Concept
Boredom
Overview
In conventional usage, boredom, ennui, or tedium is an emotion characterized by uninterest in one's surrounding, often caused by a lack of distractions or occupations. However, boredom is not well defined. It is distinct from depression and apathy. Boredom may damage mental health, but it also seems to have improved creativity in humans.
In Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity, Elizabeth Goodstein traces the modern discourse on boredom through literary, philosophical, and sociological texts to find that as "a discursively articulated phenomenon...boredom is at once objective and subjective, emotion and intellectualization—not just a response to the modern world, but also a historically constituted strategy for coping with its discontents." In both conceptions, boredom has to do fundamentally with an experience of time—such as experiencing the slowness of time—and problems of meaning.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Boredom is discussed.
In like manner no one has ever yawned during his maiden speech in the House of Lords, with the exception of the late Duke of Devonshire, who was reverenced by their Lordships in consequence. Boredom is essentially a thwarted desire for events, not necessarily pleasant ones, but just occurrences such as will enable the victim of _ennui_ to know one day from another. The opposite of boredom, in a word, is not…
Bertrand Russell, The conquest of happiness
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
This is a precise proof that existence in itself has no value, since boredom is merely the feeling of the emptiness of life. If, for instance, life, the longing for which constitutes our very being, had in itself any positive and real value, boredom could not exist; mere existence in itself would supply us with everything, and therefore satisfy us. But our existence would not be a joyous thing unless we were…
Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays of Schopenhauer
names the idea; states what it is; author linked in the graph
This is the true source of boredom--a continual panting after excitement, in order to have a pretext for giving the mind and spirits something to occupy them. The kind of things people choose for this purpose shows that they are not very particular, as witness the miserable pastimes they have recourse to, and their ideas of social pleasure and conversation: or again, the…
Arthur Schopenhauer, The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer
names the idea; author linked in the graph
We decide at last not to read the poem again, because we know that this time the effect would be boredom. We may not know all the niceties and shades of the boredom we should feel, but we know enough to guide our decision, and the prophecy of boredom is none the less true for being more or less general. Thus the kinds of cases upon which Bergson relies are insufficient to show the impossibility of prediction in the…
Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy
states what it is; names the idea
In point of fact, there is in contempt too strong an admixture of nonchalance, of casualness, of boredom, of impatience, even of personal exultation, for it to be capable of distorting its victim into a real caricature or a real monstrosity. Attention again should be paid to the almost benevolent _nuances_ which, for instance, the Greek nobility imports into all the words by which it distinguishes the common people…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy.
author linked in the graph; names the idea
Philosophers who discussed Boredom
Related ideas
- Emotion
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Franz Kafka
- Hedonism
- Creativity
- Nausea (novel)
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Fin de siècle
- Decadence
- Positive psychology
- Learning
- Fiction
- Moscow
- Nihilism
- Psychology
- Pessimism
- Perception
- Søren Kierkegaard
- Ubuntu philosophy
- The New York Times
- Martin Heidegger
- Blaise Pascal
- Meaning (philosophy)
- Critical theory
Place in the tradition
Part of Existentialism.