Boredom and Its Variations

Boredom is beautiful, a necessary component of human existence. Like good food, too much can be harmful. Like marijuana, take your boredom in small doses. Being bored for a whole day is way too much. Boredom teaches us what’s important. Seen reflectively, it can inspire us. Albert Einstein said, “Creativity is the residue of time wasted.”

Baudelaire despised boredom, documented in his virulent masterpiece, “Au Lecteur” (To the Reader), and we’re all its victims, seeking distractions. But he later found a way out, through creativity and art.

The following is from a really thoughtful piece on boredom written a few years ago:  “At the very least, ruling out boredom as such means ruling out taking time with yourself and the question of who you are or might be. That sort of flight-from-self is a species of self-loathing.” Here’s a pretty good definition: boredom “is a confession of your inability to lead a life animated by your inner resources.” And yet, as Baudelaire taught us, boredom is also the price to be paid for creativity and art.

For consumers, fashions of novelty change almost daily: “The quest for novelty and the flight from boredom is not simply an individual spiritual challenge or even the aggregation of many individual problems; it keeps our iPod designers, video game engineers and bartenders employed.” Boredom, in its most profound contemporary sense, can produce both creative and distracting endeavors. In another sense, it is a rejection of all the stuff you don’t want to deal with.

This is a complicated subject. Here are some of its mutations, as I find them, things that bore us or induce boredom. Add others, as you experience them.

Commercially induced boredom: stems from bad movies, including 90% of Netflix; the excesses of youth as reported in the media; most cultural exhibits; repetitive commercials, filler and infomercial junk on TV and the internet. Living in Mexico it’s hard to get TV news in English. I am forced to watch CNN, which regular readers know I absorb like foul-tasting medicine.

An example: Here we get CNN International which in its commercial breaks recently dropped all U.S.-produced commercials, boring in their own right, for constantly repeating segments of “Inside Africa.” This is B-roll promo stuff, shown over and over again in lengthy commercial breaks. You must not only hit the mute button but avert your eyes to avoid recurrent attacks of nausea. It’s an assault worse than boredom.

Then of course there are the multitude of technological distractions industry provides to keep us from being bored. Young people engage in a constant stream of jabbering phone calls, social media, movies, videos, messaging and more. They wear headphones while jogging. We are constantly subjected to their behavior patterns, their likes, their sexual activity, etc. Much of this continues to be written about, making for a subject that has become boring in itself.

Human-induced boredom: These include many informal conversations, such as we encounter at parties, phone calls gone on too long, discussions of unimportant subjects, many work-related tasks, lectures live or digitized, most political speeches, family dinners, church sermons, and so on.

Politics and the news: Especially in the Trump era, too much focus on the media brings on heavy dependence, bias, partisanship, bigotry and distortion. Many folks have tried simply to turn off the news. Eliminating your news fixation can produce boredom, not to mention ignorance. It’s a Hobson’s choice yet one can find better sources than CNN and the Washington Post.

I live much of the time alone and have become accustomed to, if not always happy with, bouts of boredom. I have finally learned that solitude and boredom don’t have to go together.