On Boredom
A Potential Solution
Table of Contents:
Boredom
Patience
Notes
Book I: Boredom
§1. In this essay, I will attempt to prove that boredom is a uniquely significant emotion/mood and problem, and then solve said problem. This essay is not too logically constrained, insofar as the main truths presented here are closer to contingently-universal in this ‘world’, rather than necessary. The arguments I am setting forward apply to humans, along with most sentient life we know of. I do not dispute that it is possible that an alien species could avoid some of the following conclusions due to biological differences; however, I find this consideration to be irrelevant at the moment.
§2.
Definition 1: Boredom is a form of suffering which accompanies a lack
of stimulation.
Proposition 1: Boredom is omnipresent in the sense that all things become progressively boring with time, or else already start off so.
This essay will attempt to prove Proposition 1 and then provide a solution to the clear problem that this poses.
§3. The sole property of boredom, which gives it a privileged place within the existence of those who experience it, is its omnipresence. Boredom’s property of omnipresence simply means that it’s always there, either presently being felt or lurking just on the edges of our consciousness, slowly eating away at and eroding whatever present stimulation we are experiencing. Along with this, its negation seems to present us with a difficult problem, whose solution is not apparent from common sense alone.
“All things become boring with time, even the greatest pleasures.”
Leopardi
“Ennui seems to me the nature of atmosphere, which fills up the spaces between material bodies, and also the voids in the bodies themselves. Whenever a body disappears, and is not replaced by another, air fills up the gap immediately.”
Leopardi
Proof of boredom’s omnipresence is not difficult to come by due to its tendency to arise when we simply leave ourselves to our own thoughts. One can use a thought experiment to demonstrate it:
Room: Let us imagine ourselves sitting in a room alone, with all of our basic needs (food/water, shelter, sleep) met, not suffering, and simply sitting.
Any reasonable imagining of this scenario would see boredom shortly pop up. One need not even use one’s imagination to demonstrate this idea; sit in a room unoccupied, and feel boredom eventually invade your mind.
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Pascal, Pensees
The obvious objection to this assertion is that it only proves that boredom will arise if one is left unoccupied. But a reflection on the path of life itself, a constant jumping from thing to thing, or stimulation to stimulation, shows that this objection is void and that, as Proust puts it, ‘Possession makes everything wither and fade.’ The list of examples of boredom overtaking every facet of human life is near-infinite, but focusing on and analyzing some of the most relevant cases here should be enough to reveal the truth.
§4. Our investigation into boredom’s history must begin as far back as possible; not as an attempt to cover the entire history of boredom from beginning to end, but to dispel a common modern myth within the philosophy of boredom: that boredom is an illness endemic exclusively to modernity. If boredom is truly omnipresent, then it must have always existed within the experience of those who possess the capacity to experience it. Here, I will attempt to show that this was the case.
§5. The earliest mention of boredom afforded by history appears to be dated to around 1700 BCE. It comes from one of the oldest jokes within Ancient Egyptian history:
Q: How does one entertain a bored pharaoh?
A: You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.
Women are one of the most common antidotes to boredom given by later thinkers. We can also take into account Leopardi’s statement that royalty has more reason than others to be completely and absolutely convinced of the omnipresence of boredom within life, for they have at their disposal all possible sources of happiness, and yet are still unsatisfied and plagued by ennui.
To find concrete references to boredom, however, we must jump to the classical period, in which numerous writers took up the subject. The first of these is presented by Homer in his Iliad. Homer, being partially responsible for the formation of the Greek language, was the originator of the term acedia. Homer’s acedia appears in the Iliad, on multiple occasions, in the sense of meaning ‘indifferent’. Specifically, he uses it to reference the way that one feels about a thing that one pays very little mind to, which would seem quite similar to how boredom functions. He also notes:
“Of all things is there satiety, of sleep, and love, and of sweet song, and the goodly dance.”
Iliad bk 13, 635-40
Here we see the first recognition of boredom’s omnipresence. Boredom suppresses the enjoyment within all things. Homer’s contemporary Hesiod also used acedia in the way Homer describes above.
