“He has outsoar'd the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain” - Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Adonais”
“II en est un plus laid, plus méchant, plus immonde!
Quoiqu'il ne pousse ni grands gestes ni grands cris,
Il ferait volontiers de la terre un débris
Et dans un bâillement avalerait le monde;
C'est l'Ennui! L'oeil chargé d'un pleur involontaire,
II rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!” – Baudelaire, “Le Fleur Du Mal”
What is Boredom?
I feel a growing restlessness. Do you? Distraction reaches a fever pitch, flung from every corner of your awareness by the hand of marketers and propagandists. What is the most horrid fate one can endure? Surely it is boredom. The modern boogey man par excellence.
I have a few moments of space ‘twixt the demands of the day. Shall I simply sit quietly, alone with my thoughts and sensations? For some panoply of reasons and “admirable evasions” we moderns find the idea of actually just being nigh unbearable. So, the proverbial nine times out of ten, I produce my so-called “smart” phone from wherever it parasitically hides itself on my person and mindlessly scroll or peruse some soul-caustic drivel to drown out the thundering and violent space. But do we ever stop to think what this is doing to our minds and our souls? I mean really contemplate what’s going on here. I know there is some hustle-culture nonsense about the hit to our productivity and the all-hallowed “neuroscientific” consequences with some half-intelligent sounding claptrap about synapses (I’m not saying this phenomenon of suboptimal brain rewiring doesn’t happen, obviously there is a neurological correlate to all our thoughts and sensations. I’m no synapse-denier!). But what I mean is more on the spiritual level. Because like it or not you are a spiritual being, and all you do has metaphysical ramifications that are inadequately explained by the empirical sciences.
This is of course why we need philosophy. If we don’t consider the type of creature we are and what we are meant to be doing, someone else will provide us an answer that is likely not to our benefit. But I think philosophy should always be geared toward the human Good and have as its end some praxis. To make it less pretentious, we need to think about what we’re doing and why and what result it has on our only and precious life. And just as a brief and slightly eggheaded rebuttal to the materialists who think you can explain all this with atoms bouncing around in the form of neurochemicals: I’d invite anyone possessed of the idea that Reality is entirely understandable by empirical methods consider the fact that the supposition “only that which is empirically verifiable is True”, is not itself empirically verifiable and thus self-refuting and false. Cold materialism is based on an axiom that cannot be proven by its own methods.
That philosophical digression aside, what is going on when we are bored? What are the qualities of that experience? I’d argue they are manifold and I’m not attempting a comprehensive treatise here on the metaphysics of boredom. I merely want us to see it for what it is and offer a few thoughts on its purpose and how we might practice the Good Life in the face of it. To spoil the conclusion just a bit, I’ll say we can live the Good Life precisely because of boredom. For I believe it has a purpose in our lives and such a universal and perennial providence should not simply be disregarded as a pathology on the basis of whim, or addictive desire, or the word of some advertiser.
So, roughly speaking boredom is that state of being where we find our immediate experience uncomfortable and inadequate. We have no interest in anything happening or not happening around or in us. We crave some stimulation or exciting event to get our nervous system revved up just a little bit. We want some activity to engage in that we are not currently engaging in. We want to do something, anything. And this “anything” is the rub. We often experience boredom as psychological pain and we want to relieve it as fast as possible. And as anyone with even a passing education in marketing knows, what you really sell people is pain relief. In our natural, though not ideal, state we seek to avoid pain much more than any other drive. I want to say that I don’t consider this the unalterable fate of Man; we can develop virtue and character to an extent that we behave based on moral principle and Love more than we are compelled by pain avoidance. But the sad fact remains that most of us are to varying degrees propelled by our baser animal desires and the cessation of pain is the big one. And everyone proffering distraction for profit knows this. That is why you’ll not see an intelligent, nuanced, or enriching discussion of anything on TikTok or Twitter.
Stated plainly, material that is difficult to engage does not sell en masse. Which is fine, as the purpose of thought and art and such things is not chiefly commercial. I know full well for instance that if you’ve gotten this far in reading this essay, it’s not been a cakewalk. I’m not the brightest bulb in the box but I know some fancy words that I think express my ideas most precisely and I gave you a hopelessly pretentious big block of French poetry to start. I’ll translate the salient concepts for you when we get to it, but I’m trying to point out that, in this Age of Distraction, I understand reading this might feel like work. And it is. In the best sense though, which I’ll elucidate shortly. But keeping with the theme of me quoting Shelley, he said somewhere (my paraphrase) that the process of maturing has a lot to do with exchanging easy pleasures for more difficult ones. I hope to offer you a difficult pleasure in my work.
I Am Bored
I don’t want to give an impression that I’ve transcended the discomfort of boredom. I’m no guru and I detest the implication some give that they’ve figured a way out of what is surely an insoluble problem by design. Hell, I am bored right now which is largely the impetus for writing. At that is what I want to get at. See, we have a choice when boredom strikes and I think it can be fairly clearly boiled down to create or consume. However, those two terms have been seriously marred by internet “creator” culture and I don’t wish to come anywhere close to deeming “consumption” a universally bad endeavor. It must simply be done in the right way or with the right things. To quote an anonymous ancient Chinese maxim – "If the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way”. Consuming something which is inherently good is bad only if the motivation, the disposition of the heart and soul, is bad. The same goes for creation. “Create good, consume bad” is a facile interpretation. The basic heuristic is: “does this activity enrich and enlarge the human spirit or harm and diminish it?”. Living this out takes wisdom and discernment that we acquire with practice and life experience.
