Let’s Celebrate Boredom!
Among the many serious problems that have arisen by way of the global pandemic—from a rising death toll to economic collapse—boredom would seem to be a trivial consequence. How can one complain of tedium when so many grave crises loom? But complain we do. Many people are now confined to their homes for an extended period of time and, after all, how many Netflix series can one watch or Zoom meetings attend before your eyes and your mind just bug out?
The Plague of Boredom
The plague of boredom, or more accurately, the boredom that comes in a plague, is not new. In October 1918, at the height of the Spanish flu pandemic, the city of Cleveland instituted a partial lockdown. An article that appeared in the October 25, 1918 edition of the Cleveland News lamented that one could not purchase cigarettes after 5 p.m. or alcohol after 6. No eating out after 8 p.m. No movies, no theatre, no parties. The writer bemoans that Cleveland has become “just a big vacuum, a great monstrous wad of nothing.”
We have been raised to view boredom as a nuisance, so we take it out for drinks hoping to anaesthetize it, we make it watch movies, we turn up the volume to drown out the sound of monotony. We cajole and persuade, plead and distract our boredom. As long as we’re not left alone together without a chaperone. What are we so afraid of?
As the late American novelist David Foster Wallace pointed out, the variety of recreations we use to counter dullness serve to block “some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling.” And with all of the toys at our command, including the escape rooms of social media 24 hours a day, we can try to run from the terror of silence. But we cannot quite hide. “I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information,” Wallace adds. “Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.”
Bored Games
The irony of all of these bored games is that in our vigorous commitment to leaving boredom behind, we miss the opportunity to tackle our greatest challenge – ourselves. In the words of the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Well, maybe poverty, hunger, and violence play a role too. But let’s consider what he’s getting at. It is not, of course, that endless ennui is a desirable state of being, but what emerges from the gaping hole of having “nothing to do”, is the space to be, and, to become more. Boredom is necessity’s stepchild, breeding creativity out of the ashes of quarantine.
One day a few months ago, while I was physically grounded but mentally floating in my apartment, I began to wander. I thought about absent friends, and time passing, and the idea of the world outside spinning by me. But I did not feel bad and I did not feel alone. And it occurred to me: what if we thought of ourselves as someone we would want to spend every waking hour with – an interesting, kind and tolerable companion. To simply be in silence, without distraction, like sitting with your best friend in the world on a late summer afternoon, on a hill overlooking a green valley with the sun going down golden orange. Nothing need be said, no act needs to be taken. We just sit, and take it in. And what if that friend is ourselves.
And in that silence where I meet myself, an unhurried compassionate acceptance, there can emerge–not right away, but eventually–the kryptonite for boredom: imagination and self-discovery. Imagination allows us to go inwards and not run away, to explore what we think about, what we dream of and how we are going to pursue it. One of the greatest flights of imagination in the twentieth century, which led to literary works of incomparable power, was born when a very bored professor sat at his desk and scribbled one sentence on a blank piece of paper: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” As J.R.R. Tolkien would later recall, he began The Hobbit as a way of coping with mind numbing activity of endlessly marking student papers. Consider this: what if Tolkien had been diverted from his marking by Pacman or Instagram?
Who’s Really Bored Though?
Children intuit whether boredom should be engaged or deflected by their parents’ initial reactions to their temporary lack of stimulation. And what we do with our children’s boredom, will tell us a great deal about how they will cope with it as adults. The issue, says psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, is not that the kids are bored, but that the parents are anxious that the kids are bored: “The capacity to be bored can be a developmental achievement for the child. Yet, how often, in fact, the child’s boredom is met by…the adult’s wish to distract him – as though the adults have decided that the child’s life must be, or be seen to be, endlessly interesting. It is one of the most oppressive demands of adults that the child should be interested, rather than take time to find what interests him.”
Especially with younger children, we must resist–as though it is a moral imperative—becoming complicit with their ostensible desire for diversion, to allow kids, as Wendy Mogel puts it, “a chance to build up their boredom tolerance muscle.” Adults could use a little workout of that kind as well. So take the little kid in you, get down on the floor, and let your mental, emotional and spiritual imagination begin to play.
Create Time
The novelist Susan Ertz wryly commented in the 1940s that “millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” We always claim that we do not have enough time for ourselves. That if we could only just “get off the treadmill” or “escape the rate race” or “slow down the movie” we could really begin to live out the life that somehow mysteriously got derailed a few stations back. Now is that time. Covid-19 has been tragic in its toll on the sick and vulnerable, and for the enormous financial wreckage that continues to spread in its wake. There is no way to diminish that kind of anguish. But for those not in the direct line of its tide, there has never been a better opportunity in our lifetimes to reset our priorities and re-envision ourselves.
And there is nothing boring about that.