 29 June 2026 Troodos: Cyprus’s diamond in the rough 29 June 2026 Yiorgos Savvinidis 29 June 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber For days now, the words of Finnish artist Kalle Nio have been turning over in my mind, from an interview I did with him about his remarkable performance Tempo: “It is a gift to be able to experience boredom, and to stay with it rather than immediately escape it.” Nio came to appreciate this feeling when he realised that boredom, these days, seems to have almost disappeared altogether. There is something almost ironic about hearing that from a performance artist—borderline off-putting, even, for anyone thinking of going to see the show. And yet the Rialto was packed. In any case, in an age where we have convinced ourselves that every empty second without stimulation is a wasted opportunity for information, amusement, social connection or productivity, the idea that boredom might be a blessing feels almost heretical. If I am honest, I have always found boredom a distinctly unsettling emotion. And I cannot even remember the last time I was truly bored. That does not necessarily mean my life is thrilling. It means, more likely, that boredom never gets the chance to arrive. In the split second before it even begins to take shape, the hand reaches for the phone on reflex—some message, some notification, a text, an image, a video, a podcast, an endless stream of small doses of stimulation designed to protect us from the most unbearable sensation of all: that nothing is happening. As if it were something to be eliminated at all costs. Nearly four centuries ago, Blaise Pascal observed that all of human misery stems from man’s inability to sit alone in a quiet room. He was not speaking exactly about boredom, but about our relentless need to seek distraction so as not to be confronted with ourselves. Two centuries later, Søren Kierkegaard noted that human beings endlessly and anxiously invent new forms of stimulation in order to escape boredom. It is hard not to read those lines as prophetic while scrolling through a lit screen. For centuries we were raised on the certainty that idleness is the root of all evil. Human worth became fused with productivity, and laziness was elevated into a moral failing without forgiveness. Today we no longer demonise laziness quite so much. Because even when we are not working, we are not idle. We are “working” on ourselves, consuming—or sometimes producing—content. What our age forbids, almost violently, is boredom. We cannot tolerate the void. If Paul Lafargue once defended the “right to laziness” against the work ethic of the 19th century, today we may need to defend the right to boredom against the tyranny of constant stimulation. The fundamental mistake is that we forget boredom is not the problem, but a signal that something is. Just as pain is the body’s protective alert that something is damaged or unwell, thirst signals the need for hydration, and hunger that we need energy. In the same way, we do not satisfy boredom within this whirlwind of impulses and information—we merely switch it off, like quenching thirst with a gulp of ice-cold water. But in truth, we keep it suppressed. Or, if you like, sedated—like taking painkillers without ever looking for the cause of the pain. That signal tells us that what we are doing is not truly engaging us, that our attention has nothing to latch onto. Beyond that, boredom is also a state of mind: the individual wants to interact, to connect, but cannot quite manage it. So before we suppress it, it is worth listening to what it is trying to tell us—sometimes about meaning, novelty, even the human condition itself. Suppressing all of that does not make it disappear. After all, there are many kinds of boredom. There is creative boredom, the kind that comes just before an idea. There is the boredom of waiting. And there is the existential boredom of Fernando Pessoa, born not from a lack of stimuli, but from a lack of meaning. Lord Byron, the archetypal Romantic, chased constant sensation because he believed life’s highest purpose was aesthetic intensity. He was tormented by ennui—that unbearable existential listlessness which drove him to travel, to love affairs, to gambling, to wars in distant lands. Anything that failed to excite him, he felt, was a kind of death. And what if boredom is not the opposite of creativity, but its precondition? What if it is that awkward moment in which nothing has yet arrived to fill the space? A threshold state, a blank canvas before the next thought appears? That, at least, is what Kalle Nio suggests. I am not convinced it always produces creativity. Psychology is more cautious about such neat conclusions. What is certain is that creativity needs time that is not already occupied. It needs cracks, silence. It depends on those brief moments when the mind is not digesting the next stimulus, but allowed instead to wander. Yet perhaps the real issue is not the defence of boredom as yet another wellness trend, but the defence of the right to emptiness itself. In an age where everything competes for our attention, the ability for nothing to happen has become a luxury. Nio may well be right: boredom may not always be pleasant, or noble, or creatively fruitful—but it is one of the few states in which we are left with no option but to encounter ourselves. And that, yes, may truly be a gift. If this text did not bore you, and managed to hold your attention to the end, then it has probably failed in its purpose. Subscribe to our Newsletter Latest News Man facing Hamas terrorism and murder conspiracy charges remanded in Cyprus after bail overturned Troodos: Cyprus’s diamond in the rough Tony Blair-Christodoulides meeting on Cyprus Board of Peace summit scrapped over flight delay When a €10,000 sculpture was sold for scrap metal Row erupts over Nicosia exhibition featuring artist behind occupied north flag Overnight pharmacies on Monday, June 29 Protest planned outside Presidential Palace over Gaza Board of Peace meeting in Cyprus Follow en.philenews on Google News and be the first to know all the news about Cyprus and the world.