In a world of never-ending change, of infinite complexity and activity, the existence of boredom is a bit strange. Our time is limited and something is always happening; how could one get bored? The reality, though, is that we all experience tedious, unengaging, monotonous times. Underneath the dynamism of life is a repetitiveness that we quickly acclimate to, and in short order what was newly exciting becomes stale.
I guess it’s a byproduct of the unbelievable computing power of the human brain. It recognizes patterns with such efficiency, it learns so fast, that near constant novelty is required for stimulation. And finding this novelty takes energy, creativity, and a level of discomfort that clashes with simultaneous desires for stability and safety and calm, a craving for the known.
How one deals with inevitable boredom ends up being a defining trait. Tolerance of boredom is quantified as our “attention span,” basically an expression of how long one can maintain concentration on the task at hand. This dictates how we act and live: the sorts of jobs we take, the hobbies we enjoy, the depth of our relationships with the world around us, essentially what we like to do and how we fill our days. How we handle boredom, this weird underlying constant that inherently necessitates effort to avoid, is fundamental to our personality.
A common refrain nowadays is that modern technology has destroyed attention spans, which has dumbed humanity down into a depressed, flaccid mess of confused individuals. At its core, the argument is that we’re more bored than ever, which makes us unfulfilled, despite and because of having easier access to nearly unlimited content. People can’t figure out how to feed their insatiable mind anymore. These sentiments have been taken to another level during COVID lockdowns.
I’m not so sure about this. Without a doubt we’re more exposed to quick-trigger stimulants, flashing electronic lights and dopamine hits than our ancestors were. Maybe our attention spans are shortened. But I believe in the universality of boredom. I think it’s been present among humans since our first days on Earth, and that its presence has spurred our collective advancement. As long we’ve had these brains, we’ve strived to satisfy them with constant exploration and challenge.
An ancient, extroverted shepherd whose livelihood demanded he keep watch over grazing ruminants all day, every day, watching the sun move across the sky in the quiet still meadows, must have felt boredom akin to what someone might feel today. A young, curious housewife obligated to stay home instead of in school must understand boredom regardless of what era she lived in.
Maybe the scale of the phenomenon is larger than before, that more people are more often bored than during previous times. How to even begin measuring this is beyond me. But on an individual level, I think we ultimately face the same conundrums humans have always faced. We're more similar than different.
I got to this topic while reading The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, a book essentially about boredom in contemporary life. He sets the story in just about the most bland, unremarkable place imaginable: an IRS office in Peoria, Illinois, a flat expanse of Kafkaesque bureaucracy and mind-numbing work. He humanizes the employees by showing how they deal with boredom—their inner thoughts, their interaction on breaks, their histories, their gossip, their hopes. In a way he valorizes these oddballs who do what most of us cannot, facing tedium head-on and conquering it.
Wallace makes the reader grapple with boredom, too. He wrote a dense book with loads of detail on accounting and the IRS structure. Parts are difficult to get through. But this is the point. I think he wanted us to really feel what he was writing about, to grapple with it like his characters do and understand ourselves more fully as a result. It reminded me of ASAP Rocky’s album Testing in that both feel like a challenge from the creator to his audience to self-reflect. Both works grew on me over time as I recognized their interactive nature.
I think it’s unsustainable to rely on external forces as a salve to boredom. The most infallible solution, I believe, is changing our own mindset about the whole thing. We can train our brains to focus, to find the specific originality of every moment we’re alive. We can’t really escape boredom, but I believe we can learn to embrace the oft-ignored details that make up life. Instead of settling into the familiar patterns our brains create, we can examine our lives in more minute and expansive ways. In these investigations we can find endless wonders.
