Art & Creativity Quote by Laura Riding

Riding opens with a brutal diagnosis of social life: boredom is not a scheduling problem but a failure of inner occupation. “Not sufficiently employed in themselves” flips the usual moral panic about idleness. The real scandal isn’t laziness; it’s the inability to inhabit one’s own mind without panic. So people “run about loose,” a phrase that makes sociability sound like a kind of leak or escape, energy spilling outward because it can’t be held inward.

Then she lands the knife: the “supererogatory occupations” are not necessary labor but self-appointed busywork, a culture of add-on projects that let you feel useful without confronting the harder task of being a self. Riding’s contempt sharpens in the aside that these pursuits mostly involve “making things already made” - reiteration, replication, secondhand creativity. The line reads like an indictment of salons, scenes, and movements where the performance of originality substitutes for the practice of thought.

Her most cutting turn is the redefinition of friendship as “the making of people.” Friendship becomes an artisanal, even coercive enterprise: shaping others into legible characters who confirm your tastes, your virtues, your narrative. The subtext is that many friendships aren’t meetings between formed selves; they’re informal workshops of mutual editing, where “care” masks control and companionship masks consumption. Coming from a poet associated with modernism’s pressure toward authenticity and exactness, the context matters: Riding is wary of the social machinery that turns individuals into material. She isn’t rejecting friendship so much as exposing how easily it becomes a substitute religion for those who can’t bear their own company.