"The only good things coming out now are impressions of good things of the past."
I am still struggling with the fact that the 1990s are over. I know how that sounds. Every generation eventually discovers that the world which formed it has become somebody else’s historical aesthetic. Our ordinary surroundings become period details. The things we barely noticed acquire the strange dignity of objects in a museum. But something about this particular distance troubles me beyond the usual sadness of getting older. I keep returning to the possibility that what ended was a way of being alone with our minds. There were hours which had no obvious purpose, afternoons that refused to move, questions we could not immediately answer. We were bored. Often intensely, unpleasantly bored. And somewhere inside that experience, without anyone announcing its importance, we had to begin supplying something ourselves.
The internet made an extraordinary offer. Almost anything we wanted to know, hear or see could become available, eventually within seconds, wherever we happened to be. I understand the appeal because I feel it too. A forgotten piece of music can return to us. An obscure film can find its audience. Someone making strange, beautiful work in isolation can discover that there are people elsewhere who understand it. These are real gains, and any honest account has to include them. Yet I increasingly feel that the exchange was made without much thought about what unlimited availability would do to the person receiving it. We considered the inconvenience of having nothing to occupy us. We paid much less attention to what might grow in the absence of an occupation. The empty moment became a problem to solve, and we became very good at solving it before it could develop into anything else.
Boredom has a texture which is difficult to explain once you have acquired the habit of escaping it immediately. There is the first irritation, the sense that something ought to be happening. Then the search for something familiar to do. Beyond that, if the moment is allowed to continue, attention can begin to behave differently. A shadow becomes interesting. A sound from another room suggests a place. A thought you would normally dismiss starts connecting itself to something you saw days ago. None of this guarantees a work of art. Plenty of boredom remains boredom, and nobody should have to defend every idle afternoon by producing a novel at the end of it. But the possibility matters. An imagination needs occasions to become active without being handed its next object. If every small discomfort is answered by something already made, the impulse to make something has one fewer opportunity to arise.
Think of the difference between remembering a fictional world and looking it up. In memory, the world changes. You lose a detail and supply another. An image becomes entangled with a place you have visited; a piece of music acquires weather, colour, a whole landscape which was never present in its original setting. These inaccuracies can become beginnings. A child drawing a creature from memory may discover, through failing to reproduce it, a creature of their own. Immediate access allows us to correct the deviation before we have considered whether it is valuable. Of course artists need references, and access to them can deepen a practice enormously. What concerns me is the reflex by which every uncertainty now sends us outward. We have made it so easy to consult the original that we can forget to notice what our own minds have done with it. Some of what I value most about imagination happens during that unobserved alteration.
This is part of what I mean when I find myself thinking that nothing is being created anymore. Taken literally, the statement is unfair. People are making astonishing things, including things which could only exist because the internet exists. I would never want to erase their work to make my disappointment sound more complete. The feeling comes from encountering so much activity and so little room for anything to establish its own terms. A work appears and is immediately surrounded by explanations of what it resembles, who it is for, how it should be understood. There is a particular exhaustion in meeting something for the first time after apparently everyone has already decided what it means. Discovery becomes difficult when interpretation arrives ahead of the experience. Even our surprise can feel scheduled. I want to encounter a work before I encounter the instructions for having an opinion about it.
I worry about what that atmosphere does to the person making it. An unfinished idea is often embarrassing. Its proportions are wrong; its language is borrowed; the part which makes it worth pursuing may be almost impossible to explain. It needs time in which its maker can misunderstand it, return to it and slowly recognise what is there. The expectation of continuous visibility puts pressure on that process. You begin imagining the response while the thing itself is barely formed. You anticipate the dismissal, the comparison, the question about why anyone should care. Eventually the imagined audience can enter so early that it starts making decisions on your behalf. Privacy matters here. There should be a portion of creative life which is allowed to look unpromising for a long time. Some ideas become interesting only after their most obvious version has been exhausted, and that is a difficult stage to reach if every version has to justify its existence in public.
