Bored

Absolute Zeitgeist—the open-source curatorial magazine exploring the themes and forces shaping our time—invited Joachim to guest curate and edit their second issue, published by our friends at LMNOP. The theme: Bored.

Exploring what it means to be bored in an age that relentlessly monetizes our attention, together with LMNOP and Martijn Ros, Joachim developed six distinct lenses to examine boredom from multiple perspectives. For which then Wisse Ankersmit, Jorn Bartelema, Mark Hinch and Christoph were invited to reflect on each of these lenses through original contributions.

The magazine is available for purchase [here]. Joachim’s introduction and Christoph’s essay are included below.

FORWORD
The Power and Necessity of Boredom in 2025

A Personal Note on Boredom
I can’t remember the last time I was bored. My days are carefully packed, like a game of Tetris—every idle moment filled, every trip and holiday meticulously planned. I like to be in control, to know what’s next, where we’re going, what we’re doing. It keeps things efficient and predictable. But working as guest curator on this issue of Zeitgeist, I’ve come to realise just how much I’ve been missing out. And maybe—even more provocatively—how boring this whole capitalist Tetris game actually is.

This issue is, in many ways, a confrontation with myself. It’s made me reconsider my relationship with boredom and what its absence really means—creatively, emotionally, and intellectually. I see now that boredom, in all its forms, is not just inevitable, but essential. Especially in an age of hyper-optimisation and the rise of AI, where machines can generate and automate so much, our uniquely human capacity to idle, reflect, and imagine might just be our greatest advantage.

Six Lenses of Boredom
Prompted by that realisation, we decided to explore boredom through six interwoven lenses—each revealing a different facet of how it shapes our lives today. These perspectives don’t stand alone; they form a composite portrait of boredom in our culture, our habits, and our technology—deeply embedded in the zeitgeist.

We looked at how boredom can be something we deliberately choose (as a verb): a conscious slowing down, a pause we allow ourselves to create space for something new. At other times, we find ourselves at its mercy (as a victim), caught in a restlessness that signals misalignment or emotional fatigue. Then there are those moments when boredom becomes something we actively seek (as a state), a rare and necessary emptiness in a world overflowing with input. Increasingly, boredom is also emerging as a form of quiet resistance (as a movement)—a rejection of burnout culture, a refusal to be constantly optimised. At the same time, we acknowledged how, for some, boredom is a fleeting luxury (as a privilege), while for others it’s virtually unthinkable in the constant noise of daily survival (the absence of boredom).

These six lenses largely emerged from the relatively safe, creative space we work in. We’re aware there are forms of boredom that are far more destructive—mentally wearing, socially destabilising, and emotionally numbing. Boredom that isolates and disempowers. In this issue, we chose to focus on our own lived experience—and we acknowledge that it comes from a limited, and often privileged, point of view.

Taken together, these perspectives remind us that boredom isn’t one thing. It’s a spectrum, a signal, a space. And maybe—just maybe—it’s something we all need a little more of.

A More Interesting Life
Ultimately, the value of boredom lies in its power to make us more interesting people. When we embrace boredom, we become more attuned to our inner lives. We cultivate curiosity, imagination, and depth. We learn to find beauty in stillness, joy in creation, and meaning in the mundane. In a world that often feels overwhelming and superficial, boredom offers a path to authenticity—a way to reconnect with ourselves and the world around us.

In 2025, as we navigate the complexities of a hyperconnected, overstimulated society, boredom is not a relic of the past—it’s a resource for the future. It reminds us that sometimes, the most important thing we can do is nothing at all. By carving out space for boredom, we unlock the infinite potential of our own minds—and with it, new forms of creativity, resilience, and meaning.

Thank you to all the incredible creatives, artists, writers, thinkers, and contributors from around the world who added their voices, images, ideas, and imagination to this issue of Zeitgeist. Your boredom has become our inspiration.

— Joachim Baan

INTO THE NOISE
(OBSERVATIONS ON THE ABSENCE OF BOREDOM)

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, boredom has been systematically eradicated. With soma, the perfect happiness drug, citizens are kept in a state of constant stimulation and contentment. Pain, longing, introspection—those volatile, deeply human things—have been swapped out for pleasure on demand. What’s lost, of course, isn’t just suffering, but the very structure that allows for growth, resistance, and any meaningful sense of self.

