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Boredom

Cheryl Fok searches for the source, and its relief.

Our instinctive attitude towards boredom is one of aversion. We tend to think of boredom as categorically undesirable. At best, boredom is unpleasant; at worst, it’s psychologically and physically painful. It’s no coincidence that intense, prolonged boredom is a device for punishment and torture. Practices such as solitary confinement, which deprive individuals of sensory stimulation and human interaction for long periods of time, can cause lasting psychological damage to their victims.

Everyday boredom is much less extreme. Yet despite the trivial way in which we think of our own episodes of boredom (“I’m just bored”), boredom, or more specifically, the avoidance of boredom, shapes our lives in drastic ways. People choose careers, friends, and spouses based on what most interests them – that is, on what will produce the least amount of boredom. We devote our spare time to hobbies and entertainment to compensate for the boredom accumulated in the week’s drudgeries. In fact, we have become so adept at manoeuvring around boredom that, most of the time, we avoid it before it can even arise. Each of us has virtually infinite access to countless distractions and diversions we may mobilize at any moment when boredom starts creeping up on us. It would not be an understatement, then, to say that many people organize their lives around evading boredom. We are, in short, boredom-minimizers.

We don’t just avoid being bored, though; we also avoid thinking about boredom – something I hope to change that now.

Madame Bovary being bored
Madame Bovary By Eugène Michel Joseph Abot 1885

What Makes Something Boring?

It’s sometimes taken for granted that ‘being boring’ is an objective quality: that there are certain features of things and situations that make them boring. Upon closer examination, however, boredom proves to be more difficult to pin down. For instance, boredom crops up in all sorts of everyday situations – yet we can easily imagine counter-scenarios that have identical features but aren’t boring. We might think boredom comes from sheer inactivity or lack of stimulation – say, when, during a prolonged wait at the doctor’s office, you realize you’ve forgotten to bring the book that was supposed to keep you preoccupied. But someone in the exact same waiting room could find themselves daydreaming, or lost in thought, and not be bored. Or perhaps boredom arises in the midst of a mundane, repetitive activity – such as performing the same action over and over again on an assembly line. But there are plenty of repetitive hobbies that people enjoy, such as paint-by-numbers or jigsaw puzzles. We might even look to boredom’s fictional varieties – such as when Madame Bovary’s titular protagonist grows despaired at the monotony of provincial life. Is her boredom solely the product of her circumstances? Surely not, as not all women in similar circumstances react the same way.

If the objective features of typically ‘boring’ situations alone don’t guarantee boredom, then perhaps boredom is subjective. So what causes it?

What seemingly unites all cases of boredom is a desire to get out of boredom: it’s a motivation to un-bore oneself. The feeling of boredom, then, implies the feeling of wanting to stop being bored. In light of this, one might surmise that boredom is fundamentally about meaninglessness: that a boring situation is an ongoing one that feels pointless. It doesn’t arouse our interest, hold our attention, or seem to contribute to our fulfilment in any way.

Indeed, this is exactly what the philosopher Lars Svendsen suggests. In his 2005 book A Philosophy of Boredom, he traces boredom back to the ‘introspective turn’ of eighteenth century Romanticism. Whereas traditionally, meaning in life revolved around participating in collective practices, for the Romantics, life became a quest for personal meaning. The consequence, as Svendsen puts it, is that we have become ‘addicted to meaning’ (p.30). And if boredom is the result of a lack of meaning, then a moment bored is a moment wasted. Not only is boredom unpleasant and even painful, it constitutes an existential failure to achieve life’s ultimate end, self-actualization.

Meaning and Boredom

While it undoubtedly is the case that we often experience boredom as the absence of meaning, there’s something Svendsen’s view can’t explain: what I call ‘self-imposed boredom’. Why do we still get bored even doing things that are meaningful to us, which we have freely chosen to do? For instance, imagine a person who has been looking forward to a vacation for weeks; yet when the long-awaited trip finally arrives, they find themselves decidedly bored. No-one forced them to go on holiday; it was done entirely of their own volition. Similarly, from my own life as an academic, I can’t count the number of times I’ve found the perfect book or article for my passion project, been excited to read it all week, then found myself bored by it after only a few pages. There might be lots of reasons for this: the book did not meet my expectations; I have trouble concentrating; it’s late at night and I’m fatigued… These might all play a part in exacerbating my boredom. But my point is this: even if none of these conditions hold, me being bored with the book is still both possible and intelligible. ‘Meaningfulness’, then, is no safeguard against boredom.