Jumping forward into Roman times, two Latin authors took up the theme of boredom: Lucretius and Lucian. In his work De Rerum Natura, Lucretius uses it in reference to an aristocrat who moves from place to place attempting to avoid boredom, but finding no respite, as well as to signify that nothing can draw our attention to itself for any meaningful period of time, even though someone experiencing it for the first time would be overcome by pleasure:
“And there is nothing that exists so great and marvelous
that over time mankind does not admire it less and less.”
“True, while we lack that which we long for, it’s an obsession,
But we will just crave something else once it’s in our possession.”
Lucretius leaves us without a solution to this problem, and compels the reader to investigate ‘the nature of things’ in an attempt to uncover the secrets of, and solutions to, boredom.
The next writer to espouse boredom’s omnipresence was the satirist Lucian. In his Dialogue of the Dead between Chiron and Menippus, he tells the story of the god Chiron, who kills himself to avoid the monotonous existence of immortality. Chiron explains to Menippus that no earthly objects can avoid sinking into boredom, so he has decided to leave Earth. However, Menippus asks him why the land of the dead wouldn’t follow a similar trajectory and come to bore him with time. A distraught Chiron then asks Menippus how to avoid this fate, and Menippus leaves us with the unsatisfying answer: ‘Take things as you find them, I suppose, like a sensible fellow, and make the best of everything.’
These examples should convince the reader that boredom is not only a present ill but one that has existed since time immemorial. Taking this into account, we shall now jump further into the future to engage with the main proponents of boredom’s omnipresence.
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§6. A simplified synopsis of Goethe’s Faust could be: a man searches for anything that could provide him with a single moment of happiness. However, giving happiness this privileged position in the synopsis does a disservice to the actual main idea of boredom. Happiness is certainly a real emotion; we have all experienced it, and hence may not understand Faust’s challenge. But we must remember why Faust has such a problem experiencing happiness. Faust’s inability to experience happiness comes from the fact that he is so well learned that all earthly things are familiar to him, and have left him in a state of perpetual boredom, in which nothing can arouse his interest meaningfully. Without Faust’s decades of study, happiness (at least a moment of it) would come quite easily from one of the endeavors he undertakes. Take the language Goethe uses to describe Faust’s dissatisfaction in the scene of Faust’s visit to the tavern: ‘There is nothing for me here.’ These are the words Faust utters when signifying that his moment of happiness will not come from the rabble of the tavern. Now, of course, there are things in the tavern to find enjoyment in, just not for Faust, as, like all things, he has developed the inability to be stimulated by any earthly pleasure. As Care later states: ‘He is starving though there’s plenty’. This line of thought can be found in and applied to all of Faust’s undertakings. Therefore, we may more accurately give the synopsis of Faust as: a man searches for anything which could provide him with a single moment of respite from his boredom.
It is important to note here that without boredom pressing upon Faust, he would not be so distraught and therefore determined to find a moment of happiness. If boredom were naught, he could peacefully exist in his neutrality. This pressing of boredom is often called ‘desire’ (especially when pointed towards a specific object), when it is not called ‘boredom’ or ‘restlessness’.
What eventual solution does Faust find to the problem that he faces? That of imagination. Faust’s moment of respite comes when he removes himself from the present (which is always deadening) and imagines the happiness of the future. However, this happiness is never even allowed to materialize; Faust dies at this very moment. I am here reminded of the words of Schopenhauer, when he says of stories which continue after the hero has achieved their goal:
“The continuation of which would be only a wearisome and meaningless monotony corresponding to boredom.”
Faust’s momentary happiness would be just that, a single moment. Given any length of time, he would soon fall back into the ennui from which he just escaped, and if his story continued, so would the reader.
