Consider the following comments on boredom.
Boredom is the desire for desires.
Leo Tolstoy
I reach for my phone the instant a moment threatens to be empty.
The boredom I keep escaping is often the door to the thing I actually need.
We have not become busier, only less able to sit with a quiet hour.
Some of my best ideas came from the afternoons I had nothing to do.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective approach treats boredom not as an enemy to be killed with stimulation but as a signal we have grown too anxious to read. Open with an honest scene, the reflex reach for a screen, the discomfort of an unfilled afternoon, and notice how quickly you flee it. Then hold two stances together: boredom as emptiness, a void that feels close to despair and demands to be filled, and boredom as fertile ground, the restlessness from which curiosity, imagination and self-knowledge can grow. A useful structural move contrasts the boredom you escape instantly with the rarer boredom you let yourself sit inside, and what each one gave you. Caution: resist the neat lesson that boredom is simply good for you, since some emptiness is real and not every quiet hour blooms into insight.