In Defense of Boredom
In Defense of Boredom
How many times a day, whether at work or at home, do you say or think to yourself, “I’m bored”? If you’re anything like me, it happens unconscionably often. When I was a girl in middle school, I’d constantly complain to my teacher about my boredom, to which he once replied with the age-old saying, “Only the boring get bored.” As soon as he said this—more than anything out of a desire to please the educator on whom I had a dizzying crush, something akin to the Van Halen song, “Hot For Teacher”—I kept my feelings of boredom to myself.
Now that I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun questioning this notion that boredom is a negative feeling, that it’s merely the unfortunate product of living in a modern world with too much time on our hands, in which we don’t have to constantly do physical work for our survival. A couple of years ago, I read Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. In one excerpt, he explains the difference between a true thinker and a mindless worker. He says, “They [thinkers] actually require a lot of boredom if their work is to succeed. For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable ‘windless calm’ of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds. They have to bear it and must wait for its effect on them. Precisely this is what lesser natures cannot achieve by any means. To ward off boredom at any cost is vulgar, no less than work without pleasure.”
Nietzsche’s take on boredom is a fascinating concept, one that I think should be considered seriously, especially by those of us who live fairly “normal” lives. Fear of boredom is what drives us to be always doing, regardless of whether or not the activity is meaningful. This manic desire for action manifests itself in different ways. One example that comes to mind most of you will be familiar with– surfing the Internet addictively. Now don’t get me wrong; I’m guilty of this pretty much daily, and when all is said and done, I do think the Internet has revolutionized our existence more or less for the better.
But while free time spent on the Net can be useful, particularly with staying abreast of what going on in the world, even the informative, has constantly updated Internet news cycle can be harmful if taken to an extreme. The Internet has bombarded us with astounding amounts of data, such that warding off boredom via the Web becomes, simply put, an addiction to information. And by information, I don’t mean the kind of well-developed gems resulting from hours of deliberate pondering; I mean just quick facts, bits of data that we swallow and immediately discharge, without ever really digesting anything.
Charles Baxter, a renowned novelist and essayist, writes about how our allergy to boredom (or stillness,” in his words, which is essentially the lack of action) has had a profound effect on today’s fiction. Baxter argues that currently, there is hardly any stillness in fiction, simply because we fear and ignore stillness in our daily lives. He notes, “If, however, we have truly lost the ability to be interested in stillness … we will have lost the capacity to be accurate about an entire dimension of our experiences.”
So, if you’ve got some extra time on your hands, then enjoy it. Revel in it. Boredom isn’t a disease, and it’s not inimical to a happy, productive life. Sometimes it’s perfectly okay to just sit and do nothing.
By-line:
This guest post is contributed by Emily Thomas, who writes on the topics of top online colleges. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: emily.thomas31@gmail.com.
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April 1st, 2010 at 3:17 pm
I don”t think I”m afraid of boredom, but I do think I feel guilty if I”m not doing something. I”m a loner and don”t need people and chatter and activity all the time or even a lot. So, often, I could be bored, but don”t think I am. My mind is usually or often active.
Boredom is a state of mind, not body.
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April 1st, 2010 at 11:27 pm
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April 2nd, 2010 at 6:27 am
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April 2nd, 2010 at 7:42 pm
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April 2nd, 2010 at 10:09 pm
The older I get, the less time I have to actually get bored. Between work, family, and everything else, I find it amusing that I used to be a very bored kid. Now, I”m thankful whenever I can tell the wife that “I feel bored”. Ah well!
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April 3rd, 2010 at 2:46 am
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April 3rd, 2010 at 6:14 am
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April 3rd, 2010 at 10:41 am
Defence is necessary for all…
Thank you for the post..
April 3rd, 2010 at 6:06 pm
you are welcome about the post, however, it isn”t about defense at all…
April 3rd, 2010 at 8:27 pm
Hey Tatiana, just stopping by to wish you Happy Easter. Tell you the truth, I don”t have time to read your post now, but I will be back. BTW thanks for the card, I will check it out later. Happy Easter my friend, all the best. Anna
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April 7th, 2010 at 4:42 pm
Thank you, and I hope your Easter was lots of fun too Anna dear
May 26th, 2010 at 8:17 am
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June 29th, 2010 at 11:57 pm
I have to agree that boredom isn”t always a bad thing… it certainly does seem to be inevitable sometimes. All the choices we have and the quickness with which technology evolves – which makes us have fewer and fewer things we have to actually DO ourselves as opposed to technology doing things for us – can produce a din that sometimes I think lulls us into boredom.
My mom was a housewife and mother her whole adult life, and I remember more than a few people telling her “Oh, I *have* to work [outside the home], I”d be so *bored* at home. My mom never got that. She never understood people not being able to occupy themselves with a book or with writing or with simply sitting and thinking or praying or just being quiet. She was a dying breed though…
I love your blog btw ^_^
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August 9th, 2010 at 12:31 am
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February 13th, 2011 at 11:34 am
Nice post. I think boredom is very much an environmental child. I have lived in the mountains, on a farm in the countryside and in the sprawling cities of london and Paris (where I currently reside) and the pace of the life dictates your stillness, to use Charles Baxters word. The city is fast, staccato, and it plays on you in this way. There is no fluidity and so you jump from one distraction to the next. The countryside is the polar opposite and so you can sit and stare and not feel compelled to move on to the next thing. Speaking of which…
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May 7th, 2011 at 3:59 pm
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