18 Minutes Later: How Boredom and Scrolling Shape Creativity

The creative process is often filled with a lot of nothingness. I’ll find myself glancing out the window, watching cars pass, listening to birds chirp to one another before they lift off and disappear—like they’re going somewhere important, like they already know. And I’m just here, waiting. Part of me is hoping for that moment an idea sparks—like inspiration will hit so hard I no longer have control over my body, my pencil will start to move by itself, and the only thing I can do is watch as the masterpiece unfolds. But that’s not reality. Most days it feels closer to boredom… though maybe boredom is the wrong word. What I feel is the vastness of empty space—quiet enough to scare me. In that stillness, the mind asks the questions it saves for when there is nowhere left to hide: Am I good enough? Is this all I have? Will anything new come? If it doesn’t—does my journey end here? At first, that vastness looks like emptiness. But I’m starting to realise it was never empty at all. It’s beaming with energy. I just haven’t been still long enough to see it.

Still, I don’t stay there easily. I escape. I sit down at my desk to write—the task is small and honest: take what’s in my head and place it on paper. A garment idea. A paragraph. A sketch that doesn’t need to be beautiful yet, only true. I solve one tiny sentence problem, feel that brief relief of progress, and my hand reaches for my phone like it has a mind of its own. Then I look up and it’s eighteen minutes later, with no memory of why I opened it. That’s the turning point for me—not the time, but the amnesia. The disappearance. I used to call it a break, told myself it was harmless, even deserved… but scrolling doesn’t rest me. It erases me. It cuts the day into fragments that never become anything whole.

Social media feeds the beast that only gets hungrier. The more you give it, the more it asks for. It doesn’t reward completion; it rewards repetition. It trains you to crave novelty over depth, motion over meaning—and the worst part is how reasonable it feels. Like you’re “staying connected.” Like you’re “keeping up.” Like you’re not falling behind. But disconnection feels like disappearance. It’s strange that not being updated can feel like not existing, as if relevance is a cord you have to keep tugging—proof you’re still in the room where the world is happening. So the empty space becomes frightening, not because it’s empty, but because it’s quiet enough for you to hear yourself.

I don’t think I lack ideas. I have them. I can feel them waiting behind the walls of my attention. But a garment can’t live in the head forever. It needs paper. Rough drafts. The ugly first version that exists only to be refined. The modern world teaches you to avoid that ugliness—to chase the feeling of being inspired while skipping the cost of beginning, to treat boredom as failure, something to fix with noise—so I started doing something small and severe: I put my phone out of reach. Not as punishment. Just to remove the easy exit. Just to make the room honest again.

And then I do something that sounds simple, but feels radical: I sit. Thirty minutes of silence. A meditative start. No demand to begin immediately. No pressure to produce a masterpiece on command. I let restlessness rise and pass. I let the mind complain. I let it reach outward and find nothing to grab. I begin when I need to, and I give myself permission to write rough drafts—to stop demanding perfection at every moment—because perfection can be another form of avoidance: a way to never start, a way to keep the work safely imaginary. The most beautiful dishes come from the messiest kitchen. And in that quiet, something returns. Boredom is not the enemy; it is the moment when my monkey brain stops working. In the pause, the world comes back in small details—my own voice, the sounds around me, my own feelings—until the room becomes a room again and the present becomes present.

When the feed goes quiet, the universe gets loud again—not loud like noise, loud like presence, loud like scale. The kind of loud that reminds you you’re alive, and that the world is not only what updates, but what remains. Only then can I do the real work: listen. I pick up fabric samples and feel them without rushing to decide what they should be. I let them tell me what they want to become—whether they connect to an existing idea I carry. I let the weight speak. I let the surface suggest a silhouette. I notice what kind of life the material wants to live. Craft, to me, is becoming quiet enough to hear what’s already there. And the moment I know an idea is real is when I can see it can become part of my customer’s process—his day, his work, his posture, his sense of dignity inside his own body—when it stops being a fantasy and becomes a responsibility.

I’m starting to understand that when I stand at the edge of boredom—when the vastness looks like emptiness—if I jump, I will not fall but fly.