§7. Let us reimagine ourselves in our room. If we sit for long enough, boredom will arise; we will likely then look for something to occupy ourselves with. This is not always the case, however. Often, we are already inclined towards some object, whether this inclination arose in ourselves or was produced in us through another means. In these cases, when our boredom arises, we feel this inclination strongly and call this desire. We also call desire, that state we feel when we are not able to obtain the object of our desire. However, both of these states could also be called boredom. When we desire an object, separation from this object bores us. Therefore, everything but this object (or other objects we also desire) bores us. Note here that I am referring to what I am inclined to call active-desire, as opposed to passive-desire. Passive-desires include latent desires in the back of one’s mind, such as very weak ones, or desires whose fulfillment could not take place in the near future.
Therefore, we can see that a better way to relate these concepts is as follows:
(a.) Boredom causes us to desire stimulation
(b.) If we desire X, then not-X bores us
(c.) X will eventually bore us as well, given boredom’s omnipresence
Russel’s quote referring to drug addicts shows this relationship:
“The kind of boredom which the person accustomed to drugs experiences when deprived of them is something for which I can suggest no remedy except time.”
‘Accustomed’ signifies boredom of the drug (habituation), and boredom from deprivation is explicitly mentioned. Most of us would not hesitate to say that addicts ‘desire’ their fix (even if they ought not), and that these fixes stimulate the addicts.
§8. Omnipresent is not a term that can be used lightly. Traditionally considered only attributable to a God that possessed various other magnificent qualities, this idea carries with it a totally infinite weight. If we apply it to boredom, a logical conclusion arises which states that boredom is absolutely inescapable for any extended period of time. However, in the history of thought on boredom, numerous writers claimed to have overcome this feeling. Many of their reasons for attempting to overcome boredom even came from the realization of its omnipresence. However, after finding a solution to it, they could no longer claim that it was an omnipresent feeling, meaning that, in light of their discovery, one could dispel boredom. It is quite odd then that these various writers often rejected the solutions of their predecessors and gave their own, differing solutions. To defend boredom’s property of omnipresence, I will here review and rebut two of the most reasonable solutions to the problem of ennui.
§9. The first solution rests on God. Here we will again turn to Pascal, who was significantly invested in the problem of boredom. For Pascal, diversion was the means that the populace attempted to use to escape the omnipresent feeling of ennui. But given its omnipresence, simple distraction could not sate us, as omnipresence denoted infinity. Pascal saw boredom as greater than the entire universe, in that nothing could fill the infinite void it left in our hearts. Nothing except the only other infinite and omnipresent object in existence. Thus, the first solution enters as a kind of deus ex machina, a divine intervention into a problem that nothing else, by itself, can resolve:
“This infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object, in other words, by God.”[22]
Pascal, Pensees
In contrast to this line of thought, we turn to boredom’s greatest theoretician: Leopardi. Commenting on the attitude towards religious festivals, he states:
“The cause of this is as much the particular cooling of religious feeling, the work both of time in general and of this irreligious time in particular ... and the present-day inability of peoples to be moved and uplifted in spirit except by things that are altogether extraordinary. With us in particular, it is also caused by the utter lack of resistance to our religious opinions, and our religion in general.”
Here Leopardi gives us three main reasons for the inability of religion to stimulate us: (1) the cooling of religious feeling due to time, (2) the fact that religion is not extraordinary, and (3) the lack of resistance to religion.
The first two of these reasons just seem to relegate religion to the level of all other earthly (mundane, from the Latin mundus - world) objects, in that it becomes boring with time and is hence not extraordinary. The final reason is a bit abstract and unimportant to us here, but it references how a lack of resistance leads to boredom. We experience this in the cases of easy challenges, such as those against children. However, given enough time, even difficult challenges become boring as well. While these arguments are rather simple, they seem to me to be able to successfully refute the idea that God is an antidote to boredom. Note that these arguments do not even require one to assume the non-existence of God; only to accept that if God exists, he doesn’t solve the problem of boredom.
§10. I will now review a second commonly prescribed, and I believe the closest, incorrect method of avoiding boredom: that of variety.
“The only thing that is most lastingly and truly pleasurable is the variety of things, for no other reason than that nothing is lastingly and truly pleasurable.”
