Boredom and Injustice

The emotional price of being poor: How boredom harms those who are less affluent

It seizes us at home or at work, in open spaces or behind closed doors. It sneaks upon us when we are alone or in the company of others, on computers or exercise bikes, while standing up or lying down. It envelops us in buses and on planes, behind the wheel, around the dining table, in poorly ventilated classrooms, and in uncomfortable waiting-room chairs. It’s with us even when we are out of this world. “Funny thing happened on the way to the moon: not much,” wrote Gene Cernan, the last person on the moon.

We are all affected by boredom. Yet not all of us are affected by it in the same way. “Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning,” Marcel Proust writes in his Remembrance of Things Past, expressing the Nietzschean thought that boredom is the emotional storm before the creative calm. New habits, opportunities, and careers often start with the thought “I’m bored.” But the same holds for unhealthy eating habits, binge drinking, drug use, or utter destruction. “I guess I was just bored,” Keith Eugene Mann said explaining why he ignited two fires in western North Carolina that scorched 16 acres of forest in 2016. “Fact is I had no reason to do it, I just thought … fuck it, life is boring so why not?” posted gunman Ian David Long on social media while killing12 people in Thousand Oaks, California, in 2018.

Researchers have recently learned a great deal about boredom as a psychological and neurological phenomenon. It is studied closely in labs, and sometimes in the real world. Scores of academic papers have been published. Willing participants answer questions in person, in front of their computers, on their phones, at work, even inside fMRI machines. At other times, they are left alone in laboratory rooms, made to watch tedious videos, and asked to perform tiring vigilance tasks, to fold pieces of paper, to copy down lists of references, and even to chase after a mechanical, pink-eyed, jacket-and-scarf-wearing rabbit—all with the hopes of understanding the true character of boredom.

Is boredom first and foremost a cognitive phenomenon? And if so, is it the outcome of our inability to pay attention? “None of this is banal, only if you would attend to it,” Jenny Offill writes in her book Dept. of Speculation, giving literary voice to this idea. Or is the inattention characteristic of boredom derivative, a symptom of an underlying meaninglessness with our situation? Is boredom something more general and slightly more ineffable? Is it an inability to properly make use of our cognitive abilities—“the shriek of unused capacities,” as Saul Bellow memorably puts it in The Adventures of Maggie March? Or is boredom something else entirely? Could it be an unshaped wish, that vague “desire for desires” that Tolstoy mentions? Could it be the result of a physiological disruption, a state of nonoptimal arousal that follows our inability to be stimulated in the right way, as other researchers have suggested? There’s no shortage of views about boredom. If anything, there’s an embarrassment of theoretical and empirical riches.

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I favor a functional view of boredom. This view identifies boredom with a specific role within our behavioral and mental economy. Boredom is an attempted transition from an input state to an output state. It arises when we find ourselves in a meaningless, uninteresting, non-stimulating, or overly stimulating situation—any situation, in fact, for which there’s a perceived mismatch between desired engagement and actual engagement. It reflects a dissatisfaction with our situation and can help us move out of our current state of discontent and into one that is either in line with our interests and values or engaging and stimulating in the right way. Boredom isn’t a perception, a thought, a pain, a distraction, or a sensation. It’s a mechanism for action, a call to move when we’ve become stuck.

The functional view synthesizes a great deal of the literature on boredom. It makes sense of how the different aspects of boredom work together to promote the exercise of boredom’s regulatory function. It generates hypotheses and opens up doors for future research. The functional view also puts to rest the view that boredom is a toxic psychological state, bereft of value. If boredom serves a function, then it can’t be always bad. Indeed, understood as a self-regulatory mechanism, boredom is a boon. It signals the presence of unsatisfactory situations and motivates escape from them. It’s an insurance policy of sorts against the blahs, meaninglessness, and never-ending doldrums.

But we must not draw the wrong conclusion from the functional view. To focus on the positives of boredom without acknowledging its harms is to accept half-truths. These are statements that put a particular spin on our understanding of boredom. They selectively emphasize the positive; they minimize its harms. Half-truths aren’t lies but they still spell trouble. In the case of boredom, string enough of them together and a misleading suggestion arises: the beneficial responses to boredom are available to everyone. The positive gloss on boredom makes it attractive but only by concealing its core. Boredom begins to seem like a good for all, when it should not.

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Boredom is a push for escape, not the guarantee of one. Bring to mind a seemingly never-ending work shift or a mandatory meeting. The boredom they induce is inescapable. Think of Edgar Degas’ ironing women (See photo above). They stand exhausted, oppressed by labour and the monotony of their task. They are bored. And they are forced to remain so until their work concludes. The feeling of boredom won’t suffice to get us out of our discontent. We must also have the resources, freedom, time, and energy to do so.