Our current world increasingly resembles Brave New World—not through pills, but through platforms. These algorithmic (social) media are our digital soma—offering us bite-sized joy, fed through a straw. Infinite doomscrolls, sequenced dopamine, curated glimpses of other people’s performative shiny moments. It doesn’t just entertain—it anesthetizes. It wraps your brain in bubble wrap and hums a catchy little tune—something you’ve heard before, but you can’t remember when and where—while your deeper thoughts simply evaporate.

This is the world that the great Adam Curtis describes in HyperNormalisation: a society where everything is so mediated and so complicated that we stop seeing the seams. We live in a blur of carefully constructed content—endless news cycles, filtered “reality,” slick, glowing distractions. The illusion of stability becomes the truth we accept. It feels normal, even as it erodes our sense of agency and real connection. We keep scrolling because it’s what we’ve been trained to do. We’re told to look for meaning in each flickering image, but in the end, it’s just noise.

This noise, this constructed reality, is what one of my favourite writers and thinkers about contemporary culture, Kyle Chayka, calls the “filterworld”. In the filterworld, we exist in a bubble, an environment shaped entirely by an ever-growing web of invisible algorithms that govern our experience online. It’s not a random stream of information—it’s a curated, finely-tuned cascade of images, ideas, and advertisements designed to keep us engaged, distracted, and docile. Our every click is tracked, our every preference noted, creating a virtual world that reflects, reinforces, and often distorts our desires. We no longer stumble across ideas or faces by chance; instead, we’re guided through a maze of ever-more-precise inputs that deliver exactly what we think we want—or rather, what the algorithms know we want.

Joshua Citarella’s remarkable work on digital communities and ideological subcultures taps into a similar dynamic, researching deep into the context of the filterworld—the dark corners of our algorithmically-curated, digitized environment. Citarella highlights how social media platforms have not only become spaces for entertainment but have also created hyper-engaged, often polarized, ideological bubbles. These bubbles thrive on constant participation and performance, much like the panoptic system, where individuals are not only watching others but are also watched by others, especially within these digital communities.

In Citarella’s analysis, platforms encourage us to curate our identities—we are constantly presenting and editing versions of ourselves, knowing that others are observing, judging, and responding. Just like in the panopticon, we are self-policing. The performance of our identity becomes a constant feedback loop: we perform for likes, comments, and followers, constantly aware of our visibility. The gaze of the other—whether a community, an algorithm, or an audience—is internalized, shaping how we present ourselves. In effect, we become our own surveillants, continuously optimizing our digital presence.

And here, like a thread pulled through the fabric of our digital lives, The Godfather of Digital Thinking; Jean Baudrillard’s work emerges, intertwining the concepts of surveillance and the quiet dance of self-regulation. Baudrillard’s interpretation of Michel Foucault’s panopticon concept is crucial for understanding the dynamics at play in the digital world. It personally also reminds me of the Radboud University Nijmegen Library, that has (or maybe had at this point) a cafetaria above and between the two large reading halls, where I spent many study breaks with my dear friend Henk to observe the studying crowd and establish in what stage our hangover was in—but that is a completely different story.

Baudrillard describes how, in a society dominated by surveillance, individuals no longer need an external authority to regulate them. Instead, we internalize the gaze of the state, the institution, or the system that watches us. In a digital age, the algorithms themselves become this gaze, invisible yet omnipresent. They curate our experiences, nudging us toward certain behaviors, reactions, and thoughts. Much like the panopticon’s ability to manipulate behavior through constant surveillance, the filterworld manipulates behavior by constantly presenting us with controlled stimuli, pushing us toward predefined responses.

Citarella’s work on digital subcultures aligns with Baudrillard’s panopticon, despite being written in different stages of the digitalization process. Both theorists highlight how technology has turned us into self-surveilling beings. Citarella observes the fracturing of identity within online spaces and how individuals perform in ways that fit within narrow, algorithmically-defined niches. These digital spaces, powered by social media and its algorithms, function much like the panopticon, creating conditions in which individuals feel compelled to perform, conform, and be watched. The constant feedback loop of likes, follows, and shares reinforces this dynamic, just as the panopticon’s invisible gaze encourages self-regulation.

