Ep. 5 - Boredom: From the Dread of Empty Time to the Fullness of Creativity
What is boredom?
Although typically understood as the absence of an activity or doing nothing, boredom could be felt more poignantly when there is a perceived monotony of an activity, especially a prolonged, exasperating, “too much of the same” kind of activity. In this vein, doing nothing is not experienced as boredom if it is freely chosen. Rather, we feel bored when we experience ourselves captive in an activity or space that does not interest us, when we are not free but trapped in something that does not involve us. Essentially, boredom is an experience of not being personally involved or not showing up, and of feeling disconnected from oneself, and from life and its possibilities. In these situations, time feels empty and heavy at the same time. There is an impending sense that time is passing and an inability to seize the moment and to know what the moment requires of us. Boredom may appear when there are lots of possibilities waiting for us and we do not know which one to choose because we lost our value orientation. In boredom, we are thrown upon ourselves and we are radically just with ourselves. We are ourselves given to ourselves as a task since nothing in the realm of perceived possibilities is given to us as essence or as our task. This generates uncomfortable feelings ranging from restlessness to unpleasantness to pain, and we may be tempted to escape these unpleasant feelings by searching something outside to distract ourselves when in fact the invitation of boredom is to search within ourselves to be creative and to find a renewed sense of meaning. Entertainment from outside is escaping from boredom while creativity means finding a personal response to boredom.
How does boredom feel?
Usually, boredom is experienced as unpleasant and uncomfortable, even painful, or as a torturous frustration. It may feel like an unlivable place imbued with the atmosphere of the threshold: tasteless, colourless, annihilating because there is no felt life, no meaning, no connection with vitality. When we are bored, we feel tired, drained, ineffective, powerless. Nothing is moving, nothing captures or reaches us. We feel given to ourselves when we do not want that. We experience disconnection from life and from meaning understood as orientation toward a value.
What is the question that boredom asks us?
Viktor Frankl coined the concept of “existential turn” which posits that every life situation is a challenge or a task for each of us, and that we are asked to give our personal response to what life is asking of us in each situation. Using this concept in the context of understanding boredom, we may ask ourselves not only how to escape from or get rid of boredom but also how to find freedom, meaning and creativity in boredom. We are asked to choose among the many possibilities and to show up even in or through boredom. This way, boredom is an opportunity, a gift, and an invitation to inhabit our existential space and time, to be creative, to find our authentic task in being thrown upon ourselves, and to exercise our “freedom for” not only our “freedom from”. Boredom is asking us to show up, to take ourselves seriously, and to give our response. It asks us to make a decision and to reengage with life. Boredom invites us to ponder how and when we stepped out of the flow of life and fell off the rhythm of life. Boredom is asking us to turn toward ourselves not only towards the outside entertainment and to find again the vibrancy of life through our creative response.
How do deal with boredom?
It is very tempting to deal with boredom by distracting ourselves and by searching some way to experience more vitality. Sometimes, distractions may be attempts to reconnect with life and with values, and what begins as a distraction may become the path towards reengaging with life. However, sometimes it may also be fruitful to allow ourselves to be bored rather than trying hard to pull ourselves out of it. This may look like accepting to feel dispossessed of time, and to live in austerity and with limitations when there is reduced vitality and zest for life. Staying with the impassionate pain of boredom and taking it up requires some ground because it may feel too hard and even annihilating for some people. The myth of Sisyphus from Greek mythology may offer some pretext for reflection regarding how the very object of our ordeal may constitute the anchor for our capacity to be with boredom and not to put down our existential task.