{"id":6488,"date":"2026-07-24T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/?p=6488"},"modified":"2026-07-23T09:45:02","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T07:45:02","slug":"can-creativity-exist-without-boredom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/2026\/07\/24\/can-creativity-exist-without-boredom\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Creativity Exist Without Boredom?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I travel roughly 2,000 kilometres a week for work. Sometimes, on the train, I put my phone away and sit with nothing. No book, no podcast, just the landscape moving past and strangers shifting through the carriage. On one of these journeys, my mind drifted to a photograph I’d never quite got right, a recreation of a shot from the opening credits of a TV series called Felicity<\/em>, the main character standing beside an incoming metro train. From there it wandered to a conversation I’d had about composition, then to whether I should reshoot the frame on a different camera for more control. By the time I arrived, I had the seed of what eventually became this post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Taking the train to work<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

None of that came from reading, research, or watching someone else’s video about creative inspiration; just from sitting there, unstimulated, while my brain went off and made something up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boredom isn’t the source of creativity; creativity cannot exist without it. You need empty space. Ideas form in it, connections establish themselves, and your brain processes what it has already absorbed. Fill every moment with external stimulus and the internal process that generates original thought never gets started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I look back at how most of my newsletter ideas surface, very few come from deliberate effort. Reading and research provide knowledge, which is necessary but not sufficient. Ideas tend to appear during walks, while washing up, in the odd gaps between activities when there is nothing particular to occupy my attention. Left alone, my brain does its own work: revisiting photographs I’ve taken, questioning decisions I thought were settled, critiquing work I’d assumed I’d finished with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something similar happens with photographic critique. I evaluate my photographs better while walking aimlessly than while studying them on a screen. The screen provides too much stimulus; the walk provides just enough boredom to let the relevant questions rise. This internal process matters more than any external feedback. It’s where you develop your eye, internalise what you’ve learned, and begin to understand not just what the rules are but when they stop applying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some people consider constant content consumption “research”, or “warm-up”. But consumption and creation are two distinct activities that have little in common. Treating consumption as a prelude to creation creates exactly the kind of creator block people spending time endlessly scrolling are trying to avoid. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Online photography places are full of that confusion: people ask what they should shoot to free their creativity, as if creativity came from others; they ask how people have had the ideas they like, as if ideas came from copying others. YouTube is even worse, with thousands of people promising to resolve your creative blocks, to free your imagination, to take you to the next level. Photographers end up consuming that content instead of digesting it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boredom is uncomfortable because you can’t scroll away from ideas or unresolved questions. You have to stay with them, look at them, confront the fact that they create uncertainty. But the brain, with nothing else to do, starts generating its own material: revisiting memories, imagining scenarios, questioning assumptions it had filed away. That discomfort is what drives progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A generation that has never known a minute that couldn’t filled with content has a problem: creativity exists, and younger generations have shown that they can be creative (often in a derivative kind of way, but it’s still creativity). But when you never sit with your thoughts, when you never contemplate nothingness for an hour, you don’t access that creativity and you don’t feed it. It takes time and practice to free your creativity, and filing every minute with easy content atrophies the creative muscle. A life of constant entertainment is also a life of constant avoidance, even if nothing is consciously being avoided.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photography requires many activities that must come together to create the object: technique must be learned; this can come from courses or tutorials. When technique is under control, equipment mastery needs to be accomplished so that the camera isn’t in the way of your process<\/a>; this comes from practice, more than training. When technique and equipment mastery are accomplished, vision develops through attention to your own production<\/a>, as an emergent property over time. Vision happens in stillness, and stillness only becomes available when you are willing to be bored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

#Photography #Opinion #IMayBeWrong #Creativity<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I travel roughly 2,000 kilometres a week for work. Sometimes, on the train, I put my phone away and sit with nothing. No book, no podcast, just the landscape moving past and strangers shifting through the carriage. On one of these journeys, my mind drifted to a photograph I’d never quite got right, a recreation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,9,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","category-personal","category-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6488"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7896,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6488\/revisions\/7896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}