I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
After writing this draft, I was so enchanted with the idea of seeking boredom in 2026 that I turned it into a newsletter article on Greensborough Drive.
I’m keeping the original draft here as it represents my processing of Walter Benjamin’s idea of the “dream bird” of boredom that “hatches the egg of experience” and turning it into something a bit more organized.
We owe the cultural achievements of humanity—which include philosophy—to deep, contemplative attention. Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention. A rash change of focus between different tasks, sources of information, and processes characterizes this scattered mode of awareness. Since it also has a low tolerance for boredom, it does not admit the profound idleness that benefits the creative process. Walter Benjamin calls this deep boredom a “dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”
Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society
What does Han mean that culture depends upon deep, contemplative attention? He explains this by describing how dancing might have developed:
If a person experiences boredom while walking and has no tolerance for this state, he will move restlessly in fits and starts or go this way and that. However, someone with greater tolerance for boredom will recognize, after a while, that walking as such is what bores him. Consequently, he will be impelled to find a kind of movement that is entirely different. Running, or racing, does not yield a new gait. It is just accelerated walking. Dancing or gliding, however, represent entirely new forms of motion.
And dancing is not part of the achievement society:
Compared with linear walking, straight ahead, the convoluted movement of dancing represents a luxury; it escapes the achievement-principle entirely.
Han’s achievement-principle (Leistungsprinzip) is characterized by hyper-productivity, self-exploitation, and the logic of hustling. It is the invisible engine of modern life dictating that everything must have a purpose, a profit, or a measurable result.
In September, I wrote about Han’s promotion of the vita contemplativa, a life devoted to contemplation, one which seeks out deep boredom in order to escape the achievement society’s demands. I wrote that I was thinking of giving up browsing Reddit and Twitter, and Facebook and Instagram too. I did get off of Facebook and Instagram but still browe Reddit and Twitter when I’m looking for a quick buzz.
Now with the changing of the year, I’m considering that again. Sometimes you have to work at a change over time — trying it again and again until it sticks. I feel more ready for this now, having
Thinker and writer Walter Benjamin wrote about the “dream bird” of boredom in his essay “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” written in 1936 (PDF). While Han used Benjamin’s idea of this dream bird of boredom to provide an antidote to achievement society hustling, Benjamin was addressing something different: the loss of ability to assimilate stories because we no longer take on repetitive, manual tasks like weaving and spinning:
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places—the activities that are intimately associated with boredom—are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained. It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to. The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself. This, then, is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled. This is how today it is becoming unraveled at all its ends after being woven thousands of years ago in the ambience of the oldest forms of craftsmanship.
Benjamin launches the essay this way:
[The] art of storytelling is coming to an end. Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.
So to Benjamin, stories are for exchanging experiences.
The point he is making is this: a story becomes your own internal experience when you are relaxed enough to assimilate it rather than simply analyze it. Crafts like weaving and spinning put you in the necessary frame of mind for this.
How do Benjamin’s storytelling as exchange of experiences and Han’s cultural progress via contemplation relate to one another, aside from being linked by the dream bird of boredom?
Perhaps contemplative storytelling? That is what I’m doing here, and doing with my erstwhile Things Men Gave Me project. I contemplate and I tell stories. I suspect I’m better at the contemplation part than the storytelling, but the storytelling is just as important in making the ideas and theories and frameworks I come up with palatable and digestible.
And they are linked by the need to leave the achievement society behind, to focus on presence, rest, manual crafts.