The Phenomenology of Boredom: Insightful Creators Choose Solitude, Not Boredom

There was someone who started blogging around the same time I did. They wrote sharp, detailed analyses of athletes—performance breakdowns, tactics, small adjustments that change the game.

Then one day, the updates stopped. Two months. No new posts. Why did they quit? Maybe they got tired of writing with no indexing, no AdSense approval. Maybe writing into silence—no comments, no reactions—felt unbearably heavy. They didn’t stop because the content was boring. They stopped because they no longer felt connected to the world.

So the question is this: Why is it so hard to keep creating when you rely only on internal motivation?

Because producing insight means shifting perspective again and again. Seeing the same world, but from new angles. That sounds romantic. In reality, it’s exhausting.

People who keep producing insight usually stand at an angle to the world. Their vision is tilted. They are not fully inside the center. This is the key: To see differently, you must be positioned differently. People rooted in the center follow shared norms and standard paths. Their being becomes uniform— because that is the price of belonging. In socio-economic terms, the “center” often looks like this: Major University graduates + licensed elite careers. Meanwhile, the periphery looks very different:

Economically unstable individuals
Successful but unmarried adults
Thinkers like Kafka or Nietzsche
Outsiders experimenting with survival abroad (like me)
Artists who turn trauma into craft (Hemingway, Stephen King)

The margin is where forms multiply. Because there is no fixed template there. Outsiders reinterpret reality in ways the center does not. Those interpretations create niche worlds—alternative centers. When these worlds resonate, they influence the mainstream. That’s how culture expands. This was how Jazz or Hiphop created.

But here’s the problem: If everyone on the periphery lives with solitude, why do some keep creating, while others collapse into boredom? That is what this essay tries to answer. Using the Phenomenology of Boredom framework, we’ll separate two things that often get confused:

Solitude — the condition of being at the edge
Boredom — the collapse of meaning, narrative, and body

In conclusion, Solitude can fuel creation. Boredom kills it.

2. The Difference Between Solitude and Boredom

(1) Solitude — Existing on the Edge of the World

At the center of the world, people resemble one another. Their lives are stable, predictable, optimized around consensus. Solitude simply means this: you are positioned at the periphery.

Solitude does not automatically mean sadness, emptiness, or despair. Solitude itself is value-neutral. It can become many things. Some people in solitude feel lonely. Others know they are alone, but don’t suffer from it. Solitude allows diversity of being. Because you are not locked into a single life template.

Some people, driven by longing, try to enter the center. They follow procedures, rules, credentials—hoping to be accepted. Others reject that structure entirely and try to build a world from scratch. Those who build their own world begin to bind together:

what they eat
what they wear
how they live
how they narrate it

into one coherent personal cosmology. That is how a worldview forms. That is how meaning is born. When others resonate with that worldview, communities appear. A club or A scene. And finally A cultural micro-planet. Sometimes, these influences grow strong enough to reshape the center itself.

So, under certain conditions, solitude becomes the seedbed of creativity. We’ll define those conditions later.

(2) Boredom — Disconnection, Narrative Collapse, Loss of Embodied Body

Boredom feels like this:

“It doesn’t feel like I’m living my own life anymore.”, “The world has lost its meaning.”

This is not the same as solitude. We broke boredom into three perceptual failures:

Boredom	Description
1) Loss of world-connection	The world no longer responds to me.
2) Absence of narrative motion	Life no longer has events, arcs, or unfolding.
3) Loss of bodily control	When I cannot move, act, or choose rhythm.

Boredom is not a condition. It is a mode of perception. And it can happen even in the center. You are married. You have friends. You have money. And yet: “I live with someone, but I feel alone.” That is boredom, not solitude. It is a subjective perception that life feels meaningless.

Let’s take marriage as an example. Several things can slowly turn it into exhaustion:

Loss of world-connection

When communication breaks down—personality clashes, unresolved conflicts— and the shared world disappears.

Narrative collapse

When daily life loses events: visiting in-laws/parents, or going on regular outings with the children—that sustain the typical dramatic structure (beginning-climax-resolution) of marital life.

Loss of bodily control

When you can’t even choose your own rhythm: no soccer, no beer, no quiet. Only chores, schedules, obligations, now—immediately.

When all three combine, boredom appears. And boredom always seeks escape:

Gambling.
Alcohol.
Affairs.
Games.
Compulsions.

Anything that makes the body feel alive again. When this continues, depression is not far behind. That’s why philosophers took boredom seriously. Boredom drains the energy needed to create meaning. Before it kills productivity, it kills the will to try.

(3) The Relationship Between Solitude and Boredom

So—can solitude and boredom ever be connected? Yes. And the connection is paradoxical. The content created by the solitary is what soothes the boredom of others.

Why? Those trapped in boredom long to find meaning in life, but they lack the ability or the circumstances to do so. They desperately yearn for other possibilities in life, crying out for a different perception. It is through the horizon of perception offered by creators who have chosen solitude that they finally step into a new world.

