like daughter: She needed to sleep.
Boredom is a bit like spastic colitis. It is massively overdiagnosed. Also like spastic colitis, we forget that it is essentially an effect, not a cause. Patricia Meyer Spacks refers to the word boredom’s “capacity to blur distinctions.” When we say something is “boring,” it is “an all-purpose term of disapproval.” 4 It’s not dissimilar to describing a baby’s crying as “colic”—or for that matter an adult’s failure to thrive as a case of “low self-esteem.” Spacks, who happens to be a mother as well as a scholar, notes how often boredom is invoked as a screen for more difficult emotions within family life. She refers to “the hidden aggression—every mother knows it—in proclamations of boredom.” 5 Boredom implies victimhood, and even a quasi-self-righteous anger directed at the perceived source of the deprivation (i.e., you!).
An inability or unwillingness to engage may be a side effect of physical fatigue, as we’ve just observed. Children who are sleep-deprived find everything boring (just as their mothers and fathers do). Less obviously, boredom may also mask fear : the fear of failing at some new undertaking, for example, or within a new social setting. Boredom can be erected almost as a shield, a force field protecting us from potential psychic harm. As the expression “numb with boredom” suggests, it can also function as a kind of psychic anesthetic. The real source of discomfort is blunted, or supplanted altogether—which is why, over the long term, addressing boredom by treating it with escalating doses of “entertainment” is a dodgy excuse for a cure. Interestingly, psychoanalysts have observed that boredom and clinical depression are closely related. “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!” moaned Hamlet. Translation: “Muuum ... I’m bored!”
My own experience with boredom also suggests a connection to loss of control. Sitting trapped in a classroom, or at the laundromat, or on a station platform, or in a long-term relationship, or even a perfectly nice foreign country, may be labeled “boring”—but it’s really frustration borne of powerlessness. The resentment we feel at such times may get massaged into something more passive, more socially acceptable. Instead of getting mad, we zone out. In situations where, on the contrary, we perceive we do have what psychologists call “locus of control”—regardless of the level of stimulation we receive—we are less likely to invoke boredom. Even the illusion of choice helps us to reduce boredom’s dead weight.
Paradoxically, too much choice can also induce boredom, or at any rate indifference—almost as if an overload switch has been tripped. An oft-cited study that found shoppers bought more jam the fewer varieties they had to choose from is a sweet illustration of the numbing effect that “options overload” can produce. Thirty years ago, when cable television was an innovation, the joke that you now had access to one hundred channels and there was still nothing on seemed the height of irony. Today it’s more in the nature of a truism. The dilemma has been noted by many observers, among them Orrin Klapp in Overload and Boredom , who points to the “major paradox that growing leisure and affluence and mounting information and stimulation ... lead to boredom—a deficit in the quality of life.” 6
The more interesting life becomes, in other words, the more boredom we are doomed to experience. Kinda fascinating, really.
January 19, 2009
Electricity still awesome.
Bill and Anni to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button today ... together . (The Curious Case of Socializing Siblings?!)
B. lobbied for reimbursement—“Thanks to you and YOUR experiment, we have nothing else to do!” Frankly too stunned to object. Last time they saw a film together was literally last century.
Had hoped to save money, but can see
Boredom is a bit like spastic colitis. It is massively overdiagnosed. Also like spastic colitis, we forget that it is essentially an effect, not a cause. Patricia Meyer Spacks refers to the word boredom’s “capacity to blur distinctions.” When we say something is “boring,” it is “an all-purpose term of disapproval.” 4 It’s not dissimilar to describing a baby’s crying as “colic”—or for that matter an adult’s failure to thrive as a case of “low self-esteem.” Spacks, who happens to be a mother as well as a scholar, notes how often boredom is invoked as a screen for more difficult emotions within family life. She refers to “the hidden aggression—every mother knows it—in proclamations of boredom.” 5 Boredom implies victimhood, and even a quasi-self-righteous anger directed at the perceived source of the deprivation (i.e., you!).
An inability or unwillingness to engage may be a side effect of physical fatigue, as we’ve just observed. Children who are sleep-deprived find everything boring (just as their mothers and fathers do). Less obviously, boredom may also mask fear : the fear of failing at some new undertaking, for example, or within a new social setting. Boredom can be erected almost as a shield, a force field protecting us from potential psychic harm. As the expression “numb with boredom” suggests, it can also function as a kind of psychic anesthetic. The real source of discomfort is blunted, or supplanted altogether—which is why, over the long term, addressing boredom by treating it with escalating doses of “entertainment” is a dodgy excuse for a cure. Interestingly, psychoanalysts have observed that boredom and clinical depression are closely related. “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!” moaned Hamlet. Translation: “Muuum ... I’m bored!”
My own experience with boredom also suggests a connection to loss of control. Sitting trapped in a classroom, or at the laundromat, or on a station platform, or in a long-term relationship, or even a perfectly nice foreign country, may be labeled “boring”—but it’s really frustration borne of powerlessness. The resentment we feel at such times may get massaged into something more passive, more socially acceptable. Instead of getting mad, we zone out. In situations where, on the contrary, we perceive we do have what psychologists call “locus of control”—regardless of the level of stimulation we receive—we are less likely to invoke boredom. Even the illusion of choice helps us to reduce boredom’s dead weight.
Paradoxically, too much choice can also induce boredom, or at any rate indifference—almost as if an overload switch has been tripped. An oft-cited study that found shoppers bought more jam the fewer varieties they had to choose from is a sweet illustration of the numbing effect that “options overload” can produce. Thirty years ago, when cable television was an innovation, the joke that you now had access to one hundred channels and there was still nothing on seemed the height of irony. Today it’s more in the nature of a truism. The dilemma has been noted by many observers, among them Orrin Klapp in Overload and Boredom , who points to the “major paradox that growing leisure and affluence and mounting information and stimulation ... lead to boredom—a deficit in the quality of life.” 6
The more interesting life becomes, in other words, the more boredom we are doomed to experience. Kinda fascinating, really.
January 19, 2009
Electricity still awesome.
Bill and Anni to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button today ... together . (The Curious Case of Socializing Siblings?!)
B. lobbied for reimbursement—“Thanks to you and YOUR experiment, we have nothing else to do!” Frankly too stunned to object. Last time they saw a film together was literally last century.
Had hoped to save money, but can see
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