Boredom, it turns out, is morally fraught. Like other mood states (anger, sadness), boredom prompts a response, but what that response should be is not always clear. What is needed is something outside boredom—practical wisdom—to help us understand whether a boring situation should be endured or is evidence that something must change.
Take, for example, the dilemma faced by most students. Students overwhelmingly report being bored in school, especially in the higher grades—a massive irony given the advent of technology in schools over the past half century, all with the goal to pique, sustain, and direct student interests. Yet rather than decreasing, student boredom has held steady, if not increased, and so too have aversive boredom-avoidance tendencies. But boredom itself is seldom addressed explicitly. Instead, students (and teachers) are conditioned to do one of two things in the face of boredom: either escape boring circumstances with entertaining pedagogy (a.k.a. edutainment) or distractions, or resign themselves to boredom as an inevitable part of life, assuming that maturity requires such compliance. Both responses (avoidance and resignation) are problematic. Conditioned to avoid boredom, students miss out on activities that may provide value and meaning, and knee-jerk boredom avoidance makes them vulnerable to problematic quick fixes. Conversely, resignation to boredom, as inescapable, diminishes human agency. Rather than conceding, students should, when appropriate, learn how to challenge boring circumstances or to find meaningful possibilities within circumstances that may not be apparent at first glance. Yet before we can engage wisely with boredom, we need to better understand the phenomenon of boredom itself.
Two Kinds of Boredom
Our rush to solve the problem of boredom draws attention to Martin Heidegger’s important distinction between situational and existential boredom. To be situationally bored, note psychologists James Danckert and John Eastwood, is to be “painfully stuck in the here and now, bereft of any capacity for self-determination, yet driven to find something that we can engage with.” Boring situations seemingly offer little or nothing with which to engage. Heidegger shares the example of sitting at a remote train station, having to wait hours before his train departs. Stuck at the station, Heidegger literally feels the time moving slowly. His experience of the extension of time under such conditions correlates with the German word for boredom, Langeweile, which literally means “long while.” Heidegger’s assessment is not simply a cognitive inventory of limited options for mental engagement but rather a felt sense of impoverishment.
A bored person feels the barrenness of her situation. It leaves her groping for something, anything, to occupy herself with. One can imagine Heidegger considering a number of options with which to pass the time. However, the nature of situational boredom seems to be precisely that we cannot decide between these, that we are caught in a kind of akratic or weak-willed state, unable to wrest our way out of it. The familiar complaint from children, “I’m bored; there’s nothing to do,” captures this sentiment. The judgment about “nothing to do” indicates a situation that is seemingly barren of interest (an objective condition) but also reveals a diminishment of the imagination (a subjective condition). In such circumstances the bored person literally cannot see or imagine something worthwhile to do.
To complicate matters, we may have literally at our fingertips an endless array of possibilities and yet still be bored. While boredom is usually associated with a lack of stimuli, it can also be prompted by too much stimuli—what Robert Louis Stevenson describes as the “weariness of satiety.” Boredom is a tricky foe.
In the case of satiation fatigue, we are on the threshold of existential boredom—a deeper aimlessness about meaning and purpose. While situational boredom is characteristically linked to an objective condition, existential boredom is harder to diagnose. The cause is indeterminate. Heidegger describes an epiphany of his own existential boredom after attending a dinner party. He sees after the fact how boring the party was, though he did not find it so at the time. He then realizes how boredom avoidance was a pervasive force, guiding and informing his actions, and he discovers that his success at staving off situational boredom unwittingly intensified his existential boredom.
So what is the solution? Heidegger counsels letting boredom hit us full force, resisting the tendency to run from it, for often in shirking boredom we are drawn to take up inauthentic diversions. Instead, facing boredom directly, we can then see through our inauthentic proclivities and discern that culture is shot through with inauthentic ways of being. Heidegger is hopeful that once we allow ourselves to reach the nadir of boredom, a vision of possibilities for authentic existence will come into view. The way out, it turns out, is to sit with and hold fast to our boredom.
This account, on a certain level, rings true. Decisions about one’s profession or spouse ought to be informed by a discernment process that aims to be faithful to one’s authentic desires, rather than governed by social pressures. Yet prompting children to sit with their boredom sounds naive—perhaps the advice of someone who does not have much experience taking care of children. Furthermore, the ideal of authenticity has proved to be ripe for exploitation. Recognizing the existential desire for authentic self-expression, marketeers of capitalism have inundated us with seemingly indispensable means for becoming our true, authentic selves.
Instead of avoidance, resignation, or the quest for a chimerical authenticity, an optimal response to boredom may be simpler than we have become conditioned to see. The fourth-century desert father Evagrius counselled his monks to be on high alert with regard to boredom. More than a mere malaise or sense of aimlessness, he considered boredom to be an aspect of what was referred to as acedia—long considered one of the deadliest of sins. What today we often simply regard as a passing restlessness that we can abate with distraction Evagrius viewed as a state of mind, a train of thought that we should view with moral trepidation. Described as the noonday devil because it strikes at midday, when the monk’s daily prayers feel like they stretch on endlessly, it is subtler than emotions like anger or fear. For this reason acedia was regarded as far more dangerous, the breeding ground for a multitude of other sins like greed, envy, lust, and gluttony.
Evagrius’s proposed remedy, however, is simple, and perhaps off-putting to modern ears: remain steadfast and do everything with great care. To understand Evagrius’s counsel, it is helpful to consider the definition of acedia, which translates as a lack (a-) of care (kedos). To suffer from acedia is to let oneself go—to become careless. The cure, then, for acedia is caring attention. “Set for yourself a goal in every task,” Evagrius counsels, “and do not rise from it until you have finished it.” He urges monks to continue with and hold fast to their appointed tasks, especially manual labour, so that they can more fruitfully engage in the single-minded work of prayer. Though simple, this solution is more difficult to appreciate and enact in this age of endless distraction. We are continually prompted to flit from one thing to the next. What is needed is careful focus on one thing, but to ensure this we need to set up conditions that nurture strong focus.
Focal Practices
Taking Evagrius’s lead, St. Benedict in the sixth century included in his Rule, which would become the definitive guidebook for monastic life in the West, the requirement that all monks, regardless of their intellectual acumen, do some work in the kitchen. Evagrius and Benedict are directing us to what philosopher Albert Borgmann describes as focal practices. Situated and developed across millennia, focal practices embody simple yet compelling ways humans have discovered to contend constructively with the problem of boredom. Rather than authentic or original, such practices embody practical wisdom about how to live well. They “have the power to center [one’s] life and to arrange all other things around this center in an orderly way,” prioritizing what is important.
By focal Borgmann is referring not to optics or points of convergence in geometry but to its more ancient denotation. Deriving from the Latin, focus literally means “domestic hearth” or “fireplace.” The hearth, prior to the development of ventilation heating systems, was the figurative and literal centre of the home. Thus, for Borgmann, focal practices are unique in that they—like the hearth—structure and direct attention, engaging us with the things that constitute them. It is the quality of attention (where it is directed and how it is directed) that focal practices require that is meaningful and salutary. A focal practice trains and guides us to attend deeply, in a sustained way, to one thing, overcoming the temptation to move from one thing to the next. A focal practice “gathers the relations of its context and radiates into its surroundings and informs them.” To the extent that we give ourselves over to them, focal practices change the way we see and interpret.