inklingfair We have reason to be afraid of boredom. In Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game, it was boredom that drove General Zaroff to hunt men when he got tired of rhinos and jaguars.
“It had become too easy. I always got my quarry. Always. There is no greater bore than perfection.”
Curating insights on boredom:
- Boredom is ranked with pain as one of the evils of life (Arthur Schopenhauer). Pain is there when you lack something; boredom replaces it when you possess it. “Boredom is an emotion usually associated with a nourished body: like satiety, it is not normally for the starving.”
- Boredom is a function of your frame of attention. If you’re bored with something, you’ve been probably experiencing it the exact same way over and over.
- “Boredom is to disgust what annoyance is to anger” – this disturbs me. The point of inflection where boredom turns into disgust (whether directed at you or from you) feels exactly how it would on a roller-coaster.
- Boredom as the polar opposite of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow” – “a state of intense focus you enter whilst absorbed in an enthralling task, when you lose track of time”.
- Novelty-seeking and rule-breaking quickly become part of the boring state of constant change.
- Boredom’s cousins: risk-taking and sensation-seeking.
- Boredom is adaptive. It’s meant to make you flourish by nudging you out of that zone you’re stagnating in (as in Zaroff’s case). Transient boredom is good. It’s chronic boredom that’s dangerous. Adapt or perish.
Sources (yes, Brain Pickings again):
And what’s a discussion about boredom without the definitive book on boredom in the Bible?
“All things are wearisome. No one can say that eyes have not had enough of seeing, ears their fill of hearing.” (Ecclesiastes 1:8)
Everything is boring! Wisdom, pleasure, work, advancement, riches… What is the cure? The truth is, there is none that we can find by striving on our own. Contentment and enjoyment is a gift. (Ecclesiastes 5:18-19)
So what is there left to fear?
Photo by Juan Gomez on Unsplash
