Bored with Life

                                                      Seneca

It is indeed ironic that although we live in an age where we are presented with an unprecedented range of opportunities to satisfy our needs, boredom still affects people like never before. Despite its association with dysfunctional behaviour and health-related problems, boredom is still not very well understood since there is not much research on this topic.

Although there is no universally accepted definition of boredom, most researchers agree that it is not another synonym for depression or apathy. It’s only in 2012 when Dr. John Eastwood, a clinical psychologist at York University in United Kingdom, and his colleagues published their research paper titled The Unengaged Mind: Defining Boredom in Terms of Attention in an attempt to explore the nature of boredom.

Their paper argued that boredom is a state in which the person suffering from boredom wants to be engaged in some kind of meaningful activity but cannot. This state is characterized by lethargy and restlessness, which makes it an issue of attention because attention is the process by which we make connections with our world and make sense of it.

Scientists now make a clear distinction between ‘simple’ or ‘ordinary’ boredom and existential boredom. ‘Simple’ or ‘ordinary’ boredom describes a particular mental state that individuals find extremely unpleasant. It involves a lack of stimulation, which makes an individual crave for immediate relief. Research indicates that this kind of boredom is often accompanied by behavioural, medical and social consequences. Existential boredom, on the other hand, is more complex.

According to the German sociologist, Martin Doehlemann, who coined the expression ‘existential boredom,’ it is a malaise that affects a person’s very existence and it may even be perceived as a philosophical sickness. Although boredom has very recently become the focus of research among scientists, its history will indicate that it is not something new. Throughout history, several philosophers have studied boredom. For the purpose of this article, I have selected the few philosophers who have addressed the notion in their works in some detail.

During the Roman era, Seneca addressed the issue of boredom or tedium quite extensively in his essay on Tranquility. According to him, many individuals are”plagued with fickleness and boredom and a continual shifting of purpose” who spend their time lolling and yawning. Seneca described boredom vividly:” Thence comes mourning and melancholy and the thousand wavering of an unsettled mind, which its aspirations hold in suspense, and then disappointment renders melancholy. Then comes that feeling which makes men loathe their own leisure and complain they themselves have nothing to be busy with.”

In the 17th century, French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623- 1662) studied boredom by observing humans in their everyday life. In his book, Pensées, Pascal explained boredom with great insight. According to Pascal, humans always seek diversions to get out of their empty life, which is a major source of ennui or boredom. In the long run, these diversions never work, and we are back to square one ~ a life of boredom.

For Pascal, human life is generally empty, and this is why there’s a pervasive sense of ennui or boredom. Although Pascal paints human life in a negative way, his ultimate message is not so negative. He stated that a bored person was someone without God. He felt that, in order to rid us of boredom, we need to establish a close connection with God who will make our empty lives full again and help obliterate restlessness and boredom from our lives.

In the 19th century, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1870) made boredom one of the foci of his philosophy. According to Schopenhauer, there are two poles in human life: one is boredom and the other one is human need, want, lack, or desire. We are perpetually in the pursuit of trying to capture what we desire, need, or lack; once we succeed in obtaining our goal, we realize it does not give the satisfaction or happiness we had anticipated. Instead we get boredom; off we go again, pursuing something else to make us happy only to find ourselves back to boredom.

Schopenhauer explained that boredom was the sensation that we get when we experience the worthlessness of our existence. Thus, according to Schopenhauer, human life is essentially without any significant meaning. It is only humans who are intelligent and complex, and who experience the boredom and meaninglessness that Schopenhauer wrote about.

For Schopenhauer, there are individuals who do not suffer from boredom. They are the ones who are engaged in a life of contemplation and enjoyment of music and art. For Schopenhauer, boredom is a source of misery and a scourge on human race, which, can lead to death or prompt someone to commit murders or even launch a war.

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) reckoned that boredom is the root of all evil. It is associated with nothingness, which permeates all human existence. He called this” demonic pantheism.” It’s demonic due to the fact that human life is empty without meaning, and it is also pantheism since it is all pervasive.

According to Kierkegaard,”The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings. Adam was bored, because he was alone; therefore Eve was created….” For Kierkegaard, boredom makes everything empty and devoid of meaning. It makes life intolerable and unlivable. Kierkegaard described boredom thus:

“ How frightful boredom is ~ frightfully boring; I know of no stronger expression, no truer expression … If only there were a higher expression, a stronger one; that would at least indicate a shift. I lie outstretched, inactive; the only thing I see is emptiness; the only thing I live off: emptiness; the only thing I move in: emptiness. I do not even experience pain.”

Kierkegaard believed that boredom instead of being disabling actually motivates people to act in creative ways to get themselves out of this highly unpleasant state. He even described the boredom’s action-inducing nature as”magical.”

