Riots, shootings, sadism… blame it on the boredom of social media | Martha Gill

It's a dangerous emotion that makes us crave drama, and one exacerbated by the modern world

The age of boredom... has now passed". So begins On Boredom, a 2021 essay collection that claims the likes of TikTok and YouTube have driven it to extinction. These days, the time needed to be bored is no longer available". This view, that boredom has been blotted out, is widely held - so much so that psychologists have started to worry that we have lost something in the process: attention spans, or the state of blankness from which creative thoughts must spring.

But last week a study came along to confirm what has been lurking at the back of our distracted minds all along - scrolling through endless content actually makes boredom worse. Of course it does. Open up your phone while in a queue or on the bus, and your brain goes into a restless kind of limbo. If I'm honest, it's not boredom that makes me reach for Instagram but the urge to quiet other thoughts and emotions under a hum of static, like putting a blanket on a bird cage. Watching other people's travel slides and home videos was once seen as the epitome of tedium - now it's all some of us do.