Chairman of the Bored

"It’s basically a new phenomenon – only about 200 hundred years old. Boredom is inextricably linked to modernity. It is a modern thing. This has to be linked to technology, the fact that technology is leaving us behind, waiting for us to use it. This must be the reason we are becoming increasingly more bored… boredom reveals to us the gaping void we are so afraid of. Now that God is dead all we have is technology. Technology once afforded us the privilege of becoming God ourselves, but now technology has surpassed us. We are left paralysed, motionless and lost. No amount of gadgets, holidays, recreational drugs and spiritual awakenings with help to alleviate this underpinning fact. We seriously don’t know what to do with ourselves. This is the crippling nature of boredom: it reveals to us our finite, limited, meaningless lives – and we can’t handle that… I suppose it’s how we choose to look at this that is the important thing. I would rather try to embrace boredom full-on than try to fill my life with things in order to keep it at bay."


- Interview with Lee Rourke, author of The Canal and Everyday.