Something similar can happen between people. A small group develops a sound or a sensibility through being together, sharing a place, getting things wrong in ways peculiar to them. Distance once gave such differences time to accumulate. It also excluded people, concealed wonderful work and left many of us feeling painfully alone, so I cannot simply wish those barriers back into place. Still, there is a cost when a fledgling culture becomes widely legible before it has had much chance to live. Once it has been named and displayed, its visible features can circulate more easily than the relationships which gave them meaning. Anyone can reproduce the look. Living inside the conditions that produced it is another matter. I think this helps explain why so much contemporary nostalgia feels strangely hollow. We can reconstruct a room from a particular decade with extraordinary accuracy while remaining unable to recreate the quality of attention someone brought into that room.
What troubles me is how often my excitement about a new artist takes the form of recognising an old world (e.g. Haute and Freddy with the 80s, Tame Impala with the 70s, C.W. Stoneking with the 30s). Influence has always belonged to art, but I want to feel it carrying us somewhere I cannot already name. We have become extraordinarily good at making the past sound new. I wonder what it would take to make the present sound like itself.
The 1990s had boredom, cruelty, bad art and commercial calculation. Childhood edits the past, and memory gives disproportionate weight to whatever first made us feel alive. I know that. But recognising nostalgia does not settle every question nostalgia raises. What I miss is the experience of an encounter remaining with us because there was no immediate replacement. A film could occupy the evening and continue occupying the next day. A game could become a private geography. An album could be heard often enough that its less obvious passages eventually became the reason we loved it. That depth is still available, but it now has to survive the constant invitation to move on. The next thing waits beside the present thing, already lit up, already asking. We have extraordinary access to culture and an environment which makes sustained contact with any one part of it surprisingly difficult.
The word convenience can make this sound smaller than it is. Saving a few seconds seems harmless. Taken individually, it usually is. But a life is also made of the seconds between things, and the character of those intervals affects the character of the whole. Waiting used to leave us somewhere. We had to look around, remain inside a feeling, or follow a thought further than we intended. Now waiting can be filled so completely that the place we are physically standing barely enters our experience. I find that disturbing because art depends, among other things, on noticing what does not arrive already marked as interesting. A particular expression. An awkward silence. The way late light alters a familiar wall. These things offer no guarantee that paying attention will be rewarded. They require a willingness to stay before we know what staying will give us.
There is also the uncomfortable question of what all our cultural knowledge becomes. It is possible to spend an evening reading about creative work, collecting references and discovering methods, then emerge with the feeling of having moved closer to making something. Sometimes we have. Sometimes we have simply postponed the vulnerable part with unusually convincing excuses. Beginning means accepting the limitations of what we can actually do today. The image in the mind has to become a drawing with an imperfect line. The imagined book has to become a sentence which can disappoint us. Online, there is always one more beautiful example to inspect before taking that risk. An endless supply of inspiration can become a very comfortable place in which never to begin. I suspect this is one of the losses hidden inside abundance: we can feel continuously involved in creativity while leaving our own creative decisions almost entirely untouched.
I do not think the answer is to turn boredom into another productivity technique. The thought of scheduling an empty hour solely to extract a better idea from it feels like carrying the same problem into a quieter room. Time should be allowed to pass without proving useful. There should be walks which generate no insight, drawings which are never shared, interests which do not become identities. That freedom matters even when nothing comes of it. It gives a person some experience of existing without an audience or a stream of instructions. For those of us who want to make things, it also allows preferences to emerge which we have not yet learnt to defend. We might discover that what holds our attention is unfashionable, difficult to explain or apparently insignificant. Staying with it for a while is how we find out whether it belongs to us.
Perhaps this is why I have trouble letting the 1990s recede into the distance. I am trying to understand how something as ordinary as having nothing to do could turn out to have been so valuable. We complained about it, welcomed its removal, then found ourselves surrounded by more things than we could ever experience and wondering why the future felt so familiar. I cannot prove that boredom would have given us a different culture. I can say that a culture needs people who have enough room to develop thoughts which have not already been supplied to them. We ought to be willing to protect that room, even when leaving it empty feels wasteful. Especially then. I want to be able to reach for something, find that it is not there, and remain with the absence long enough to imagine what might be. I want us to have the chance to miss something that nobody has made yet.
What haunts me is the 2026 we will never know: the music, the films, the entire ways of being that might have emerged had the internet never arrived. Somewhere in that impossible, alternate timeline, there is something I would have loved beyond words. I cannot even imagine what it is...
