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1 month ago
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We’ve forgotten how to be bored, because we’re in constant search of the next big thing.
But the key to innovation lies hidden in plain sight, if only we knew how to return to it.
Tourism is easy. Homecoming takes patience.
It took Odysseus 10 years to return home. The journey home was just as epic—if not more so—than the battle again an external enemy.
Execution is heroic, but attention is saintly.
This is an essay about an older approach to innovation, one that sees it not as a break with tradition, but as a dynamic that unfolds through attending to the obvious until it becomes non-obvious.
The word “revolution” has undergone its own revolution. Originally, it meant what it still means in astronomy: a complete orbit, a return to the starting point. The planets revolve. The seasons revolve. But sometime during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, revolution came to mean its opposite—not a return but a rupture, not a cycle but a break. The French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and especially the Scientific Revolution marked not merely new discoveries but a new understanding of what discovery itself meant. We had discovered the possibility of radical breakthrough.
This linguistic shift reveals how fundamentally we’ve reframed time, progress, and human achievement. The old view, encoded in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, declared with weary certainty: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun” (1:9). For most of human history, this wasn’t pessimism—it was realism. Innovation crept slowly, almost imperceptibly. Each generation largely repeated the patterns of the one before. The farmer’s son became a farmer. The blacksmith’s daughter learned the forge.
But modernity promised perpetual novelty. And we’ve become intoxicated with it. Walk into any corporate boardroom and you’ll hear the mantra: if you’re not growing, you’re dying. This applies not just to revenue but to the nature of growth itself. Companies used to distinguish between maintenance capital expenditures—funds to keep the machinery running—and growth capital expenditures—investments in expansion. Maintenance was once considered sufficient, even virtuous. A business that reliably produced the same quality product year after year was deemed successful. Now, maintenance reads as failure. Growth isn’t enough either; we demand transformation. We expect each year’s iPhone to not just improve but revolutionize. We expect industries disrupted, business models reinvented, ourselves optimized.
Yet there’s an older wisdom tradition that preserves the memory of cyclical time, and it has something urgent to teach us. This week, Jews around the world will celebrate Simchat Torah, which marks the completion of the annual cycle of reading the Torah. On this holiday, the Torah scroll is rolled back to its beginning, and the community starts again with the same ancient words: “In the beginning...”
But here’s the paradox: each return to the beginning is meant to reveal something new. The rabbis understood that genuine insight comes not from chasing novelty but from returning again and again to the same text. We measure our years in recitations of “In the beginning.” Life is a matter of learning to begin again. Or as G.K. Chesterton says, God’s super-power is the ability to regard each day as if it were the first. We find this same tendency in children, who say “Do it again” over and over. In music, the of a phrase repetition is a key driver of aesthetic relief.
Take the Hebrew word mishna, which refers to the great compendium of Jewish oral law. The word derives from the root meaning “to repeat.” But that same root also gives us shinui—change. Repetition and change, bound together in a single word. Or take Rosh Hashana, literally “the head of the year”—a phrase suggesting cycles, the year coming around again. Yet Rosh Hashana shares its root with ma nishtana, “how is this different,” the question asked at the Passover seder. The language itself insists: return is never mere return. The cycle contains change. Change requires the cycle.
This tension between repetition and innovation isn’t a contradiction to be resolved but a dynamic to be inhabited. Repetition over long stretches of time has value—not flashcard memorization or rote learning, but daily prayer, annual return to the same holidays, lifelong engagement with the same foundational texts. This kind of repetition doesn’t dull the mind; it sharpens it. It teaches you that meaning isn’t exhausted at first glance.
The poet Ezra Pound famously commanded: “Make it new.” There’s power in that imperative, that hunger for innovation. But there’s another kind of making, captured in the Hebrew phrase chadesh yameinu k’kedem—”renew our days as of old” (Lamentations 5:21). Not make it new, but renew it. Not invention but restoration. Not creating from nothing but discovering what was always there, now seen freshly.
We need this wisdom especially now, in an age when artificial intelligence has made certain forms of creativity almost trivially cheap. You can generate an essay, an image, a piece of music in seconds. Novelty is abundant. But the idea of creating something you’ll return to again and again—something with reread value—remains underappreciated. The attention economy measures everything in immediate impact: views, clicks, engagement. The shelf life of content approaches zero. We produce and consume and scroll past, endlessly.
Except for certain works. The great books, we call them, though the category includes more than books—certain films, albums, works of art that somehow resist obsolescence. What makes them great isn’t primarily that they were innovative when they appeared, though many were. What makes them great is that people return to them. They repay rereading. They reveal more the second time, the tenth time, the hundredth time. They have depth.
Creating depth requires something that both creators and audiences are losing: patience. Not the patience to wait for loading screens, but the patience to look harder at things until they reveal themselves more deeply. Simone Weil wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” She understood attention as a kind of waiting—not passive but intensely active, a discipline of staying present to something until it opens itself to you. This often requires passing through what the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips calls the “fertile waiting” of boredom. You sit with a difficult poem, a challenging passage, a subtle painting, and at first you see nothing. The temptation is to move on, to find something more immediately stimulating. But if you stay—if you have the patience to stay—the thing begins to open.
Martin Heidegger distinguished between shallow boredom (waiting for a delayed train) and what he called “profound boredom”—the kind that makes time itself palpable, that forces us to confront our relationship to existence. This deeper boredom, uncomfortable as it is, can become the ground from which genuine thought emerges. Phillips argues that boredom in childhood is precisely the space where imagination and desire are born. When we eliminate boredom, we eliminate the conditions for creativity itself.
But we’re losing the ability to be bored in this generative way. We’ve optimized boredom out of existence. Every empty moment gets filled—with our phones, with content, with stimulation. And artificial intelligence, by bringing the cost of creation to zero, threatens to eliminate even those last islands of productive boredom where we might sit with something and let it slowly reveal itself.
The irony cuts deep: in our rush toward perpetual innovation, we’re losing the very condition that makes genuine innovation possible. The breakthrough often comes not from chasing the new but from returning to what we thought we already knew and seeing it again, differently.
The revolution we need isn’t another radical break but a capacity for repetition over days, weeks, months, years, decades, and generations.
