In a 2023 piece published in The Atlantic titled “What Did People Do Before Smartphones?”, technology writer Ian Bogost sets himself the task of recalling what daily life was like pre circa 2000 — a time before smartphones became ubiquitous. He and his middle-aged friends compare notes and conclude, to their horror: “We couldn’t remember what we did, because there was nothing to remember having done. We did nothing, and it was horrible. Filling the nothingness with activity of any sort became a constant exercise.” He goes on to mercilessly puncture the seemingly easy truisms about how smartphones are making us more distracted, less connected. Here’s how he concludes, just in case there was some subtlety that stood to be missed:
“I cannot overemphasize how little there was to do before we all had smartphones. A barren expanse of empty time would stretch out before you: waiting for the bus, or for someone to come home, or for the next scheduled event to start. Someone might be late or take longer than expected, but no notice of such delay would arrive, so you’d stare out the window, hoping to see some sign of activity down the block. You’d pace, or sulk, or stew … Before smartphones, people didn’t invest their in-between time into forging social bonds or doing self-improvement. They mostly suffered through constant, endless boredom.”
It is fair to say that boredom is a distinctly modern terror — though, of course, it long predates modern times. There are telltale traces of it in the Hebrew writings of “Qohelet” (or “The Teacher”, in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes) which speaks of activity producing nothing, yielding nothing, gaining nothing. (There’s good reason to think these reflections were prompted by the emergence of “money” in the older cultures of Asia Minor — which became an object of pursuit, and yet finally arbitrary and unsatisfying.) From Homer to Dante to Montaigne, sloth or listlessness or torpor (in Greek, akēdeia) was condemned as a deformity or distortion of the will, and the seedbed of all manner of perversity and ill-disciplined thoughts. From Kant to Bernard Williams, boredom is associated with callousness, indifference, philistinism, blindness.
It is when we reach Gustave Flaubert and Anton Chekhov, to take two important examples, that boredom (ennui in French, skuka in Russian) becomes the backdrop against which characters rebel against the repetitiveness of (typically) provincial life and attempt to slake their restlessness. But rarely without damage to themselves and others. It is as if boredom is a condition of reality itself, a sentiment that points to an indissociable aspect of human existence.
So what to make, then, of our seemingly endless longing for distraction, for something to fill the minutes (even if it is, precisely, pointless activity), and our unwillingness to confront the mere passage of time? Existential boredom is something many millions throughout the world confronted during lockdowns over the course of the pandemic, confronted as we were with little to do other than simply exist with others. And it was an experience many never want to repeat. Are we worse for it?
A fascinating counter-perspective is provided by the Russian-American essayist and poet, Joseph Brodsky, who delivered an address to the graduating class of Dartmouth College in 1989 on the topic “In Praise of Boredom”. Here’s what he writes:
“When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is, the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface … The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor … In a manner of speaking, boredom is your window on time, on those properties of it one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. In short, it is your window on time’s infinity, which is to say, on your insignificance in it …
For boredom is an invasion of time into your set of values. It puts your existence into its perspective, the net result of which is precision and humility.
This is what it means — to be insignificant. If it takes will-paralyzing boredom to bring this home, then hail the boredom. You are insignificant because you are finite. Yet the more finite a thing is, the more it is charged with life, emotions, joy, fears, compassion. For infinity is not terribly lively, not terribly emotional. Your boredom, at least, tells you that much. Because your boredom is the boredom of infinity.”
The question then becomes: What do we stand to lose if you lose the preparedness to be bored?
This episode was first broadcast on 06 August 2023.
Guest: Stan Grant is a Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi man. He is a distinguished journalist, author, and one of Australia’s most influential public intellectuals. He has recently been appointed as Vice Chancellor’s Chair of Australian-Indigenous Belonging at Charles Sturt University. His most recent book is The Queen Is Dead.
You can read Stan Grant's reflections on boredom on ABC Religion & Ethics.