On Boredom

Medieval monks fought acedia, or sloth, while they chanted psalms for hours. Later, nineteenth-century philosophers sneered at ordinary people who found daily life boring. According to Nietzsche, “Is not life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?” According to Kierkegaard, “Boredom is the root of all evil—the despairing refusal to be ourselves.” And to Tolstoy, boredom is “the desire for desires.” (For Tolstoy, that’s bad.) More modern writers have taken snarky potshots at boredom, too.

For such thinkers, if we admit we’re bored, we’re admitting that our minds are lazy, unappreciative, and incurious. Worse, we’re admitting that we’re frightened of our own deepest selves. In this diagnosis, boredom arises from moral and spiritual failures. It’s our own fault. We’re just not brave or interesting enough.

There’s some truth in all this, as there usually is in striking epigrams. But mostly I say, bullsh*t.

Or, as John Berryman more elegantly puts in the opening lines of “Dream Song 14,”

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns.

we ourselves flash and yearn,

and moreover my mother told me as a boy

(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored

means you have no

Inner Resources.’

The speaker goes on to conclude that he must in fact have no inner resources because he is “heavy bored.” He’s bored by literature, “especially great literature,” by his friends, and by “valiant art, which bores me.” Even gin bores him.   

Doesn’t everybody know this mood? It usually doesn’t last long—for an hour here or there on an afternoon of unrelenting rain, during an interminable wait at the repair shop or the doctor’s office, while we’re put on hold for forty-five minutes and can’t hang up. Eventually we shrug and pull out a book to read. Such moments number among the minor irritations of life.

At other times, we’re in the middle of a big project—one that’s actually valuable to us—but are slogging through an unexciting phase of it. Maybe we’re memorizing vocabulary lists or conjugations so that we can someday speak a language. Or we’re attending a meeting where important things will be decided, but someone is droning on about a point we find nitpicky or irrelevant. Or we’re waiting for an airplane to take us somewhere exciting, proofreading a manuscript before we send it out, reading the fine print on a mortgage for a new home—or doing any other dull task we need to complete if we’re going to achieve a long-term goal.

Boredom can also strike when we run out of steam. We write, read, walk, talk to friends, work, volunteer—i.e., do interesting things—for hours. Then we get restless and want a change. By now it’s late afternoon and we’re a little fatigued. We’ve already gotten our exercise, yet it’s not quite time to make dinner or meet friends for cocktails. In the old days, some of us might have lit a cigarette and stared moodily out the window. Now we scroll through Facebook. (Or Instagram. Or Twitter. Or even the news). We’re not suffering from moral and existential blight; we just can’t summon the energy to start something else yet. We’re between things and briefly bored.

Luckily, since boredom is painful, it can also be a springboard to creating, inventing, or doing something new. Our unoccupied brains play around, and we think, Well, why the heck not? During these Covid-19 days, people have invented obstacle courses for their backyard squirrels and Rube Goldberg contraptions with their lawn equipment. Kids who get kicked off their screens may invent games with new rules, play pirates, or build cities in the woods. Some adults have been reduced to cleaning out closets (I’m one of them), so I’ll bet some novels are getting written, too.

In fact, finishing a novel practically requires boredom. In Greer’s Less, Arthur Less tries to escape a stalled novel and genuine heartbreak by traveling the globe. He hops from country to country, conference to retreat, hoping to outrun his unhappiness. Then he injures himself so badly that he’s forced to convalesce in an empty resort. In “his new white prison,” he passes weeks “in blank tedium, which turns out—finally—to be the perfect situation for Less, at last, to try to write.” By the time his leg heals, his novel is rewritten and ready to publish. His heartbreak gets cured, too, though I won’t spoil the conclusion by saying how.

I know that nonfiction is getting polished during these slow, hot days, because my friend Maddy spends her days editing. Songs are getting composed, too. My friend Ginny is writing them–as well as performing and publishing them. Recently, she wrote a song called “Dreamland (Capo 6)” about the challenges and rewards of this quiet summer. In her lyrics, she encourages us not to fight the boredom of the pandemic but instead let ourselves slide into it. She invites us to “Let boredom come, turn you inside out, pull you under, toss you about.”

Maybe the result will be what Robert Pirsig identifies as a natural consequence of boredom: “a period of great creativity.” May we all be so lucky.