Even though Baudrillard’s reflections on the panopticon were written long before the age of social media, they feel remarkably prescient in this new digital context. The filterworld is not just a place where we consume content but also where we construct and project our identities for the world to see—constantly aware that we are being observed and evaluated. The space where individuals are “watched” becomes the space in which they watch themselves. This mirrors Baudrillard’s concept of self-regulation through surveillance, suggesting that even though these ideas come from different digital eras, their core observation remains startlingly similar: technology has restructured society to the point where we no longer need outside forces to control us. We do it to ourselves.

And yet, in this constant state of performance, we’ve quietly erased the conditions under which real thought might emerge. Because boredom—good, honest, uncomfortable boredom—is not failure. It’s a starting point. The slow atmosphere where half-ideas bump into each other and weird, beautiful things happen. It’s where existential questions seep through the cracks of everyday life. It’s where you stop asking “what should I post?” and start asking “what do I believe, truly?”

This space—the one where you don’t have to be anything or anyone—is vanishing. One estimate making the rounds claims that by 2030, 90% of online content could be generated by artificial intelligence. Nearly everything. Machine-fed, frictionless, soothing. Content incapable of challenging. Strictly created to charm. We’ll be cocooned in content. Gently suffocated by it. We are entering a world where content will be engineered to keep us at a constant state of consumption—or the anxiety that precedes it—constantly seeking validation without even realizing we’ve stopped creating.

Pop music, too, has become something entirely different today. What was once the domain of maturing counter-cultures and blooming niches is now drained of its energy as it is completely absorbed and commodified. Major festivals have become un-curated spectacles of different genres and styles, endless iterations of what was once novel, now flattened into a cycle of “album campaigns.” Hit songs, instead of reverberating with lasting influence, are reduced to brief sparks of global attention, consumed and discarded in rapid succession. Nothing sticks long enough to make real, lasting change. Pop culture has become a salesman of traction, instead of the potential mind-shifter it once was. Nothing stands out. It’s all noise.

But in this new reality, Citarella’s exploration of radicalization feels especially true. As we fill our digital worlds with distractions, we stop questioning how we got here. In the constant noise, the self is erased—not by some tyrannical force, but by our own increasing need to be fed. The radical fragmentation of communities online has eroded collective thinking, and it’s leaving us with little more than a series of hyper-individualized, emotionally charged bubbles. And most of us don’t even realize it’s happening.

Josh Harris, an early internet pioneer turned artist and creator of Quiet: We Live in Public, warned of a “fractured brain”—a state where the self is split between public performance and private interior, until even that private space is colonized by performance. His experiment in total surveillance eerily foreshadowed our present: a world where even solitude must be performed to feel real.

Adam Curtis, in his Can’t Get You Out of My Head, in similar fashion explores how the increasingly complicated and mediated world of the 21st century has similarly fractured our sense of self. Curtis suggests that the dizzying mix of media, political manipulation, and technological control has left us with a fractured and disillusioned psyche—unable to find our bearings amidst the noise. We’re pulled in so many different directions, unable to make sense of our reality, our identities, or even our thoughts, just as Harris warned: the fracture becomes not just an individual experience, but a collective one.

In this world, ironically so, prison may be the last refuge for reflection. Cut off from the constant noise of digital life, the incarcerated might inherit the last fragments of stillness. The one place the filterworld doesn’t completely influence. Their isolation may be the final, rare opportunity to experience boredom in its truest form—not curated or manipulated by an unseen algorithm. In that silence, free from the constant pressure to perform or consume, real thought might begin to stir again. The punishment becomes a blessing. While society at large is captured by invisible forces.

Huxley feared a world lulled into apathy by pleasure. But maybe, in a world so thoroughly distracted, so comfortably numb, we’ve lost something far worse: the ability to simply be. To exist without performing.

Boredom, long dismissed as a useless ache, now reveals itself as a radical act—a last, precious space where we don’t need to refine ourselves. We don’t need to prove we’re happy. We don’t need to be anyone but us.

So maybe the question isn’t anymore: how do we avoid boredom?
Maybe it’s: how do we save it?

Because in boredom, we might finally become real again—unfiltered, uncurated, not for the algorithm, not for the external gaze.

And in that silence, we might still find the universal truth of what it means to truly be.

— Christoph van Veghel