Even when boredom motivates change, it’s not necessarily for the better. Boredom is functional, yes, but it isn’t a remedy for all of life’s ills. Our responses to boredom can be beneficial or harmful, moral or immoral, profound or mundane. Boredom is an instigator of change—a felt provocation to take action and to respond to a perceived crisis of agency. Through its affective, cognitive, volitional, and physiological features, boredom calls on us to do something other than what we are currently doing.

All the same, it never reveals to us what that something else is. And it doesn’t fabricate opportunities when those don’t exist. Without access to the right source of alternative engagements, and without guidance as to what might be worth pursuing, it is easy to choose the wrong way—sometimes the only way—out of boredom. It’s no surprise that maladaptive responses to boredom abound. This is especially true for those of us who find ourselves often in the grips of boredom, distressed and bedraggled by its force. Binge drinking, drug use, gambling, mindless eating, self-harm, even disobeying social distancing measures can all serve the function of avoiding the doldrums of life. They don’t serve a greater purpose and may even lead us back to boredom. Yet they offer us a much-needed, albeit temporary, respite from ennui.

If we lack the material and psychological resources to properly respond to boredom’s onset, it can become a burden and threat to our well-being. When boredom finds us in a place of stress, of dependency on others, of poverty, of loneliness, we stand psychologically compromised. Our capacity to respond to boredom is undermined, and we are less likely to alleviate it in productive ways. It affects most severely those who, because of no fault on their own (their psychological, social, or material standing), have a hard time escaping productively out of boredom. In this way, boredom can be unjust.

The nature of its injustice becomes discernible when we turn our attention to how boredom works in conditions of material scarcity. Decades of research on the psychology of poverty have shown that poverty affects self-regulatory processes, coping styles in response to stress and difficult situations, decision-making, mental and physical health, and even our beliefs about the efficacy of our actions. Worse still, research has found that poverty puts one in an almost inescapable bind: Poverty influences our psychology and behavior in ways that further harm us financially.

Conditions of material scarcity are an especially fecund ground for the experience of boredom. In poverty, we are often incapable of choosing our means of livelihood. We are restricted in the manner in which we carry out the activities that we are forced to carry out. We lack the ability to change jobs, to move, to take breaks, to relax, to decompress. There’s no opportunity to learn an instrument or to travel. There’s no time to gaze lazily at the starry night. Our attentional resources are consumed by worries and thoughts of monetary scarcity. And we experience less control and greater dependency on external factors. All of these conditions are known antecedents of boredom.

Poverty not only invites boredom but also corrodes our ability to face up to it. Poverty takes a toll on our self-regulatory abilities and impairs mental and cognitive functioning, especially when it comes to decision-making. In doing so, it has the capacity to derail our coping mechanisms and to even further solidify our vulnerability to boredom. In poverty, boredom can become cruel and unjust—a scourge that afflicts those who are the least capable of dealing with it.

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Poverty doesn’t appear to be unique in escalating the harms of boredom. Other conditions that exert prolonged and severe stress on us—loneliness, chronic pain, psychological dependency—may lead to the same worrisome outcomes. But none of this contradicts the functional account. It rather highlights the need to keep in mind the bivalence of boredom.

An overly optimistic presentation of boredom generates unrealistic expectations. It obfuscates its dangers. It can even assign blame for our failure to cope productively with boredom when often such a failure is beyond our control. An excessively pessimistic picture is also flawed. It leads us to underappreciate boredom, perhaps even to fear it. It robs us of the opportunity to make use of our rich emotional life. It doesn’t permit us to listen to boredom when it needs to be heard. It doesn’t allow us to be motivated by it when we are in need of its push.

Our words about boredom matter. They shape the discourse of boredom and in doing so, influence our expectations concerning its experience and outcomes. If we want to get boredom right, we must describe it evenhandedly.

Photo: “Women Ironing” by Edgar Degas (via Wikimedia Commons)

Andreas Elpidorou

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Andreas Elpidorou (@aelpidorou) is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Louisville. He specializes in the philosophical study of the mind and has published on the nature of emotions, consciousness, and cognition. His most recent book, Propelled: How Boredom, Frustration, and Anticipation Lead Us to the Good Life (Oxford University Press, 2020), explores how negative emotions and states of discontent can help us live a flourishing life. His work on boredom has been featured in venues such as BBC News, Forbes, Nautilus, Fast Company, Vogue, Business Insider, Huffington Post, and others, and he has made appearances on both radio and television.