For instance, the hustle gurus will tell you that reading any kind of fiction is a waste because it doesn’t improve your economic prospects. Aside from this being patently false, it betrays an (we pray not hopeless) obsession with financial gain as the prime mover in human life. Even the worse, they opine, if it’s something like a sci-fi novel, the likes of which they often lump into the distraction category. And fair enough, there are books that fit this bill nicely and as such are to be avoided. But there is such a lack of nuance is broadly assigning these categories in pop culture as to make them entirely laughable to any sincere person. You can learn more about politics from reading Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” than from most popular writing on the subject. Of course I’d say if learning about politics is your motivation for reading that excellent novel perhaps you’re better off leaving it on the shelf. Do we listen to a symphony for purposes of “self-improvement”? I shudder.
I’d like to quote Viktor Frankl now. “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Don’t mistake this observation as some woo-woo “our thoughts create our reality” nonsense. Frankl isn’t talking about bending the world to our desires. He’s talking about how our view of our environment shapes our actions and the potential for free human action within it. And he’s talking about the nature of space.
A Meditation on Space
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.”
How do we think of space? I want to approach it from a sort of common sense perspective, not a technical philosophical angle or one based in physics. I’d say the best common definition and how we commonly think of it is: nothing. No thing. Or as Genesis says “void”. Space is the absence of something. Bear in mind as we go on that this section is not technical. We’ll veer soundly into metaphor and imagery, but that doesn’t mean there’s no truth to be had.
When we are bored there’s often that sensation of space. Nothing is happening. So far, so good. Where we go awry is viewing this as an inherently negative experience. Space simply is. It is a feature of Reality. What we do with it is the thing that matters. And who better to look to for a model than God himself? What does God do with space? He creates. I don’t wish to indicate that God felt some anxiety about the void. He is the perfect Creator and was not distressed at emptiness the way that we tend to be, but his actions show us the best disposition. That disposition can be stated as a basic metaphysical proposition: Something is better than nothing. God could have just left everything void. But he did not. He made the whole world instead of letting the space remain. We can learn from this.
So I think we can extrapolate that space is a prerequisite for creation. For there to be something there has to be nothing by foundational contrast. All things which exist have a beginning, except for God. Additionally, a large part of what it means to be “made in the image of God” is the power to create things. Space is a call to some action on our part and, as Dr. Frankl points out, how we respond to this call determines our freedom and our growth.
Which Way, Restless Man?
If we will leave our phones in our pockets long enough and the computer screen black, we’ll come face to face with space rather regularly. Without the constant escape we’ve become sadly accustomed to, it is our constant companion. And as I’ve hinted, we are now confronted with a choice. In the epigraph I quoted a stanza from Shelley that contains a phrase that hit me like a freight train some 15 years ago and hasn’t left my thoughts since. “That unrest which men miscall delight”. I’ve never before or since encountered such a penetrating description of our tech-driven distraction addiction than this. Of course distraction from what we ought to do has always existed in some form, but it has been ramped up past the point of all sanity in recent decades. We feel restless in unfilled space and so we rush to fill it with the “anything” I mentioned earlier. We tell ourselves that we’re having fun or that it is innocent enough but it is, if we be honest, simply a way that we increase our unrest and smile at each other and tell each other we are delighted. But did you really have fun? Did you really “recharge”? Or do we all make ourselves complicit in a grand cultural lie that leaves us even more bored, restless, and enervated than before we had dared to scroll? Of course I am being rhetorical and you can easily ascertain my opinion on the subject.
I spoke a moment ago of our perspective on space. The quotation from Baudelaire I gave speaks of ennui being a sort of demonic creature that would swallow the world and destroy it just for the dead-eyed hell of it. I’d like to take that as a functional definition for ennui and distinguish it from a more positive type of boredom I’m offering up. Ennui has a distinct connotation of justified discontent and fundamentally negative appraisal of Reality baked into it. It has angst. It is a type of suffering. And it often results in lashing out against the world we often find so unsatisfactory. But we have a choice in the matter when it comes to responding to dissatisfaction. This particular choice comes down to building up or tearing down. I think ennui leads almost inevitably to destruction of ourselves and the world around us, while it’s more ambiguous cousin boredom can drive us to contribute to the Good and Beauty in the world through the creative act.
Let us take as a given that it’s better to build up than to destroy. And that something is better than nothing. From here we can attempt to figure out the best way to deal with our boredom that doesn’t leave us and the world more broken than before we encountered that dreaded space.
