Why Boredom Matters?

This jumping from stimulus to stimulus is directly at odds with what is required to overcome existential boredom. Overcoming it requires deep, sustained thought about life’s purpose. It also demands concentration and perseverance in conceiving and completing long-term projects, because the most rewarding human activities are not quick or easy. They ask that we work through boredom instead of avoiding it.

One might even understand existential boredom as a wake-up call: Why does nothing seem interesting, everything dull and gray? The answer might be not that the world is boring, but that we ourselves are dull, shallow, and malformed. This ignorance and lack of formation is partly due to the usual suspects of modern culture—vacuous television programs, electronic devices in general, the advertising industry—but we have allowed these influences to shape us. It doesn’t have to be this way. Thus do we arrive at Gary’s therapy for boredom: liberal education understood as the practice of leisure.

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Finally, Gary recommends that we “remember our epiphanies,” advice he gives not so much to young people just starting out as to those of us who have been around for a while. Boredom results not only from continuous distraction or youthful ignorance but also from jadedness about the world. Remembering our epiphanies means recollecting the first time we saw something in nature or perceived a philosophical truth. It means recalling our first meaningful musical performance or skillful painting, that long-ago sudden insight into the mind of another person, or our first falling in love. We must keep hold of epiphanies like these if we do not want to turn into boring, disenchanted old people ourselves.

I think Gary ultimately has it right: The cure for existential boredom must be a certain kind of liberal or “freeing” education, which simultaneously liberates us from the compulsive seeking of pleasure and achievement and shows us the beauty of contemplation. In this wondering, almost childlike mindset, the world is anything but boring. All the impressions, ideas, and happenings we see or receive become permanently ours, filtered through our minds or “inwardly digested,” in the words of Thomas Cranmer. In our idle moments, we no longer need to run from ourselves but have stored up provisions for the welcome times of real leisure.

The irony of self-examination, though, is that we may discover that our greatest happiness comes in paying attention to everything that comprises the not-self. This is a curious kind of self-forgetting.

- Review of the new book Why Boredom Matters: Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life by Kevin Hood Gary