Leopardi
‘Variety is the spice of life’ is a common adage that seems simple enough. If repetition and familiarity breed boredom, then the opposite of these - variety - is the antidote to it. This truth almost seems self-evident, but a deeper analysis of boredom reveals a property which supports its omnipresence: the property of acceleration.
If we simply take boredom’s omnipresence as true, then we can already see that the variety argument cannot stand. Boredom’s omnipresence means that all becomes boring; hence, variety itself becomes boring with time. Or as Leopardi more eloquently puts it in a series of passages:
“Continuity is such a great friend of boredom that even the continuity of variety is most tedious.”
“Man grows inured to continuous novelty as he does to uniformity, and the new object is then as familiar to him as an old object, and novelty, in general, is more familiar and ordinary to him than uniformity.”
“The strength and ease and variety of habituation, both in individuals and in mankind, always grow as they grow, precisely like the motion of heavy bodies. This is all there is to the progress both of individuals and of the human mind. This thought is of the utmost importance, and there is no more apt image of this progress in mathematics or physics than that of accelerated motion.”
Therefore, variety fails as a solution to the problem of omnipresent boredom. Continuous exposure to intense pleasurable stimuli seems to leave us numb. The harder we chase pleasure, the more we feel boredom press upon us.
§11. From the analysis of this essay so far, it seems to me that we can accept Proposition 1: Boredom is omnipresent in the sense that all things become boring with time.
Chapter I.I: Patience
§12. Let us take stock of our position. We have accepted Definition 1 and Proposition 1. This leaves us in the position that we now know that boredom is an omnipresent form of suffering accompanied by a lack of stimulation, and that there seems to be no clear escape from it. Given this fact, along with the fact that suffering grounds duties, we see an apparent contradiction:
We ought negate boredom
Boredom cannot be negated
Attempting to protect ourselves here with ‘ought implies can’ may save us from stating that there is a duty to negate boredom, but does not save us from the fact that our fate is bad. To guard against such a bleak conclusion, we must reject (2). Luckily, I believe that (2) is false and can be rejected.
§13. How might one overcome omnipresence? Given the fact that we cannot ‘go around’ the problem, seeing as there is nothing ‘around’ omnipresence, our only remaining option is to delve into it. Before this truth can be realized, however, we must go deeper in our analysis of boredom.
§14. Boredom functions as such: I am introduced to a thing ‘x’ which may or may not stimulate me. If it does not stimulate me, then boredom will begin emerging nearly instantaneously. If x does stimulate me, then boredom will still emerge, just at a later time, possibly weeks or months after initial contact. Boredom (i) suppresses stimulation and (ii) replaces it with suffering. However, we cannot say that the (i) habituation and (ii) suffering are identical, as boredom often suppresses suffering itself. For an example, we can look to animal farmers, such as pig and cattle farmers.
Time, for them, has eroded the specific stimulation of the oft-unpleasant smell of manure from their consciousness. This does not imply, however, that upon being present near a manure-smelling field, animal farmers will instantaneously experience the pain of boredom; as the pain will only arise if nothing fills this lack of stimulation. Of course, the pain of boredom will always return, but it is not necessarily present just when a thing that one has become desensitized to is present.
Therefore, we can conclude that boredom has two distinct components: (i) habituation, and (ii) suffering. We return to Proposition 1:
Proposition 1: Boredom is omnipresent in the sense that all things progressively become boring with time, or else already start off so.
When we say all things become boring with time, we are referring to the power of boredom to habituate us to said things, not the power of boredom to make us suffer. Now, as these two things are nearly always co-extensive, this point can be hard to pin down. However, this important caveat allows us to more accurately present Proposition 1 as Proposition 2:
Proposition 2: Habituation is omnipresent in the sense that all things progressively become habituated to with time, or else already start off so.
§15. I’m sure the path forward has now become clear. To deal with the suffering left in boredom’s wake, we must habituate to it. This is how we can transcend boredom, even given its omnipresent status. The result will be neutrality without suffering. As we have a duty to negate suffering, but not neutrality, we ought habituate to boredom.
