Sean Thomas has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Four days ago I was so bored that I considered starting a terrorist groupuscule. I had no demands, no ideology, no manifesto. I just wanted directionless chaos. I even got as far as ChatGPTing ‘How to start a violent movement’ before realising all movements require meetings. And meetings are dull.
You may think I’m exaggerating. But the truth is, I have a lifelong fear of boredom. To put it another way, I can handle peril, I can handle regret, I can handle doing lines of Californian coke so long they risk a heart attack. What I can’t handle is monotony.
For example, in my early thirties I visited a warzone in southern Lebanon to escape the tedium of an otherwise routine travel assignment. My German photographer friend and I were kidnapped by Hezbollah and held in a village that was under fire from the Israelis. We were lucky to survive – so lucky I now see every sunrise as a kind of clerical error. And yet, somewhere in the middle of that terrifying experience, I had a happy thought: this is the least bored I have ever been.
That, I admit, is not normal. And so it has been throughout my life. I have almost drowned in the Antarctic, been thrown off a troop train in Siberia, been in and out of jail, rightly and wrongly, and done so much heroin that I frightened Irvine Welsh into fleeing a Soho supermarket. My attempts to escape boredom have been so extreme they sometimes verge on predictable.
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