The Sydney Morning Herald has a piece about Neil Gaiman’s search for boredom.

Neil Gaiman tried a novel New Year’s resolution last year: he took a four-month hiatus from social media to rediscover the joys of getting bored. It wasn’t a decision the feted writer made lightly; on Twitter alone his 2.3 million followers read his daily posts with insatiable zeal.

“The biggest problem with Twitter is that I’d be in a taxi and I’d be on Twitter and it would keep me interested. I realised I wasn’t getting bored enough and [that I needed to get bored] to start plotting things and coming up with ideas.” The spell provided time to go for walks, talk to his wife, singer Amanda Palmer, and just “breathe out”. Speaking from Boston this New Year’s Eve, he quips of warning his fans of a repeat exercise: “Nothing’s wrong, I’m just going off to be bored”, he says, laughing….

As he explains,

We [he and Palmer] both became who we are when we were teenagers. I was writing stories, she was writing songs. We did it to fill the empty space in our heads, the lack of connection. You were entertaining yourself, finding what you had to say and saying it. I’m concerned that it’s too easy for people to connect and be interested all the time these days. And that’s like breathing in.

But you also need the dead moments when you exhale and nothing’s coming in in order to stay alive. I hope today’s wired generation will learn to take its breaks and I especially hope our teenagers do too.