Leopardi realized this truth to a degree. He wrote about ‘Patience’ in his Zibaldone (commonplace book) and Letters. However, because of the nature of these writings, he never published anything on the subject, and so may not have come to either an acceptance or refutation of this idea. I mention this for the reason that, if one reads the sources in which Leopardi writes on this topic, they will find that he often jumps back and forth between the ideas that (iii) patience is necessary in order to reduce human suffering, and (iv) boredom cannot be adapted to, and therefore, life has utterly negative value. Leopardi’s final writings on this issue posit (iii). Similarly, I argue we should accept position (iii) and reject position (iv).
§16. As the discussion about patience has been quite abstract so far, I will lay out a few concrete mentions:
“Habituation will alleviate any ill, and with enough practice, man can become accustomed to absolute, total boredom. I myself am proof of this. At first, boredom drove me to despair, but then, as it increased instead of diminishing, habit, little by little, made it less frightening to me and more susceptible to patience. My patience with boredom finally became really heroic. The example of prisoners, who sometimes have even grown to like that life.”
Zibaldone [280]
“Being tired of waging war against the inevitable, I let rest take the place of happiness, from habit I’ve grown accustomed to tedium, which I thought I could never get used to, and have almost finished suffering.”
Letter 57
Moses the Black on attempting to negate acedia through stimulation:
“You have not freed yourself from it, but rather have given yourself up to it as its slave and subject. For the enemy will henceforth attack you more strongly as a deserter and runaway, since it has seen that you fled at once when overcome in the conflict: unless on a second occasion when you join battle with it you make up your mind not to dispel its attacks and heats for the moment by deserting your cell, or by the inactivity of sleep, but rather learn to triumph over it by endurance and conflict.”
And Russell again:
“The kind of boredom which the person accustomed to drugs experiences when deprived of them is something for which I can suggest no remedy except time.”
With exposure to boredom, one can negate it up until the point where neutrality no longer seems a daunting and bleak state; a sort of mithridatism. We often associate neutrality with boredom because of the fact that the former rises up when not temporarily suppressed by some pleasure or pain, but in fact, neutrality must be a state free from all negative connotations. As Mill says: ‘With much tranquility, many find that they can be content with very little pleasure.’[23] If neutrality is not free of all negative connotations, then it is not really neutrality at all, but some form of suffering.
One may label the idea of simply sitting alone in one’s room as a boring one, but the true secret to life is being able to view such a situation without the least thought of anything negative. Sages, monks, scholars, etc., have long exemplified this skill through contemplation, stillness, and solitude. These should be our models for patience, and we should often reflect on their way(s) of life.
Cultivating patience also has the benefit of weakening our egoism. As our opposition to boredom wanes, so too will our ‘desire’ for pleasure.
Patience also gives us ‘new eyes’ as Proust would put it. Stepping back from the world of constant stimulation makes those things which we usually fail to notice appear all the more beautiful. This applies to the other sense faculties as well.
§17. While our critique of pleasure started off bleak, with us positing an omnipresent boredom as the necessary consequence, we were able to find a line of thought which instead allows us to achieve peace and serenity.
§18. The discovery of this essay is the negation of boredom through the cultivation of patience. We ought pursue neutrality, rather than chasing pleasure. Life is about (a) finding peace and (b) helping others to do likewise. Of course, suffering is not compatible with peace.
§19. Chasing pleasure leaves us numb in the end, and we must come to be familiar with boredom in order to rid ourselves of its power over us. This does not require ubiquitous exposure to states with little or no stimulation, but exposure to these states should certainly be a regular occurrence for us. Sitting with our own boredom, and then with our tranquility keeps our egoism and desire in check.
Notes
[1] Hypothetical: If (a.) only God can fill the abyss, and if (b.) there is no God, then (c.) the abyss cannot be filled; hence boredom is omnipresent.
[2] Utilitarianism.