"Boredom is the enemy of the attention economy. We have been taught to fear it."
Robert Macfarlane makes the case for boredom:
"I always wonder about the phrase 'paying attention.' It seems to bring attention into the capitalist economy: we pay attention, and in return, something is paid back to us."
"Maybe we give attention. That feels truer to the idea of unselfish and unselfing attention."
"We're in an attention fracking economy, which is always shattering and mining our attention for each monetizable unit."
"Boredom is an opening of possibility. It's when the mind starts to wander and starts to notice things that were latent in the painting or the landscape or the person."