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.
The nihilistic philosopher Emil Cioran suggested all history is the result of our desire to avoid boredom.
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