A Summary of the Book The Philosophy of Boredom

What is boredom? When does it arise? Why is it like this? Why do we fall prey to it? How does it overpower us? Why can’t we overcome it through willpower? What is the difference between boredom and depression? What is the difference between boredom and apathy?

Boredom is a phenomenon belonging to the era of modernity; boredom is the privilege of modern man. When we shattered the traditional structures of meaning, we constructed boredom. It is not unlikely that we are afflicted by boredom without knowing it, and sometimes this state overcomes us without our knowing the reason. Boredom is “pure erosion” that has an imperceptible effect and gradually turns the individual into a ruin that others do not understand, and in fact, the individual themselves does not understand either. Boredom is also inhuman, because it robs human life of meaning, or it is a manifestation of the fact that such meaning is absent.

Boredom is linked to the consumption of drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, eating disorders, sexual promiscuity, destructiveness, depression, aggression, violence, hostility, suicide, high-risk behaviors, and similar things, and statistics also confirm this connection.

Boredom is accompanied by a loss of meaning, and the loss of meaning is a serious problem for the one afflicted by it. Boredom ranges from sadness on the face to the loss of life’s meaning. We often tell someone who complains of boredom to pull themselves together, to appreciate their life, not to be weak, to look at people more wretched than themselves and be grateful, to see the glass half full, not to whine; but saying such things to a bored person is as correct as ordering a dwarf to increase their height.

Boredom is always a critical element because it expresses the idea that a specific situation or the whole of existence deeply dissatisfies us. The increase of boredom means that the society or culture that carries meaning suffers from a serious defect. We no longer suffer so much from anxiety, but are more afflicted by boredom. Or, in Heidegger’s words, “anxiety is no longer so anxiety-inducing, but boredom becomes more boring every day.”

Boredom and Time

Boredom is related to the way time is passed, and time, instead of being a horizon of opportunities, is something we must deceive. As Gadamer says, “When time passes, what really passes? Certainly it is not time that passes, and yet, what we want to pass is this same eternal, empty time that lasts too long and takes on the form of painful boredom.” When someone is afflicted by boredom, they do not know what to do with time, because it is precisely here that the individual’s abilities fade and no real opportunity presents itself. In boredom, the emptiness of time does not mean emptiness of action, for there is always something to fill the time, even if it is just watching paint dry. What is meant by the emptiness of time is emptiness of meaning.

The attempt to kill time is an attempt to ward off boredom or to find this or that thing, and basically anything that can attract our attention. When we are afflicted by boredom, we usually look at the clock, and this differs from shifting in a chair or looking around aimlessly, because looking at the clock is not just a diversion or occupation, but a sign of the desire to kill time, or more precisely, our inability to pass time, and thus it shows that “the more it passes, the more bored we become.” Looking at the clock is a sign of increasing boredom. We look at the clock and wish that time would pass faster than we feel it does.

The only reason for boredom is that everything has its own proper time. If nothing had a time, there would be no boredom. Therefore, boredom arises when there is a conflict between the time of the thing itself and the time in which we see that thing. This is a cautious answer to the question of the essence of boredom.

Kierkegaard, in describing boredom, says: “How terrible boredom is—and how boring; there is no word stronger or more real than boring to describe boredom, because everything can only be known by itself. If I could find a better and more powerful phrase for it, it would at least be a sign of change. I lie down on the ground without doing anything; the only thing I see is emptiness; my life is nothing but emptiness; the only thing I move in is emptiness. I do not even experience suffering.”

Boredom can even take away the desire to end one’s life. Boredom can be so fundamental that it cannot be overcome even by suicide; the only escape from boredom is something completely impossible, namely nothingness.

Boredom and Meaning

Most people, when faced with a loss of personal meaning, seek to create a substitute for meaning through various entertainments, that is, artificial meanings. The turn to entertainments precisely shows the fear of the great void that surrounds us. The more we pay attention to individual and everyday life, that is, the more we seek a way to escape boredom. Boredom is not related to real needs, but to desires, and this desire is the inclination for sensory stimuli. Stimuli are merely interesting. Our emphasis on authenticity and innovation shows how boring life is. Today, rather than emphasizing the value of something, we emphasize its interestingness. To look at something solely from the perspective of whether it is interesting or not means viewing it only from an aesthetic viewpoint. The aesthetic gaze stops only at the surface and judges this surface based on whether it is interesting or boring. But it should be noted that the aesthetic gaze also usually tends toward boredom because it defines the entire content of life in a negative way. Heidegger says that today only interesting things arouse our interest, and the interesting thing is precisely what seems indifferent or boring to us even a moment later.

The word boring is correlated with the word interesting; the two appeared almost simultaneously. There is a connection between interesting and boring, and to avoid “unbearable boredom,” life must be interesting. Everything that is interesting always has a short lifespan and its only real function is to be consumed to keep boredom at bay.

Boredom, Work, and Leisure

Boredom is related to contemplation, and contemplation means a tendency toward losing the world. Entertainment reduces contemplation, but it is always a transient phenomenon. Work is often less boring than entertainment, but those who consider work a cure for boredom mistake the temporary removal of symptoms for the treatment of the disease. The answer to the question of why people become bored cannot be sought solely in work or leisure. Boredom is not related to idleness, but to meaning.