In the 20th century, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) devoted an entire chapter on boredom in his famous book, The Conquest of Happiness. According to Russell, boredom is”essentially a thwarted desire for events.” Besides this thwarted desire, for Russell, there are two other essential sources of boredom: one is a contrast between one’s present set of circumstances and some other more agreeable set of circumstances, which force themselves upon one’s imagination.

The other is that where one’s faculties are not fully occupied. For Russell, boredom has been a motivator for human sins, including wars, persecutions, and quarrels with our neighbors. Since boredom is exceedingly unpleasant, there is always a natural urge to eliminate it and pursue excitement instead, which is a deep-seated desire in humans. Russell believed that not all boredom was bad.

Some, he thought, was necessary for us. In fact, Russell went so far as to say that a certain power of enduring boredom was essential for a happy life. Russell believed that great lives require those who live them to endure a lot of quietness and boredom; and the same has to be endured by those who accomplish great things. Pursuing exciting things that will keep us stimulated won’t work in the long run because too much excitement, Russell argued, will make us want more excitement, which will end our ability to be excited at all; this, in turn, will lead, paradoxically, to boredom.

As Europe entered the twentieth century, melancholia or existential boredom captured the imagination of the French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who argued quite forcefully that the world where we lived was devoid of meaning. The protagonists in both Sartre’s Nausea and Camus’ The Outsider suffered from what is known as existential boredom that results not from despair in the beneficence of the Creator, but from despair in the beneficence of the universe. Sartre often described the”nausea of ennui” as”leprosy of the soul.”

In contemporary times, modern philosophers have argued that boredom is on the rise due to the overload of stimulation rather than from monotony of life as it did in the past. Modern philosophers regard boredom as something inevitable in a world of trivia. In A Philosophy of Boredom, Lars Svendsen wrote that boredom was on the rise and there was unfortunately no cure. Several leading philosophers who blame the rise in boredom in contemporary societies to the rapid increase in information technology share Svendsen’s pessimistic view.

                                                             Jane Austen

Although boredom has become the focus of research among scientists in recent years, Western novelists and playwrights have expounded on the subject throughout the ages. It is no surprise that boredom, which often destroys the human will and a lust for life, is a recurrent motif of Western literature. In this essay, I will focus on some important literary works in which boredom is a major theme.

In Jane Austen’s novel, Emma, Austen sets the mood of boredom very early in the novel that is to haunt the protagonist Emma: “Many a long October and November evening [that] must be struggled through” for Emma and her father. We find both Emma and her father trapped in their mundane lives, which are marked by predictability, loneliness, and boredom. We also see that Christmas and the arrival of Emma’s sister and her children provide only a temporary reprieve from their tedious life. Austen’s Emma informs the readers of the instability that comes with boredom and how easily it can turn into depression if one suffers from simple boredom and finds no cure for it.

Several critics have argued that it’s boredom that forces Emma’s restless matchmaking. Critics also point out that Emma’s desperate longing to move to a new place is due to her intense suffering from boredom. Several scholars have credited Charles Dickens for being the first novelist to use the word “boredom” extensively in his novel, Bleak House, which was published in 1853.

Dickens’ next book, Hard Times, is an important work because it gives readers an opportunity to understand the dimensions of boredom faced by the working class in the Victorian era. For most of the 19th century, the working classes were deemed not to experience boredom at all because both boredom and ennui were associated with leisure and satiety, which were the privileges of the English upper classes. While Dickens does not use the word “boredom” explicitly in Hard Times, the vivid descriptions of the monotonous life in Coketown evokes the mind-numbing tedium and spiritual poverty of the factory workers.

In his novella, The Diary of a Superfluous Man, the Russian novelist, Ivan Turgenev, gives a poignant portrayal of boredom, melancholia, and depression that is experienced by the characters, especially the superfluous man, Oblomov. The following description of one autumn afternoon when Oblomov’s family is gathered around in the drawing room of their wealthy but decrepit estate wonderfully captures the melancholia, the deathly silence and the existential boredom of their banal existence:

   ""All was quiet; only the sound of the heavy, home-made boots of Oblomov’s father, the muffled ticking of the clock in its case on the wall, and the snapping of the thread by the teeth or the hands of Pelageya Ignatyevna or Natasya Ivanovna broke the dead silence from time to time.

Half an hour sometimes passed like that, unless of course someone yawned and muttered, as he made the sign of the cross over his mouth, ‘Lord have mercy on us!’

