Can Creativity Exist Without Boredom?

I travel roughly 2,000 kilometres a week for work. Sometimes, on the train, I put my phone away and sit with nothing. No book, no podcast, just the landscape moving past and strangers shifting through the carriage. On one of these journeys, my mind drifted to a photograph I’d never quite got right, a recreation of a shot from the opening credits of a TV series called Felicity, the main character standing beside an incoming metro train. From there it wandered to a conversation I’d had about composition, then to whether I should reshoot the frame on a different camera for more control. By the time I arrived, I had the seed of what eventually became this post. Taking the train to work None of that came from reading, research, or watching someone else’s video about creative inspiration; just from sitting there, unstimulated, while my brain went off and made something up. Boredom isn’t the source of creativity; creativity cannot exist without it. You need empty space. Ideas form in it,…