SWEET BOREDOM

Once upon a time there was no such thing as boredom. Before the mid-19th century, nothing was boring and no one was bored. Ever.
At least not in those terms. The word “boredom” was introduced into the English language only in those early decades of the Second Industrial Revolution. Life was obviously monotonous back then, too – imagine 14 hours of farm work per day, or endless tea-drinking with your socialite cousins – but monotony was then considered a normal part of life.
The risk of tedium really became an issue around the 1950s, when psychologists diagnosed boredom as an emotional condition that had to be cured with stimulation. Once we found a word for it, no one wanted it. Not until now.
These are among the intriguing details shared by professors Susan J. Matt and Luke Fernandez, who trace the history of American emotions in their profoundly non-boring book Bored, Angry, Lonely, Stupid: Changing Feelings about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter (Harvard University Press, 2019).
Today, boredum is trending, Magzines are quoting Friedrich Nietzche and recent psychological research, both of which deliver the same message: Boredom feeds creativity. Endless stimulation and phone-fiddling is an fact detrimental to our minds. If our eyes don’t get to stare at a wall/the sky/ the ocean every once in a while, our brain becomes dull.
If you count all the good ideas you’ve ever had in the shower and compare them to the brainstorms you’ve had while fiddling on your phone, you’re likely to undersign Nietzche’s theory.
Fernandez and Matt, for their part, suggest that people these days feel bored quite often, but it’s not the kind of old-school boredom that makes our thoughts and time fly. It’s something worse.
“Work is getting more repetitive. In the early 20th century, it was the assembly line workers who felt bored ar work. These days, white-collar workers are struggling as well, so they bring entertainment to work to make it more tolerable,” Fernandez summarises.
It seems that we are bored and entertained at the same time – an oxymoron not so long ago. Or was it? Fernandez and Matt quote research from the 1950s stating that people reportedly felt bored while watching TV, the go-to entertainment of that era.
Based on the research conducted by Fernandez and Matt, people are less willing to feel bored these days. A century ago, boredom was felt but not feared. It was only after people started to long for a new kind of emotional fulfilment that boredom became something to avoid.
“Today it (emotional fulfilment) means never being lonely, always being engaged and affirmed by others,” they write.
Our lives these days are a constant struggle to find emotional fulfilment. In that struggle, we have accepted that we need to working, developing ourselves, and interacting constantly. If we’re not, that means that we haven’t been able to land a demanding job, a lively circle of friends, a family or a hot date.
If we have a moment of idle time, placing ourselves at risk of potential boredom, something must be wrong with us. We keep ourselves busy instead.
“Some scholars differentiate between so-called micro-boredom and existential boredom.
Paradoxically, in our constant attempt to dispel moments of micro-boredom, we develop existential boredom,” Ferandez says.
This sounds like a daunting prospect. Something must be done about it! As we are living in the self-help era, here’s how: Once the problem has been identified, we ask for advice from an expert and try it at home.
On this occasion, let’s ask a French author, Anais Vanel plunged head-first into moments of so-called idle time. Her autobiographical novel, Tout quitter (Flammarion, 2019), means “leave it all behind” in French. And that’s exactly what Vanel did in 2017.
She quit her job in a Parisian publishing house, left her Haussmannian apartment, the parties, the terraces, and most of her belongings, and moved to a small town on the southeat coast of France known for its pine trees, surf and sandy beaches. She knew no one there.
“I wanted to cut off all that was keeping me busy to see what emerges from the silence. I needed to discover who I am without my job, friends, and city life,” she says.
In her book, Vanel describes her transformation in brief, powerfully dense sentences.
“I have a thousand and one shades of blue. Fire. I have sunsets over the ocean, Medusas, Weevers, Octopuses. I have time. I have long afternoons for exploring. long mornings for introspection. I have a board. I have waves.”
What Vanel had was plenty of time on her hands, and not many premediated plans to fill it. She lived both the modern dream(the surfboard, the novel that came out of it), and the modern nightmare (nothing to distract you from your own thoughts).
“I spent time alone to truly feel my emotions. At first, it was peaceful, but it changed soon. When you have time, you inevitably face all the wounds inside you,” Vanel says.
Vanel, for her part, put some of that pain in her book, right next to celebrating the everyday pleasures of listening to beach sounds, sitting on a bench, chopping vegetables, and taking a nap. The story has a day-dreamy structure, interlinking observations about the past and the present.
“As an adult, you feel the need to fill up your time. You schedule your work and plan your free time. I searched for a different rhythm and now I am present wherever I am,” writes Vanel.
Maybe it’s ultimately not boredom that feels personal creativity. Maybe it’s the ability to live in the moment and let moments take shape as they will – even if it’s not always pleasant for us. Maybe all it takes is, every now and then, to be utterly and boringly stuck with our own daydreams and nightmares.
“Idle moments can be as meaningful as full moments,” professor Matt points out, with the historical insight of someone who has closely studied 150 years of reverie.