Riots, shootings, sadism… blame it on the boredom of social media | Martha Gill

It’s a dangerous emotion that makes us crave drama, and one exacerbated by the modern world‘The age of boredom… has now passed”. So begins On Boredom, a 2021 essay collection that claims the likes of TikTok and YouTube have driven it to extinction. These days, “the time needed to be bored is no longer available”. This view, that boredom has been blotted out, is widely held – so much so that psychologists have started to worry that we have lost something