20 highlights
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Fundamentally, boredom is, as Tolstoy defined it, “a desire for desires.”
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Boredom, it’s become clear, has a history, a set of social determinants, and, in particular, a pungent association with modernity. Leisure was one precondition: enough people had to be free of the demands of subsistence to have time on their hands that required filling.
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Moreover, as the political scientist Erik Ringmar points out in his contribution to the “Boredom Studies Reader,” boredom often comes about when we are constrained to pay attention, and in modern, urban society there was simply so much more that human beings were expected to pay attention to—factory whistles, school bells, traffic signals, office rules, bureaucratic procedures, chalk-and-talk lectures. (Zoom meetings.)
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Though it was possible in the English language to be “a bore” in the eighteenth century, one of the first documented instances of the noun boredom’s being invoked to describe a subjective feeling did not appear until 1852, in Dickens’s “Bleak House,” afflicting the aptly named Lady Dedlock.
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Heidegger, one of the preeminent theorists of boredom, classified it into three kinds: the mundane boredom of, say, waiting for a train; a profound malaise he associated not with modernity or any specific experience but with the human condition itself; and an ineffable deficit of some unnameable something that sounds thoroughly familiar to us.
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One does find intimations of boredom long before its mid-nineteenth-century flowering. Seneca, in the first century, evoked taedium vitae, a mood akin to nausea, set off by contemplating the relentless cyclicality of life: “How long will things be the same? Surely I will be awake, I will sleep, I will be hungry, I will be cold, I will be hot. Is there no end? Do all things go in a circle?”
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Lars Svendsen writes in “A Philosophy of Boredom”; indeed, it was something of a “status symbol,” since it seemed to plague only “the upper echelons of society.”
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In recent years, something like boredom has been studied and documented in understimulated animals, which would seem to argue against its being an entirely social construction.
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The classicist Peter Toohey, in his book “Boredom: A Lively History,” offers a helpful resolution for the debate between those who say that boredom is a basic feature (or bug) of humanness and those who say that it’s a by-product of modernity. He argues that we need to distinguish between simple boredom—which people (and animals) have probably always experienced on occasion—and “existential boredom,” a sense of emptiness and alienation that extends beyond momentary mental weariness, and that perhaps did not come into many people’s emotional lexicon until the past couple of centuries, when philosophers, novelists, and social critics helped define it.
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Historically, the diagnosis of boredom has contained an element of social critique—often of life under capitalism.
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David Graeber, in his influential “bullshit jobs” thesis, argues that the vast expansion of administrative jobs—he cites, for example, “whole new industries,” such as financial services and telemarketing—means that “huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.”
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The psychologist Sandi Mann, in her 2016 book, “The Science of Boredom,” argues that “boredom is the ‘new’ stress”: a condition that people are reluctant to own up to, just as they once were hesitant to admit to stress, but may be doing so more.
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To confess that you are stressed implies that you are needed, busy, possibly quite important; to say that you are bored suggests—as it did when you were a child, and adults got exasperated if you kvetched about having nothing to do—that you lack imagination or initiative, or the good fortune of having a job that reflects your “passions.”
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Contemporary boredom researchers, for all their scales and graphs, do engage some of the same existential questions that had occupied philosophers and social critics. One camp contends that boredom stems from a deficit in meaning: we can’t sustain interest in what we’re doing when we don’t fundamentally care about what we’re doing. Another school of thought maintains that it’s a problem of attention: if a task is either too hard for us or too easy, concentration dissipates and the mind stalls.
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If an activity is both meaningful and engaging, you’re golden, and if it’s neither you’ve got a one-way ticket to dullsville.
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Danckert and Eastwood urge us to resist the temptation to “just kick back on the couch with a bag of chips” and instead to find activities that impart a sense of agency and reorient us toward our goals.
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Mann, in “The Science of Boredom,” makes worthwhile observations about two tactics that help people feel less bored while studying: listening to music and doodling. According to her, doodling (which also works in soporific meetings) “is actually a very clever strategy that our brains conjure up to allow us to get just the right level of extra stimulation we seek—but not too much that we are unable to keep an ear out for what is going on around us.”
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Wijnand Van Tilburg and Eric Igou, the leading research psychologists espousing the meaning-deficit theory of boredom, have conducted studies, for example, showing that induced boredom ratchets up people’s sense of group identity and their devaluation of “outgroups,” as well as heightening feelings of political partisanship.
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A study published in 2014, and later replicated in similar form, demonstrated how hard people can find it to sit alone in a room and just think, even for fifteen minutes or less. Two-thirds of the men and a quarter of the women opted to shock themselves rather than do nothing at all, even though they’d been allowed to test out how the shock felt earlier, and most said they’d pay money not to experience that particular sensation again.
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In a study that investigated emotional responses to the COVID-19 quarantine in Italy, people cited boredom as the second-most-negative aspect of being required to stay home, just after a lack of freedom and just before a lack of fresh air.