"The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes"
About this Quote
Boredom, for Sontag, isn’t a petty complaint; it’s the hidden governor of taste, ambition, and output. She takes a feeling we’re trained to dismiss as laziness and reframes it as a kind of structural force - the metronome behind the creative life. The provocation is in the verbs: lead, directed, controlled. Creativity isn’t romantic inspiration arriving on cue; it’s a management problem. The artist becomes less a visionary than a strategist, constantly rerouting attention away from the dead zones of familiarity.
The subtext is slightly accusatory. If boredom “controls” you, then your work may be less self-expression than self-escape. That lands squarely in Sontag’s broader project: puncturing sentimental stories we tell about art and replacing them with bracing, almost clinical accounts of consciousness. In the mid-to-late 20th century, as mass media expanded and repetition became a cultural condition, boredom wasn’t just personal malaise; it was a byproduct of saturation. To live among endless images and recycled narratives is to become difficult to move - and therefore desperate to be moved.
Her line also anticipates the contemporary attention economy, where “avoiding boredom” has been industrialized into feeds, notifications, and constant novelty. Sontag’s twist is that the same impulse that makes people scroll can, in the right hands, make people make: boredom as pressure, boredom as propulsion. The warning is implicit: if you don’t consciously shape that pressure into art, someone else will happily sell you distraction instead.
The subtext is slightly accusatory. If boredom “controls” you, then your work may be less self-expression than self-escape. That lands squarely in Sontag’s broader project: puncturing sentimental stories we tell about art and replacing them with bracing, almost clinical accounts of consciousness. In the mid-to-late 20th century, as mass media expanded and repetition became a cultural condition, boredom wasn’t just personal malaise; it was a byproduct of saturation. To live among endless images and recycled narratives is to become difficult to move - and therefore desperate to be moved.
Her line also anticipates the contemporary attention economy, where “avoiding boredom” has been industrialized into feeds, notifications, and constant novelty. Sontag’s twist is that the same impulse that makes people scroll can, in the right hands, make people make: boredom as pressure, boredom as propulsion. The warning is implicit: if you don’t consciously shape that pressure into art, someone else will happily sell you distraction instead.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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