There are certainly factors that make a situation or event more likely to bore us: if we don’t care about it; if we find it uninteresting; if it’s repetitive or monotonous; if it’s too easy; if it’s too difficult; or if we’re simply tired. By the same token, there are opposite factors that make circumstances less likely to bore. But this doesn’t explain why even things that are personally meaningful and apparently deeply interesting to one are still perfectly capable of being boring. Another theory might be that even the most meaningful and interesting activities inevitably involve some boring elements, and this is just the price we pay for pursuing our passions. For example, even someone who loves cooking will still have to endure the more boring parts of that activity, such as prepping, waiting, and cleaning.

Still, I don’t think this accurately captures our experience of boredom. The bored vacationgoer isn’t only bored during the slightly tedious interstices that come with being on holiday – travelling between destinations, packing suitcases before going home – but otherwise having a blast. They are bored with being on holiday, precisely when they’re supposed not to be bored.

If anything, I find I’m even more acutely bored when the cause of my boredom is self-imposed. When the cause of my boredom is an externally imposed demand, the unpleasantness of the situation is easy to explain: “This is a waste of my time”; “I would rather be doing something else”; “I’m only doing this because I have to”. The real problem arises when there’s nothing I would rather be doing, when there’s nothing making me do something except my own choice. If even then I’m still bored, then I have no-one to blame but myself – or so we tend to think. As a result, it’s not unusual to feel a deep sense of guilt over our own boredom in these situations.

A Case of Normative Delinquency

The philosopher Cheshire Calhoun has a solution to the puzzle of self-imposed boredom. If boredom were really always about meaninglessness, then we would predict that bored people would seek out meaningful activities to remedy their boredom. But, as she rightly observes, this is not the case. If anything, we see the exact opposite: people often turn to even more meaningless activities when they are bored. If meaning were truly the antidote to boredom, it would not be unusual to see bored people procrastinating their ‘meaningless’ tasks by exercising, creating art, or spending quality time with friends. Yet this is almost never the case. Calhoun herself describes a graduate student who, bored with her dissertation, would spend hours reading and posting on inane chat groups (a trending version of this would be ‘doomscrolling’, but the structure of the behavior is the same). Though she’s fully aware that this is an utterly meaningless waste of time and that she’d get much more out of reading a book, it’s almost as if she can’t bring herself to do something more meaningful.

The idea is that when we procrastinate something we’re supposed to do, we tend to procrastinate using meaningless, unproductive activities rather than meaningful, productive ones. Calhoun calls this ‘normative delinquency’ (see ‘Living with Boredom’, Sophia 50 (2), 2011). She says that boredom tends to emerge in “contexts of normative constraint” – that is, in situations where there’s something we should be doing and a way we should be doing it. This ‘should’ can be externally or internally imposed: “I should turn in my paper by the deadline” or “I should keep up with the daily journaling goals I’ve set myself.” As soon as the ‘should’ enters the picture, boredom becomes possible. The reason these situations make boredom possible, Calhoun argues, is because boredom is the desire to escape this normative constraint. When we spend too much time under the yoke of the ‘should’, we crave ‘normative freedom’ – we want to shake off those constraints, and liberate ourselves from the ‘should’. Normative delinquents satisfy this craving by resisting those constraints. This can involve not only removing oneself from the constraining situation, but also engaging in activities that specifically violate those constraints, such as doomscrolling rather than reading a textbook. Because it is so utterly meaningless, doomscrolling, though deeply unsatisfying in other ways, at least gives us the normative satisfaction of being free of the ‘should’. We are never ‘supposed’ to be doomscrolling, and there’s no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ way to doomscroll, so doomscrolling never exerts any normative pressure on us. (One may point out that doomscrolling is most often experienced as boring – but attempts to flee boredom frequently are, themselves, boring – perhaps because they are purposely meaningless.)

When we’re bored in Calhoun’s way, we don’t just want to be rid of a particular set of normative constraints; we want to be rid of normative constraints entirely. This is why we don’t move from one ‘should’ to another to relieve boredom. It is why, when we procrastinate an impending deadline, our first instinct is not to go for a run. As Calhoun interprets the bored grad student, “Reading a good but wrong book would violate the normative claim that chains her to her dissertation; reading something totally non-educational and utterly inane violates it better” (Ibid). Put simply, one rebels against the ‘should’ by indulging in the ‘should not’.

