On the Terror of Silence with Nothing to Do
“Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
My approach to boredom is briefly summarized by Nietzsche, in the quote above. It’s not a feeling I experience often, and I only express it in such terms because I can’t theoretically rule out ever being bored. However, if you were to ask me to recall a specific instance, I don’t know if I would be able to give you an example. Maybe precisely because of that, I find boredom to be a fascinating state of mind. So much so that I sometimes look up studies to see if someone is doing research on it. I wish there were such thing as neuroscience of boredom. Alas.
Let’s begin with literature, and let’s start with the most pretentious type. David Foster Wallace writes the following:
To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.
As a psychotherapist, what I do all day is listen to other people and their stories. Some of what Wallace writes rings true, although it’s rarely expressed quite so eloquently.
Some of my Googling expeditions yielded results such as this:
Because we certainly have to turn every form of “non-happiness” into a disorder that needs treating. Perhaps I’ll leave that rant for some other time. This is only to illustrate that much of what we find online about boredom isn’t quite as useful as a nice, meaty Wallace’s passage.
An article published in the Scientific American discusses the scarcity of research and quotes an interesting survey of US teenagers. Those who report being often bored were 50% more likely than their less-frequently bored peers to later take up smoking, drinking and illegal drugs. Boredom appears to significantly affect student performance, and every psychologist will tell you that proneness to boredom is one of the neglected but important symptoms of borderline personality disorder.
Even though difficult to define and study, this “terror of silence with nothing to do” is obviously a phenomenon that shouldn’t be neglected.
Most of the definitions of boredom I’ve seen use the phrase lack of stimulation in one way or another. Whereas I understand the temptation to describe it that way, I don’t think it’s entirely accurate. As many of my clients with body-focused repetitive behaviors will tell you, boredom triggers them to pull their hair or pick their skin, but it doesn’t trigger them to take up reading Heidegger, cleaning the house or finishing up their work. Tolstoy called boredom a desire for a desire – a much more poetic way to say exactly what the scientists are saying. But what is the desire that is being desired?
The desire to pick their skin or pull their hair – to use that example - produces a number of different effects. Two are, I believe, important to understand boredom:
BFRBs often produce a feeling or release, gratification, or relief (followed by shame and guilt, but that’s beside the point here)
It helps a person focus, whether on the act itself (when a picking/pulling “trance” occurs) or on another activity such as reading or watching TV.
To continue playing with Tolstoy’s phrase, perhaps we can say that boredom is the desire for tension release, but this only covers a part of it. First of all, if you’re not well attuned and mindful of your feelings, you might entirely miss this part. If you struggle with a BFRB, you might notice automatic pulling or picking, because that’s what the desire s for: to alleviate the tension and BFRBs do that wonderfully well.
In order to fully understand boredom as a specific form of desire take a look at this exchange I recently had with a client (permission given to show parts of the transcript):
CLIENT: I had a whole bottle of wine because I was bored. I was sitting there, watching Stranger Things and all I could think about was wine. Red, white, dry, sweet, expensive, cheap… doesn’t matter… just wine.
VLADIMIR: What were these thoughts like?
CLIENT: They were actually more like memories and feelings. Memories of previous time when I had wine while watching TV. It’s embarrassing to admit but that’s what my ideal evening is: trashy TV and wine.
VLADIMIR: What about feelings?
CLIENT: They were a bit vague. Feeling like I can’t sit still. Like I should be doing something else. Work? My legs just wanting to move. Itchy skin, I have dandruff from scratching my head. Just not being able to sit still.
VLADIMIR: And when you started drinking, what changed?
CLIENT: Nothing much. I relaxed and finished Season 4.
VLADIMIR: Did you enjoy the show?
CLIENT: No, after season one it got really stupid.
VLADIMIR: Why did you watch it then?
CLIENT: Honestly, I don’t know. I got home from work, what else?
Here we see someone who resorted to drinking a bottle of wine in order to be able to continue doing something he was not interested in doing. Alcohol allowed him to continue to be unstimulated – it gave him the possibility of continuing to engage in something he doesn’t like without having to put in the effort to change.
If we follow conventional logic and think of boredom as just lacking stimulation, we will miss a very important point. My client had to drink in order to resist seeking stimulation: he had a whole bottle of wine so that he wouldn’t have to look inward and reflect on what he truly needs in that moment. Watching Stranger Things was his version of autopilot. Flaubert’s Emma Bovary acts on her own boredom stemming from uneventful provincial life, albeit in a morally ambiguous way, but her approach to boredom is certainly healthier than my client’s.
To throw in another pointless literary reference, at the very beginning of Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera directly says that when events repeat themselves over and over again, they lose their meaning. In late capitalism, we live lives that are repetitive. We are oppressed by the imperative to be productive, and then between being productive and sleeping, we are distracted by numerous shiny objects, TV shows and other such nonsense that isn’t really meaningful to most of us. You can call that lack of stimulation, but the truth is, we’re overly stimulated, it’s just that the stimulation we receive is not meaningful enough.
Another rare article on the topic points to something important, albeit in passing: we tend to explore the negative aspects of boredom. In fact, we can make the case that boredom is an indication of our privilege. I know that word gets thrown around easily, but hear me out. According to Heidegger, boredom as we know it today is a state of mind made ubiquitous by societal changes that came about with the emergence of modernity in Europe. The article I mentioned articulates a useful definition of boredom that offers a guide for action:
Boredom is both a warning that we are not doing what we want to be doing and a “push” that motivates us to switch goals and projects.
In other words, boredom is a message, an invitation to look inward and see what we need in the moment. It’s only when we’re afraid to look inward that we have to find ways of coping with boredom.
In therapy and beyond – with friends, family, with ourselves – we will dissect and analyze heartbreak, sadness, loss, happiness, etc. We will find theories and explanations; we’ll communicate them with people around us. We will ask for comfort when we need it or share our joy when we’re happy. Boredom, however, often ends up overlooked. When someone calls you, you might say you’re bored in passing, but it’s highly unlikely that you will spend time reflecting on it.
Boredom carries information, and that information is often profound. It’s overlooked simply because it’s delivered in an unpleasant way to a generation of people taught that they are not supposed to be uncomfortable or feel bad. If being bored is a historical privilege, escaping boredom is the kind of privilege we don’t even have a word for: it’s second order privilege that causes suffering we then blame on boredom so as to escape any sense of responsibility for our needs.
One of my Frankfurt School favorites, Adorno, wrote that boredom only exists under the condition of being trapped by work. When we come home from work, we might think we’re free from work, but in fact, our lives are deeply shaped by work. Leisure time only exist because our lives are centered around work. I find that this is quite frequently true. When our identities revolve around what we do, the rest of our personality is fuzzy. In the private sphere, identities don’t exist. If you’re sitting alone in your bedroom not knowing what to do, it doesn’t matter if you’re gay, a surgeon or whatever other social category. What matters in that space is the rest of you, the you that is not given any space in public, the you that can only be found if you dig deep and see what’s inside. That, however, is terrifying. What if you discover that the career you’re so invested in isn’t for you? What if you discover that you perhaps aren’t all that happy being a mother? What if you don’t want to be productive? Diving into these corners of our psyche is dangerous, so we prefer to stay away. It’s kind of like swimming in the ocean and suddenly noticing the water becoming colder and then suddenly darker. The light translucent blue becomes black. How many choose to dive into the depths and explore, and how many look up until they’re back to safety of the shallows?
