Getting bored now

on boredom's revenge and reclamation

I knew the risks, but I chose entertainment over boredom. My punishment? True boredom denied. For a few hours of gardening or chatting, my body demands repayment with an incomprehensibly severe interest. I settle in for an evening of excruciating restlessness.

This symptom of long covid, with the ugly and evocative title ‘post-exertional malaise’, makes blindingly personal the truth in Blaise Pascal’s line that "all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone".

No amount of reading can prepare you for it. It is the most advanced case of Patricia Meyer Spacks’ characterisation of boredom: “the inability to desire or to have desire fulfilled”. It’s boredom’s furious revenge.

And because suffering is easier if it’s at least possible that it’s part of something bigger, I’m tempted by the idea that this weird reality of mine might be a way into an issue at large.

Hasn’t our relationship to boredom as a whole become toxic? We have exiled it from the village, and now it haunts us from the edges. In banishing boredom, haven’t we lost something precious and replaced it with a monster?

What we did wasn’t a bad idea. Boredom (Sartre’s “leprosy of the soul”) thrived with the rise of consumer capitalism. And, in the middle of the century, boredom was how the system of assembly-line production maintained itself: “When misery stopped working as a control strategy, capitalism switched to boredom” (from the Institute of Precarious Consciousness).

The impulse to resist this gave us the counterculture. A rebellion against the squares and the suits. An explosion of play. Music, art, poetry. Expression and effervescece.

A glorious party of which we find ourselves at the dead-eyed afters.

With our work gamified, and our games workified, our rejection of boredom has been turned against us. What was a sensible response to a stifling economy has been taken by the fuming father and force-fed back to us: oh you think you want to be entertained do you? I’ll show you entertainment. I’ll show you so much entertainment that you’ll never trust yourself with your own freedom again.

Now, boredom is a sin. When the psychoanalyst Adam Philips asked one of his child patients “do you ever feel bored?”, he hears, ”I’m not allowed to be bored”. His parents have a duty to shield him from it. “The adults have decided that the child's life must be, or be seen to be, endlessly interesting.”

But boredom can only be stifled, not eradicated. And when it is, when it cannot be metabolised, it gets lodged, swollen and full of a vicious, unredeemed grief. It blocks all decision, all choice, and any hope of a peaceful relationship with the present.

The child (perhaps me, perhaps you) iPad in hand, finds itself dopamine-drained, with the rage of the addict. Screaming. Wretched. At war with themselves. Needing the thing they are being trained to revile.

Is there any hope?

Stumbling around my laptop on an aimless hunt for something, I found an A4 page of the end of an essay by a 20th-century German guy called Sigfried Kracauer. He’s “associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. He is notable for arguing that realism is the most important function of cinema,” I learn from Wikipedia.

The excerpt starts with a tantalising question: “But what if one refuses to allow oneself to be chased away?” And assertively answers: “Then boredom becomes the only proper occupation, since it provides a kind of guarantee that one is, so to speak, still in control of one's own existence.”

Down the page, he concludes “If one were never bored, one would presumably not really be present at all.” And that if “one has the patience, the sort of patience specific to legitimate boredom, then one experiences a kind of bliss that is almost unearthly”.

Kracauer was getting overwhelmed with modern life. You read the rest of the essay and it seems like he just feels constantly intruded on, and desperate to sit in a cafe without having to hear the radio. He sort of just wants to be alone. Which makes me think the bliss he describes might be just the start.

For I want to roam freely and fearlessly without external stimulation. I want presence, to inhabit this body peacefully and to avoid the seduction of numbness. I want a reclaimed boredom which is at once the winding of the coil, the settling of the dust, and the tightening of the canvas. I want to “rouse” myself, as Kracauer says, “into real boredom”.

But I want this boredom shared; to sit around with friends laughing at the discomfort of having nothing to do; surprising ourselves with what arises in the gap: get the instruments down, paint the wall, make a story. Boredom is our shared right. “All “cultural advance” derives from the need to withstand boredom.’ (Spacks). It is a right, which like all rights, we lose if we don’t exercise it. A right particularly precious as we face the confusion and anguish of an uncertain future, when presence, patience, and decisiveness are most needed. If we can stomach it, we could get bored together and leave our desires un-determined just long enough to get a glimpse our options.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Luilekkerland ("The Land of Cockaigne "), oil on panel 1567