‘This age of boredom… is now over”. So start On boredomA 2021 essay collection that claims the likes of TikTok and YouTube have driven it to extinction. Nowadays “the time needed to be bored is no longer available”. This view, that boredom has been eradicated, is widely held – so much so that psychologists are beginning to worry that we something lost in the process: attention spans, or the state of emptiness from which creative thoughts must spring.
But last week, a study came out to confirm what’s been lurking in the back of our distracted minds all this time – scrolling through endless content actually makes boredom worse. Of course it does. Open your phone while you’re in line or on the bus, and your brain goes into a restless kind of limbo. If I’m honest, it’s not boredom that makes me reach for Instagram, but the urge to silence other thoughts and emotions under a hum of static, like putting a blanket on a birdcage. Watching other people’s travel slides and home videos was once seen as the epitome of boredom – now it’s all some of us do.
We are more bored these days, not less. This is a paradox of modern life. We can’t stand boredom, but plan for nothing else. People thrive on purpose, danger and other people, but are building a world that cuts these things out. It’s natural instinct to make life smoother and easier – but the impulse to create boredom extends even into our fantasy future. When we try to design perfect places – suburbs with their identical square grass, utopian new towns with their ideally spaced houses and wide, regular roads – we end up in nightmares of monotony. Stimulation is a part of human happiness – it falls into repetitive places and people stand around uncomfortably, cast around for a point of interest, or rush through. But still we are working to eliminate conflict and disorder.
In fact, paradise itself, as we tend to imagine it, would be terribly dull: predictable bliss for all eternity. How we would hate it. In Boredom: A living historywriter Peter Toohey considers a painting of Odysseus on an island with the goddess Calypso, the prospect of immortality before him, “bored stiff in this unchanging sea paradise”.
We rarely talk about boredom as a modern problem, but it is a dangerous emotion, even more so perhaps than anger, which can be extinguished with an apology or a turnaround. Boredom seeks drama, rather than a definite end point, and is therefore difficult to get rid of – prompting all sorts of irrational behaviour. Being really bored is a sick kind of feeling – close to disgust – so unpleasant that you’ll end up doing almost anything to get rid of it. Animals squirm, pace and scratch, and humans can empathize. In one famous experiment, people prefer to give themselves electric shocks rather than sitting alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes.
It’s boredom, I think, that ends up being harnessed by Elon Musk and X’s agents of chaos – the platform that provoked the emotion in the first place, in a business-savvy act of vertical integration. We tend to think of keyboard warriors as spewing rage behind their screens, but that can’t possibly apply to everyone who joins a pileup, or an outburst of racial hatred, or driving others into a riot, as happened in the United Kingdom. month. It’s surely more likely that aimless passers-by make up the numbers – along for a hit of dopamine, the relief of something to do. And could it apply to the actual rioters themselves – who aimed their blows at blameless communities and the wrong religion? Anger tends to know its targets. But many of these brick throwers seemed confused about what they were trying to protest or prove.
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The dangerous effects of boredom have been outlined. A host of recent studies put it behind a number sadistic behavior. Bored participants, given the option, were more likely to shred a (virtual) worm in a coffee grinder. Brutal behavior bubbles up in the military during those boring periods of waiting for the next mission. Parents who report boredom are more likely to be malicious toward their children, if that tendency is already lurking underneath. And in bored people, sadistic fantasies emerge—one study found that these included avenging a rival, robbing a bank, or shooting someone for fun. In fact, a “surprising number of shootings”, the researchers noted, “are carried out by perpetrators out of boredom”.
The mantra of Silicon Valley – smash it and see what happens – appeals to a bored population. How much challenging online behavior is motivated by boredom, like a kid in an elevator pushing all the buttons? The dangers spread from there, to populism to racist anger. America has spent the last two decades churning out films about midlife crises—men trapped in sterile comfort who buy the motorcycle, have the affair, create the drug empire, start the terrorist fight club. It was progressive. After too much dull democracy, the US is in its own midlife crisis, contemplating a second term of Donald Trump.
We are happier in Britain. Our flirtations with populism – Brexit, the Rwanda policy – have become boring bureaucratic nightmares, and we’ve lost interest. But the larger dilemma – the rise of boredom – is difficult to resolve. You cannot put danger and uncertainty back into modern life without overturning it. We are safe, comfortable and dangerously bored. That’s a problem.