His neighbor yawned after him, then the next person as though at a word of command, opened his mouth slowly, and so the infectious play of the air and the lungs spread among them all, moving some of them to tears. ""

All the characters in The Diary of the Superfluous Man, especially Oblomov, seem to suffer from existential boredom, which encompasses a multitude of conditions such as depression, melancholia, superfluity, boredom, frustration, surfeit, indifference, a sense of entrapment, and more.

French novelist Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is often regarded as an iconic book on the subject of boredom. The protagonist in Madame Bovary is Emma, who suffers from chronic boredom in the rule-ridden bourgeoisie life of the 19th-century northern French provinces. Her marriage to Charles Bovary quickly becomes all too routine, predictable, dull, and boring. Even giving birth to her daughter, Berthe, and moving to a new town doesn’t alleviate Emma’s acute sense of boredom and depression.

Consequently, Emma tries to escape the claustrophobic domestic life by having illicit affairs with different men, but all these romantic relationships fail to free Emma from the tentacles of boredom and loneliness. In the end, Emma commits suicide by taking poison. What Flaubert seems to be implying is that breaking societal mores doesn’t really work to liberate an individual who is suffering from boredom. In other words, chronic boredom bodes no good.

Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler is also constructed around the theme of boredom. The character of Hedda represents a strong-willed individual who finds herself trapped in a tedious life where free choice is no longer an option. Ibsen powerfully portrays the mortal danger of boredom facing Hedda who affirms her person and spiritual independence and rejects boring compromise by killing herself.

Similarly, one of the recurring themes of the Russian playwright Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya is boredom. We find the young wife, Yelena, in Uncle Vanya complaining: “I’m dying of boredom … I don’t know what to do.” What we find in Chekov’s Uncle Vanya and other plays is that boredom is in the air; the characters are perpetually stuck in hopeless, oppressive circumstances, and unhappy marriages. They all struggle to free themselves from such debilitating boredom and meaningless lives, but fail because “real” life does not often give us that choice.

French philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea is about existential boredom. In the novel, the 30-year old protagonist, Antoine Roquentin realizes that he is imprisoned by freedom and that everything is futile because existence is arbitrary.

The extreme sense of existential boredom that Roquentin suffers from makes him indifferent to his city, acquaintances, sex, his food, and just about everything else he comes into contact with. Sartre shows in Nausea that when a person suffers from this kind of existential boredom, he/she becomes empty and does not expect or cannot receive anything of significance from the world around them.

All the characters in the literary works I have discussed either suffer from ‘common’ or ‘ordinary’ boredom or existential boredom. While ‘common’ or ‘ordinary’ boredom refers to a particular mental state that is extremely unpleasant, lacking in any kind of stimulation, existential boredom, on the other hand, is a malaise that affects a person’s very existence; it may even be perceived as a philosophical sickness. We find Emma in Madame Bovary suffering from ‘common’ or ‘ordinary’ boredom.

                                                                          

                             Isabelle Huppert as  Madame Bovary, directed by Claude Chabrol

On the other hand, Sartre’s protagonist in Nausea, Antoine Roquentin, and Ibsen’s Hedda both suffer from existential boredom. The topic of existential boredom certainly is a complex one and many philosophers and literary figures have addressed it. In Boredom: A Lively History, Peter Toohey describes existential boredom as a “powerful and unrelieved sense of emptiness, isolation and disgust in which the individual feels a persistent lack of interest in and difficulty with concentrating on his current circumstances.”

In the literary works I have mentioned, we find that all the protagonists are suffering from boredom. They all seem to realize that boredom is inherent in everyday life and is thus unavoidable. While some of the main characters manage to assimilate to some extent and find their ways to fight it, others regard boredom as something that is simply unbearable to live with, as is the case with Flaubert’s Emma and Ibsen’s Hedda.

Both are unable to accept boredom and the only option available to them is to rid themselves of boredom by taking their own lives. Although suicide often serves as a leitmotif of literary works on boredom, several scholars point out that in real life suicide has no clear relationship with existential boredom because boredom simply doesn’t produce death-producing suffering in the realization of a meaningless of life unless this realization causes intense depression in the individual.

Boredom is quite widespread in contemporary societies, and it is a normal and incredibly common part of the human experience. Individuals who suffer from boredom usually try to cope with a mundane, routine and tedious life, hoping for the best. All they are left with is a personal existential choice and a personal responsibility for that choice.

Both “common” or “ordinary” and existential boredom is too enervating for most people and can easily lead to agitation, anger and depression. It’s no wonder that Søren Kierkegaard labeled boredom as “the root of all evil” and Oscar Wilde described boredom as the only horrible thing in the world, which was worse than death.

                                                                      Søren Kierkegaard

Bored with life~I   By Abhik Roy  The Statesman , November 11, 2018.

Bored with life~II   By Abhik Roy  The Statesman , November 12, 2018