First, Do Nothing
Getting down to the practical, the first thing we can do to help us is nothing. Just sit. When boredom strikes don’t think about how long it will last or what we can do to relieve the pressure. We should do our best not to react. Treat it as a meditative practice, for that’s essentially what it is. We want to actually prolong the space so that we have time and energy to actually respond creatively and intelligently and not in a frenzy of animal pain avoidance. This will be hard. I’m not convinced it will ever cease to be hard. But therein lies the meaning of boredom. That impulse to action must be channeled and we do well not to allow it to be co-opted by anything outside of ourselves.
When you first begin to practice this you’ll be bombarded by random thoughts and wild sensations about what you “should” be doing. I submit that this barrage is most likely to be entirely lies and garbage at the outset of our new practice. Bits of something your mom said, societal expectations, holdovers from school, weird daydreams, sensual desires, and sometimes utter nonsense. Do your best to ignore it and settle in to the space. We have to make friends with the pain. The greatest road cyclist who ever lived, Eddy Mercx, once said that the rider that wins is just the one who can stand the most pain. Skill is important, but if we aspire to great work we will need to get intimate with psychological pain. It’s a hopeless cliché at this point, but the Nietzschean maxim that “whatever does not kill me makes me stronger” is something to remember here. Boredom will not kill you. And it’s a fire that will refine our sensibilities and leave us with a well-tempered spirit if we can endure.
Through the Fire
If you’ll commit to the practice above for a little while (who can say how long? again, I’m no guru), you will find that genuine desires begin to crop up. You’ll start to understand what it is you actually want to do. Or stated even more strongly you will feel what you are authentically driven to do. The fire of intentionally prolonged boredom will yield the precious gold of who you actually are and what you are really meant to be doing. This will happen. I have complete faith in the process and I encourage you to hope for the same. But before we end our time together here, I want to clarify a bit what I’m talking about in terms of work and purpose and the like, so that we don’t get lost in delusions of grandeur or useless reverie.
A Word on Work and Meaning
I define work here as simply what you do to create something valuable.
We need to dig in though and try to overcome the terrible brainwashing on this subject we’ve been subjected to by modern culture. Value does not mean saleable. You can work to build a stable and loving family and that has infinite value that is literally without price. You can’t put a dollar value on it and it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks or says about it. A loving family (or a committed relationship of any kind) is intrinsically valuable and it takes work to create that value. We must absolutely and ruthlessly disabuse ourselves of the notion that value is something determined by economics or the amount of approving eyes upon it. That is “market value” and really only something you should be concerned with as a businessperson. Value is determined by philosophical and moral values as played out in actual human lives. And further, if you are the religious or even vaguely spiritual sort, please understand that the value of loving action in the world is of higher value to God and eternity than anything else you will do.
I’m saying this because you may encounter the temptation to hope that your time of embracing space will lead to the creation of our next great symphony or a masterwork of literature. If you have endeavored to build these skills and that is your true calling as spoken to you by that “still small voice”, then you have my undying support. But be prepared for the gentle disappointment that the answer that comes from the silence of boredom may be simply: “I need to figure out how to develop the discipline of being kinder to my children”. And if this is disappointing to you I submit that perhaps your vision of work and value is distorted and in need of rethinking. Not so coincidentally, Jesus’s call to “repent” is the Greek word μετάνοια (metanoia), which literally just means to change how you think. There are theological layers to the concept of course, but that’s essentially a direct translation. Even if you do write the Great American Novel, your loved ones aren’t going to talk about it in your eulogy.
Our Appointment with Life
I truly believe that we each have a unique calling and a unique potential contribution to the Good of our world. But I caution you (and myself, frankly) that this is potential only. If you don’t actualize it, no one else will and we are all impoverished thereby. And to be sober about it, we will go to our final resting place with regret if we don’t pursue this calling. But we should also take caution against the grandiose idea that we will be the next Shakespeare if we can just get off Twitter for an hour. If you love to write, pursue it with all your heart and pitilessly eliminate distraction. But there’s a fair chance you won’t be and that’s okay. A genuine passion coupled with commitment to skill acquisition absolutely will produce artistic work that is valuable, in the true sense (please don’t forget about the dedication to skill).
We also need to make room for the possibility that our calling and the cry of hearts is just moving to the countryside and running a small farm with our spouse. Or running a bricklaying company that focuses on quality craftsmanship and treating customers with dignity. Or being a damn good code writer. Or writing that bizarre fantasy novel you thought no one would like. Or starting a personal training consultancy. Or offering tutoring to sincere students who need help with math or English. Or getting really good at baking bread. Or just (gasp! not “consuming”!) reading a lot of great books.
Point is, I don’t know what you are called to do. I can’t tell you that. But if you take every moment of fertile space and let it make you dissatisfied with life and piss it way on cheap “entertainment”: you won’t know either. And this is a great tragedy.
There is something that life has in store for you. We should try to understand that boredom is a gateway to this Great Purpose for our life. There will be times of inspiration where we don’t need to sit in the fire of boredom. But by and large our creative potential will be realized through this refining flame.
I always wish to give you hope. And I pray that I’ve done that here. But I will leave you with a word of warning, and ask that you understand I say this to myself as much as to you:
Do not betray your destiny for 30 pieces of internet content.
In Praise of Boredom
Is good.