In praise of boredom

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” – French philosopher and inventor Blaise Pascal in his collection Pensées (Thoughts).

We’ve grown so intolerant of delay that we don’t read, we skim. We don’t date, we match. According to data from Spotify, listeners skip 24 percent of songs within the first five seconds and 49 percent of songs before they end. On TikTok, meanwhile, users decide if the video is worth their time within three seconds of viewing; and if it doesn’t load within two – on to the next.

We are numbed-out, overstimulated into indifference, and underwhelmed by everything.

Restless Dissatisfaction

But the crisis is misdiagnosed. The opinion that “work sucks” or that there’s “nothing good on Netflix” is not boredom. It is frustration, it is aggravation, it is restless dissatisfaction, it is the aching weight of unmet expectation but above all, it is the mistake of defining boredom by how it makes us feel, rather than by what it truly is: confusing the symptoms with the illness, like mistaking a fever for the infection itself.

Boredom, throughout history, has stubbornly resisted a precise definition, evading philosophers, scientists, and linguists alike. It is a word that means both too much and too little—the kind of concept that everyone assumes they understand until it comes time to explain it.

But, as Nick Lynch notes in a recent column published on Substack, perhaps the more useful distinction is between feeling bored and being bored. Like the difference between feeling alone and being alone; one is a psychological state and the other is a material circumstance. One a measure of subjective experience, the other a measure of objective conditions.

What this means is that feeling bored is self-reported—you can only know if someone feels bored by asking them. But to know if they are bored, you don’t need words—you need observation: brain scans, environmental situations, introspective awareness, and so on.

Across species, individuals who are happy with less than the greediest amongst us are outcompeted, outreproduced, and ultimately erased from the gene pool. Enough is never enough—because too many successful copies is an impossible error.

Craving Novelty

But wanting more is only half the equation. Our thirst isn’t just for accumulation, but for variety. The same old thing, no matter how pleasurable, is rarely as tempting as a new thing. It is what biologists call novelty-seeking behaviour: the tendency to explore and engage with new stimuli in the environment. As Darwin put it in 1859: “It is in human nature to value any novelty, however slight.”

Chasing newness leads organisms to discover greater sources of food, water, and other vital resources. And in a world of shifting climates, changing ecologies, and constant competition, those willing to try new behaviours or adapt to new habitats often have the advantage.

Attunement to the unfamiliar also sharpens an organism’s ability to detect threats early, increasing the odds of escape before it’s too late – is that thing a stick or a snake? Best be careful. It is a behaviour that keeps creatures scanning, searching, and restless in their pursuit of the next new thing. And when the behaviour stalls, when we stop experiencing novelty, boredom rushes in as a biological fail-safe against stagnation.

Animal studies have found that, for most, over 70 percent of waking life is spent being afraid, stressed, or anxious. And in primates, where social conflict is a bigger part of the equation, this number rises to 85 percent. Research also suggests that negative feelings are felt twice as strongly as positive ones and that cortisol—the primary stress hormone—delivers effects that last thirty to sixty times longer than dopamine or serotonin, further exacerbating this hellish existence.

Technology Evolves Faster Than We Do

The root of today’s suffering is that we are operating on an inherited psychological system where the most stable evolutionary strategy is a life filled with stress and anxiety, and so no matter what the outside conditions (i.e., full belly, empty belly, rich, poor, etc.), the inside machinery will always adjust the experience meter back toward unbearable static.

It is the reason why zoo animals, spared from hunger and fear, pace endlessly, gnaw at their own limbs, or pluck themselves bald in fits of unseen agony. It is their brains demanding a stress that no longer exists.

People seem increasingly incapable of doing what they used to do. A recent study published in Nature found that, across all fields, “papers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions.”

Another study found that the number of “important events in the history of science and technology” has plummeted by over 50 percent in the most recent generation (i.e., millennials). A trend that is reflected in the average age of Nobel Prize winners who, across virtually every field—from physics to literature—keep getting older, and who’s quality of discovery, as rated by scientists, keeps getting worse.

The best method of enjoying life for a longer time is therefore to keep interested in something – anything, be it sport, social, science, adventure, computer mind games or whatever. More and more people are seeking help by going to restaurants where they are obliged to turn their phones off and actually talk to each other and enjoy their food, for example.  We don’t need distraction from ourselves.