A solitary person stands at the edge of the world. They think differently, and see things differently. Some try to build meaning there for oneself. To do that, they reinterpret their experience and translate it into forms the center can understand. These people become creators. Artists. Writers.

But raw feeling alone is not enough. If you only spill emotion with no translation, most of the world will call you unstable. So the work must be communicable.

(4) Then what does communicable form look like?

It doesn’t have to be perfect like Bach, or classical like Michelangelo. To achieve that, creators must take: Concrete experience, Personal conflict, and translate them into something universal. We must leave room for readers to reinterpreting the work within the context of their own lives through abstraction, metaphor, and symbolism—just like an Impressionist painting.

Abstracting Experience

Stephen King’s The Shining is a perfect example. In the late 1970s, King projected his own: isolation, alcoholism, violent impulses, fear of harming his family, into one closed space: the Overlook Hotel.

He translated:

urge to hurt loved ones while drunk → madness
obsession with writing → ghostly possession

Personal guilt became myth. Addiction became demonology. This takes perception change. And distance from mainstream values. If you want to see the world differently from others, you must first position yourself somewhere different. Art is the act of piercing through the essence of a phenomenon from a different angle — then expressing it in a way that others can understand through the lens of their own subjective experience.

Reconstructing Narrative

King then structured that anxiety into: a closed winter hotel, a storm that never ends. Then he let the protagonist unravel. Readers think: “If I were trapped that long, maybe the demon in me would wake too.”

When an artist constructs a narrative, what matters is building a symbolic system that integrates universal, archetypal structures with individual, microscopic experience — then weaving that into a story. This is what is known as a homologous structure (homology). King presents a sealed hotel and a snowstorm purely as symbols. The horror is felt by the reader themselves. How viscerally you make them feel it — that is the core of a creator’s craft. The point is simply this: show it, don’t say it, and make the reader feel it anyway.

3. Solitude Is the Creator’s Oldest Companion

So far, we have explored the difference between solitude and boredom. While it is clear that the solitude of being a peripheral existence serves as a driving force for creation, not everyone in solitude is creative to the same degree. How does one become a creator with genuine insight?

Creators experience solitude in three layers:

(1) Peripheral Existence

Those who ask real questions rarely stand at the center. The center is too coherent. Too confident. Too invested in its own grammar. Living at the boundary means living in tension—between wanting to belong and wanting to disobey. Hustle Spirit is the core of creativity. See the world differently from others. Give a F*k what you don’t like. Don’t conform.

That tension produces the first creative spark: “Why is the world arranged like this?”

Everything must begin with a question about the origin.

(2) Lack (The Necessary Imperfection)

Creation begins when something is missing : Money. Belonging. Identity. Direction. This is the same logic as wabi-sabi. Imperfection invites attention. It invites interpretation. It invites imagination.

A life that already feels complete has no reason to speak. A life that feels unfinished searches, narrates, and constructs meaning. Emptiness is not the enemy of creation. It is its preparation. Creation is the act of filling the gap. And the audience follows that attempt.

(3) Awakening

But not everyone who is lonely becomes a creator. When placed in the exact same solitary environment, why does one person become a creator while another sinks into boredom? I believe everything depends on the mindset of actively embracing pain and subjectively interpreting it. If you remain on the periphery yet continue to envy the center, unable to let go of its standards, there is no room for alternative interpretations. On the other hand, those who strive to build and complete their own world on the periphery become creators. If you pursue this consistently, you will suddenly experience a moment where a new window of perception flings open—a rupture in perception.

Taking my own experience as an example, it is a realization like, ‘Ah, everything I thought I knew was a lie.’ From that moment on, a human being begins to pour every ounce of their energy into pursuing what is genuinely real. A sense that “I cannot continue as before.” When the perceptual crust breaks, meaning erupts. I call this awakening. A tectonic shift in how the world appears. In East Asian cultures, this is sometimes described as:

“The spirit has entered.”

A moment when artistic or existential intensity overrides the normal self. Nietzsche said suffering sharpens perception. Mircea Eliade emphasized rituals and initiations as a means to enter a state of Awakening. Hayek, who was originally a socialist, experienced deep psychological shock and distress as he witnessed the rampant inflation in Austria at the time. This led him to convert into a liberal economist, eventually rising to prominence. Regardless, the paths are diverse. It may come as a sudden epiphany, or it may require years of devoted effort. However, the core truth is that one reaches that realm only through a painful experience—a process of pushing oneself into a state where survival is impossible without a complete shift in perception. Awakening must be lived.

Exile. Loss. Failure. Trauma. Pain. They must train in the periphery— in body, in perception, in daily endurance. To be blunt: it is hard to feel existential lack in a penthouse. There are no question marks there. Only continuation. No reason to fracture perception. No need for awakening.

4. Boredom Is the Enemy of Creation

If solitude is the friend of creativity, boredom is its enemy. To avoid collapsing into boredom during making contents, a creator must cultivate three key ethical attitudes.