Fernando Pessoa writes in The Book of Disquiet: “They say boredom is a disease of the idle, or that it only attacks those who have nothing to do. But this disease of the soul is actually more subtle than that: it attacks those who are predisposed to it, and those who work or pretend to work (which is the same as not working) are less able to escape this disease than those who are truly idle.

Nothing is worse than the contrast between the natural splendor of the inner life, with its natural inhabitants and undiscovered lands, and the squalor of the everyday routine of life (even when it is not really squalid). And boredom, when it is not an excuse for idleness, is more ruthless. The tedium of those who strive hard is the worst tedium.

Tedium is not the disease of boredom from idleness, but the more serious disease and the feeling that nothing is worth doing. This means that the more work there is, the more boredom the individual feels.”

Our entire day is divided between work and leisure; after work, which gives little meaning to life, comes leisure time, which is equally empty of meaning. Boredom is not a matter of work or leisure, but a matter of meaning.

The awareness of the boredom that sometimes seizes us after a pastime or leisure ends must be understood as an awareness of emptiness. Although, for example, the party was enjoyable and entertaining, it is completely empty. Heidegger says that the feeling of emptiness that appears in this deeper form of boredom is an emptiness left behind by our “authentic self.”

Boredom and Death

Chaos and violence are what bring a person back from boredom to life, awaken him, and give life a kind of meaning. We have an aesthetic inclination toward violence, and this aesthetic was clearly manifest in the anti-aestheticism of modernity and its focus on shocking and repulsive things. Morally, too, we are inclined toward violence and simultaneously wish to see its reduction.

Boredom makes most things appear as tempting substitutes, and we might imagine that what we really need is another catastrophic war. Nisbet believes that boredom can be catastrophic: “Boredom may become the greatest source of unhappiness for Western man. Catastrophe alone is the surest and, in our time, the most probable way of deliverance from boredom.” But the problem is that there is no reason to believe that those who survive catastrophe escape boredom. Yet for those who observe catastrophe from the outside, the catastrophe-stricken world seems a suitable substitute for boredom.

Boredom and Novelty

When we resort to everything new, we hope that the new thing can be individuating and give life an individual meaning; but every novelty quickly becomes old, and the promise of individual meaning is never fulfilled. Novelties always rapidly turn into the everyday, and then comes the turn of boredom with new things that are always the same, and the boredom of discovering that behind the false differences of various objects and thoughts, everything is unbearably identical.

We become major consumers of new things and new people in order to break the monotony of the sameness of things. Roland Barthes wrote in a somewhat enigmatic sentence: “Boredom is not far from desire: boredom is desire seen from the shore of pleasure.” In this sentence, pleasure means “the same,” while desire must be considered something beyond “the same,” located “outside” (transcendence). Boredom in its purest form is omnipresent; certainly its antidote is transcendence. But how is the presence of transcendence possible in an omnipresent existence; an omnipresent existence, moreover, that is made of nothing?

Boredom and the Philosophers

According to Pascal, man without God is condemned to boredom. In Pascal’s view, in the absence of a relationship with God, we turn to pleasures to forget our wretchedness, but diversion and the pursuit of pleasure are only a consolation for our miseries, yet at the same time they are also our greatest misery. Because attending to pleasures prevents us from thinking about the self. Pascal, in fact, subsumes all of man’s various activities under the overarching concept of “diversion.” Our entire life becomes a flight from life, which without God is essentially a boring nothingness. The attempt to escape boredom by resorting to diversion means escaping from reality and escaping from the nothingness of man.

Those who are afflicted by boredom know themselves better compared to those who seek diversion. In boredom, man is completely abandoned to himself, but this means being abandoned into the grip of nothingness and emptiness, since every relationship with anything else is lost. Hence, suffering may in some respects be better than boredom, because suffering is at least something.

According to Schopenhauer, if goals are not fulfilled, we suffer, and if they are realized, we are seized by boredom. Man, dissatisfied with the real world, creates an imaginary world for himself. All religions were born this way: an attempt to escape boredom.

In Romantic thought, the characteristic of boredom is not the indefinite and endless saturation of life, but rather that we do not know what we are looking for. According to Fichte, to avoid boredom, man reduces everything to entertainment or takes refuge in various forms of mysticism.

Heidegger, in explaining truly profound boredom, says that the deeper the boredom, the deeper its roots in the temporality that is the individual's self. In profound boredom, it is boredom itself that bores me; in other words, I become entirely habituated to boredom. Profound boredom bores us when we say, or know without saying, that something is boring to us. Heidegger's answer to the question of what causes our boredom is: boredom. It is not I who bores myself, nor you who bore yourself, but rather boredom that bores us. For such boredom, characteristics such as age, profession, and many other personal traits are irrelevant. Such boredom is beyond all of these. In the superficial form of boredom, the objects around us are boring, but in profound boredom, everything, even ourselves, ensnares us in boredom. How does boredom compel us to this? By depriving us of everything, by rendering it insignificant, so that we can find no foothold for ourselves anywhere. Things do not lose their significance one by one, but suddenly everything turns into total insignificance. Everything becomes insignificant and boring due to a lack of meaning. This insignificance also determines my characteristics. I become an empty, hollow "nobody," an experience made possible by my feeling of emptiness. In a sense, one can rightly claim that the one who is bored is nobody, or that boredom itself has become bored.

