Creativity Quote by Tom Jenkinson

A polite society without real stakes can start inventing them, the way a bored brain picks scabs. Tom Jenkinson’s line lands like a sideways compliment: if you live somewhere comfortable enough to avoid “genuine problems,” you still need something that disrupts the smooth surface. The “that” is left teasingly undefined, which is the point. It suggests an outlet that might look frivolous from the outside - abrasive music, subculture, noise, risk, even self-imposed difficulty - but functions as a pressure valve for a culture padded by stability.

As a musician, Jenkinson is talking from inside a world where intensity is often self-authored. Electronic music in particular can be engineered to feel like struggle: harsh timbres, complex rhythms, hostile tempos. The subtext is a critique of comfort as a kind of soft censorship. When nothing urgent is demanded of you, your appetite for friction doesn’t disappear; it gets redirected into aesthetics, identity, and manufactured conflict. Better to have an arena where discomfort is chosen, contained, and productive than to let it leak into uglier, less honest forms.

There’s also a quiet jab at moral posturing. Societies that “don’t present” problems can treat politics and culture like hobbyist terrain, where outrage becomes entertainment and commitment becomes branding. Jenkinson’s sentence defends the value of difficult art not as luxury, but as necessary resistance to numbness - a way to simulate consequence when everyday life refuses to provide it.