This rebellion against the ‘should’, then, is why boredom compels us to normative delinquency rather than meaningful, productive activities. It’s because here, boredom is not a meaning problem but a normativity problem. And any situation that creates normative pressure – be it the most meaningful, or utterly meaningless – has the ability to bore. So, if this boredom is painful, then it is a uniquely normative pain.

In my experience, the pain of boredom is neither a sharp sting nor a dull ache, but rather, it’s strain. Moreover, boredom intensifies over time. Each boring moment makes the next one even more so, until our boredom reaches a pinnacle so intolerable that we’re compelled to distract ourselves – to do anything other than what we should be doing. This explains why diverting our attention from a boring task often takes the form of relief. Distraction from boredom feels like releasing a pressure valve that eases, however temporarily, the buildup of normative tension.

Calhoun’s idea helps us understand many of the puzzling aspects of boredom. It can explain why people can find themselves bored in almost any situation, even leisurely or ostensibly meaningful ones: “I’m on vacation, I’m supposed to be relaxing”; “I’m in college pursuing my dream, I should be making the most of this opportunity.” Once a situation acquires this structure – having a way things are ‘supposed’ to be – then we become susceptible to boredom. This also makes sense of why many activities that, by all rights, should be abjectly dull can actually be deeply enjoyable, even fulfilling. Many of us indulge in trivial hobbies that are essentially meaningless and involve some degree of tedium or monotony, yet we happily subject ourselves to them nonetheless. For example, I enjoy crochet, an extremely repetitive activity that contributes no wider meaning to my life. Yet, I am rarely, if ever, bored while crocheting. This is no coincidence: it’s precisely because crochet is ‘meaningless’ – because it lacks that normative ‘should’ structure – that crochet does not, and cannot, bore me.

Why Do We Get Bored?

Why do we react to normative constraints in this way? For Calhoun, the answer to this question lies in the kinds of beings we are. We are what she calls ‘evaluators’ – entities that make judgments about the values of things.

It’s because we’re evaluators that we can experience the normative pressure of the ‘should’ at all. The squirrel doesn’t judge whether it ‘ought’ to eat the acorn; it simply does or doesn’t. Humans, on the other hand, are always making value judgments about what is worth doing, how it should be done, and whether it’s being done well or poorly. As a result, human experience is uniquely contoured by conditions of success and failure that guide our actions. But though humans are essentially evaluators, our evaluative capacities are finite. We not only have to decide what’s valuable and what’s not, we also have to pick and choose which valuable things we spend our limited time and energy upon. Deciding what is worth our time and energy itself takes time and energy, too. All of this evaluating puts us at risk of boredom because it inevitably sets us up for disappointment. When we judge something to be worth doing and choose to do it, we create expectations in advance for what doing it will be like. To return to my book example: the fact that I anticipated that the book would be deeply engaging and interesting only heightened my disappointment. This is why we end up in counterintuitive situations, like the bored vacationer: the things we expect to be the most engaging can often be the things that bore us most. By contrast, when we have low, or no, expectations for how something will engage us, we’re less likely to be bored by it.

Valuing Boredom

This might seem to be a bleak picture. If Calhoun is right that boredom is largely a problem of normativity, not of meaning, then the very fact that we are evaluators dooms us to inevitable boredom. If boredom were simply a problem of meaninglessness, then theoretically we could solve boredom just by finding the right meaning (hence Svendsen’s ‘meaning addiction’). But on Calhoun’s view, to escape self-imposed boredom would require nothing less than giving up on finding things valuable altogether. The only way to truly stop being bored, it appears, is to stop caring. So long as we care, we are cursed to be bored.

But I prefer a different outlook. When we stop thinking of boredom in terms of meaninglessness, we find quite the opposite: that boredom is evidence of meaning. It’s because things matter to us that we are vulnerable to self-imposed boredom. Put differently, the fact that we can find things meaningful at all is what makes boredom possible. To my mind, this realization relieves us of Svendsen’s diagnosis that we’re hopelessly ensnared in an endless pursuit of unattainable ultimate meaning. Nor do we need to feel guilty when we find ourselves bored while doing what we love most. That we continue to put ourselves in boredom’s way affirms us as meaning-seekers who persist in doing things we find valuable, even when they cause us pain.

Cheryl Fok is a PhD student in Philosophy at Loyola University in Chicago.