Boredom does not lead us to any deep and comprehensive understanding of the meaning of being, but it can tell us something about how we might truly spend our lives.

Boredom and Love

To cure boredom, people usually turn to common options such as work, entertainment, recreation, travel, fashion, artistic creation, sports, film, cigarettes, companionship with friends and family, sex, alcohol, music, and so on. Yet these very things, either in the moment or at most after they end, once again remind us of the emptiness of meaning. Some also turn to having children, God, and love.

Love bestows life and value anew upon the world and gives it a meaning beyond boredom. Some theories of love consider it an extension of divine kindness and grace, but if we turn a man or woman in our life into a substitute for God, have we not done them an injustice? This means we have assigned such individuals a role they cannot fulfill and have shirked our own responsibility in the face of boredom, delegating it to another person. It is difficult to consider exhausting love a worthy answer to the problem of boredom, because true love can never bear the burden of a complete life alone. Love, as long as we have not attained it, may perhaps suffice for this task, but as soon as we have seized it, it is no longer so.

Some recommended cures for boredom, such as art, having children, love, or a relationship with God, are things worth pursuing in themselves, and it is not fitting to reduce them merely to an escape from boredom.

The Ethics of Boredom

Boredom possesses a potential capacity. Boredom is accompanied by emptiness, and empty space can be receptive. Boredom pulls things out of their causal context and can open ways for a new configuration of things, and thus new meaning, because it has emptied things of meaning. Boredom opens a vista onto our own being and reveals our worthlessness to us in a larger context. Brodsky says:

"Because boredom is an invasion of your world's order. Boredom exposes your life to view, and the fruit of this is precisely insight and humility. And note that humility arises from insight. The more aware you become of your own form and mold, the more humble and compassionate you become toward other beings, that is, this dust that swirls in every direction in the sunlight or lies motionless on your table."

Pascal is right that boredom contains an insight into the self, or the possibility of an insight into the self, or as Nietzsche says: “Whoever stands against boredom stands against himself.” Boredom isolates us because we cannot find a foothold outside ourselves, and if the boredom that grips us is deep, we cannot even find a foothold within ourselves.

All human beings are alone, and some are more alone than others, but no one can escape loneliness. What matters is how we face this loneliness and whether we regard it as a lack that robs us of peace or as a possibility that brings us peace. Perhaps this feeling of lack can be seen as a sense of duty and obligation to live a more meaningful life. Perhaps boredom tells me that I am wasting my life. Life in the mirror of boredom appears null and void because we live it as nothing.

Conscience belongs to solitude, because ultimately it is always “I” who is held guilty. Although loneliness is a universal human phenomenon, it is ultimately a personal matter. This matter concerns me, and in many cases, it is me. Just as loneliness and conscience belong to me, boredom is also my boredom, and its responsibility weighs heavily on my shoulders. Conscience helps us think about the way we have chosen to live, and this requires the passage of time. Part of the experience of boredom is that it is time-consuming.

After every amusement and pleasure ends, we must ask ourselves what value these pleasures and delights have, other than being a way to kill time. Pleasure- and delight-driven behaviors allow us to keep the pleasure center in the brain in a state of constant stimulation, so that life becomes an uninterrupted pleasure trip from birth to death, but such a life seems excessively worthless. Denying the suffering of living means dehumanizing oneself.

It is our duty to pursue a life that causes us suffering. At the same time, this life, as Kundera says, is always elsewhere. The obligation to live inevitably leads us back to boredom and creates a kind of ethics of boredom: remaining in boredom because it reflects the promise of a better life.

Final Word

Boredom arises from meaninglessness. But such a lack of meaning does not mean that the empty space of this meaning can be filled with something else. According to Heidegger, boredom itself acquires meaning because, as long as it is truly deep, it returns us to another state of being and to another time, namely the great moment. As Beckett shows, the moment is always deferred. The moment, which is the true meaning of life, appears only negatively, that is, in the guise of absence, and the small moments (in love, art, intoxication) never last long. The first and most important problem is accepting that the only thing we have are small moments, and life between these moments presents us with a great deal of boredom. Because life is not made up of moments, but of time. Yet the absence of great meaning does not cause every meaning in life to vanish like smoke. A one-sided focus on the absence of meaning can cast a shadow over all other meanings, and then the world truly appears as a ruin. One of the sources of deep boredom is that we search for the great moment while what we have are small moments. Although we are deprived of immense meaning, meaning exists, and boredom accompanies it. We must accept boredom as an unavoidable reality, that is, the heaviness of life’s burden.

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Summary of the Book The Philosophy of Boredom

Author of the above text: Mohammad Fekri

Book Details:

The Philosophy of Boredom, Lars Svendsen, translated by Afshin Khakbaz, Tehran: Nashr-e No, 224 pages, 2017.

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