(1) Make Your Worldview “Wearable” — Why Consistency Matter

The act of publishing with steady frequency is a struggle to introduce ‘narrative motion’ into one’s life and to reclaim ‘bodily control’. This beats boredom. Moreover, subscribers also place a high value on ‘consistency’.

They don’t need brilliance every time. They don’t need surprises. They don’t need perfection. What they need most is this feeling: “You’re still here.” Creators who endure allow their worldview to attach to the audience. Like a familiar pair of glasses. Like worn-in Levi’s jeans. Comfortable. Recognizable. Part of daily perception.

What “Consistency” Actually Means

Consistency has three layers:

Content consistency: Your themes, questions, worldview, tone.
Format consistency: How your work is structured and delivered.
Frequency consistency: How often you appear.

And among these, frequency matters the most.

Why? Quality is just the entrance gate. If the work sparks a smile, a nod, a moment of recognition— quality has done its job. Then repetition begins. At some point, the creator’s worldview becomes embodied. It becomes:

a lens
a habit
a comfort

Most people do not unsubscribe because one post was bad. They leave because the creator vanished. Just like you don’t stop visiting your neighborhood place because the soup was salty one day. A routine brand is emotionally expensive to replace. Familiarity creates inertia. And inertia is loyalty.

(2) Doubt the Conventional Wisdom

Without solitude, the perceptual engine dries up. In this way, choosing the solitude of remaining on the periphery, constantly questioning phenomena, and steadily exploring one’s own perspective prevents a creator from falling into the trap of boredom. This is because continuously challenging the world, developing a unique and defying narrative, and maintaining a high level of focus through physical management are the ultimate ways to reclaim ‘agency’.

The reason doubt is autonomous is that many people do not form their own logical judgments; instead, they ask for others’ opinions first, saying things like ‘Is this right?’ or ‘What do you think?’ They do this because the process of deep thinking is tedious, and they want to avoid taking responsibility for the outcome. However, creators must challenge this by asking, ‘Is this actually true?’—transforming ordinary interpretations into their own personal truth. This question demands verification through experience. That single shift builds the

Observe a phenomenon
Doubt it
Research and test
Learn something real
Turn that discovery into content

Now the reward is understanding. The context feels richer because the question touches both: objective process (How does this work?) + subjective truth (What did I actually experience?). Only when we question self-evident common sense and pursue our own truth does the world finally begin to speak to us again, restoring our ‘world-connection’.

(3) The Hardest Topic to Explore Is Yourself

The third ethical stance one must adopt to avoid falling into boredom during the creative process is to refine the most subjective feelings and thoughts into something universal. Many creators lose their original intent and begin to rely on external, ‘hot’ new issues to fuel their content. There are two main paths of good topics comes from.

Content That Introduces the External World

Travel guides. Product reviews. News commentary. Interviews. Restaurants. Trends. Academic summaries. Huge demand. But three serious problems:

High production cost: Time, travel, research, visuals, editing.
High competition: Everyone is chasing the same topics.
Dependence on external reward: Traffic, clicks, novelty.

This type of content delivers information, not meaning. Its job is to inform, not to transform. So when attention drops, motivation collapses. Sustainability then depends on: humor, charisma, editing skill, visuals, guests. Without those, burnout arrives fast.

Content That Refines My Original Thoughts and Interpretations into a Universal Context

Insight-driven content works differently. It connects: external phenomena, with internal lived experience. You still talk about society, economy, history, culture. But you interpret them through your own perception. This kind of content rarely becomes boring for the creator— because you are the material.

And here’s the irony: The self is the topic we know least about. We talk endlessly about the world. But rarely about how and why we experience it this way. The reason I repeatedly emphasize ‘doubt’ for the sake of this phenomenological inquiry is that the interpretive frameworks imposed by the state and society are far too rigid. When you feel that something is ‘shitty’ but feel unable to say so—that is precisely the point where doubt must begin. Something is clearly wrong, and there are undoubtedly others who feel the same way. You must grind down that raw emotion until it becomes something universal.

“But What About Growth? Demand? Traffic?”

When a creator is constantly obsessed with traffic and exposure, it implies three things:

They aren’t investing enough time to build an archive because their fixed costs are too high;
Their content is based on short-term trends rather than being evergreen;
Their perspective on creating content lacks originality.

Conversely, if you can maintain a low-cost structure while building an archive, focusing on evergreen topics with an original perspective, you should simply push forward. Time will take care of the rest. It takes a considerable amount of time for the algorithm to accurately identify your ‘identity.’

5. Conclusion

We have looked at the differences and relationships between loneliness and boredom. I have argued that creative work requires active solitude. Creativity is about:

the courage to remain at the periphery,
the honesty to acknowledge your own lack,
and the willingness to express what you have learned through your body and your life.

Hemingway lived war, fishing, bullfighting, love, and Cuba. He turned experience into form. His life was real. His novels were his life itself. And He had the skill to express that. To live in a way that is never boring—that is the creator’s task.

“Remain on the margins. Be Lonely. Feel the lack. Turn it into light.”

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1. Introduction