Hot Blood: Lack of fun and boredom are as big an enemy to individuals as anything

The Lovebox founder and Hot Blood DJ, Jools Butterfield, reflects on the erosion of compassion, the crisis facing 16‑ to‑24‑year‑olds and why boredom is a silent threat to mental health.

There are two main things on my mind at the moment. One is what’s going on with 16 to 24-year-olds from a professional point of view. The other is around compassion generally speaking in society at the moment, and the lack of it.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot. I heard the American actor and comedian Richard Kind talking about it the other day. He’s over in London doing The Producers, and he went on this little bit of a rant about the lack of compassion in society, and I was like, wow, because it’s something I’ve been talking about myself. He was saying that people think one person can’t really make a difference, but actually one person can make all the difference. If you start your day being more compassionate, even just a bit more than you normally would be, with the first few people you meet, there’s a very good chance those people are then going to pick that up and carry it on with the next people they meet. It spreads like a kind of happy virus.

I think about that quite a lot when you look at what’s going on around us. I live about a mile and a half from the Bell Hotel in Epping, which is where that whole anti-immigrant flags-on-poles situation happened last year. I drove past it more or less every day, and I was seeing the people out there and what they were doing, and I was thinking this isn’t right. This isn’t very good. 

There’s quite a lot of anger around at the moment, and you can feel it more broadly as well. It’s there in politics again in this country, and it’s fuelling nationalism. I understand people’s thoughts around reclaiming the flag, but most of those flags feel like they’re going up in anger rather than pride. They feel rooted in anger. It comes across as quite aggressive.

At the same time, there’s just not much pragmatism or diplomacy or understanding at the moment. People aren’t really taking the time to hear someone else’s point of view. Social media has been a big driver of that. Everyone’s got an opinion, everyone’s got a judgement, and cancellation is rife. People react rather than trying to understand and have a sensible discussion. The thing is, I do think you can have more of a positive effect on that as an individual than people realise, because you can increase compassion in society more than you think just by making that extra effort yourself. But it’s not something you can really sell to people. That doesn’t really work. You just have to do compassionate things.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that trying to change someone else’s level of compassion with your own is often quite a futile exercise. If someone isn’t particularly compassionate and you open up a lot and try to change them, they often don’t respond, and then you end up feeling even less compassionate than when you started. So it’s better just to lead with it, rather than try to change people. I had a conversation with my psychiatrist about this last year, and he said he’d been at a conference – his words, a “shrinks conference” – where they were talking about exactly this. He also said something else that really surprised me, which is that it’s getting more and more to the point whereby, if you’ve got enough cash, you can improve your mental health by buying your way out of trouble a bit. If you can get three holidays in a year, you’re probably going to be better than if you can’t. They’re quite stark messages, but sometimes it’s better to hear that kind of reality so you can try and improve the situation.

It’s quite difficult to expect compassion out of people if they’re not feeling particularly good themselves.

Because people are under quite a lot of pressure at the moment. Everything costs a fortune. Rents are astronomical, mortgages are astronomical, energy bills are astronomical. All of a sudden, people are having to really slam it just to keep up, and the knock-on effect of that is that people don’t have as much spare cash for fun. Lack of fun and boredom are as big an enemy to individuals as anything really. Any decent shrink would probably start with that. It affects relationships, and I know quite a lot of people at the moment, friends and family, who are struggling a bit. That has a knock-on effect on people's compassion, because they’re stressed and not feeling particularly good about life. It’s quite difficult to expect compassion out of people if they’re not feeling particularly good themselves.

That links quite directly into the other thing I’ve been thinking about, which is what’s going on with 16 to 24-year-olds. There are now over a million people in that age group who are not in employment, education or training. It was about 900,000 at the end of 2025 and it’s already gone over a million in the first quarter of 2026. Apparently there are about seven million people in that age group in the UK, so that’s about one in seven. If it keeps going up at that rate, that becomes one in six, then one in five, and that’s pretty high. I find that quite scary.

It feels like we’re ignoring a generation a bit at the moment, or certainly not doing enough for them. Part of it is the cost of living. It’s very hard for young people to leave home now. I’ve got a godson and a goddaughter who are 23 and 21, and they’re both still at home. When I was that age, I’d gone by 17 and never went back. That was just normal at the time, and there’s no way I’d be doing that now in the current circumstances. Part of it is that businesses are finding it harder to employ younger people. With rising costs, business rates and national insurance contributions, companies are going straight in at the middle and top end for the staff they need, and they’re less worried about bringing young people through. And part of it is that for some people, it just doesn’t feel worth it. They look at what they’d earn and what life would cost and think it doesn’t really give them a half decent life anyway, so they don’t make that step.

There’s also partly a problem with engagement. When I was younger, there were ‘scenes’. You had to go out, meet people, talk to people, get involved, and there was a certain level of investment from young people. Things didn’t just come and go. You actually had to put time and energy into it. Now it’s very different. I was managing Village Underground for a while, and we’d get artists selling out a 700-cap room off the back of five shows and TikTok, and you just think how is that even a thing. But their journey up is just as fast as their journey down. They come up quickly and then six months or a year later no one’s talking about them anymore. There’s no investment. It’s all very in the moment. It’s quick, it’s interesting, then it’s gone.

Because there’s no real scene for people at that age in the way there used to be, it means they’re less likely to go out and enjoy themselves in the same way. They’re not spending money, partly because they don’t have it, but also because there isn’t the same motivation. Covid didn’t help either, because it cut the roots of that development period for about 18 months, and I don’t think we’ve quite caught up with that yet. You can see it reflected in festival line-ups. A lot of festivals are being headlined by acts that were around 15 years ago, and that tells you something. The new talent isn’t coming through in the same way. It’s not that it isn’t there, it’s that the environment for it isn’t quite right. There’s just a lack of energy in it at the moment. It’s got a bit sanitised.

All of that feeds into each other. Pressure, lack of fun, lack of connection, lack of energy, and then a lack of compassion. You can’t fix all of that as an individual, but you can always do something small. If you want more compassion in society, you just have to do good things. Then others will follow.

Hot Blood will be performing at this year’s Lovebox, taking place in Margate’s Dreamland from 29-30 May. Find out more here.  

This conversation took place in April 2026 and has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.