What benefits can boredom bring us? In the latest episode of the Build for Tomorrowpodcast, Jason Feifer dives into boredom's complicated history to find some answers.

The origin of boredom

While the concept of boredom is relatively new — at least in name — the experience of boredom extends far deeper into human history. According to Susan Matt, a History professor at Weber State University and one of the authors of Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid, the roots stretch back to Ancient Greece.

"So the ancient Greeks had a word 'acedia,' which meant listlessness, and early Christians applied it to monks, who went out into the desert, lived alone, and got struck with a melancholy that made them falter in their devotion to God," Matt says.

This created a problematic situation for the monks — how could you get bored while doing something so ostensibly important as serving God?

"It became a sign of your lack of devotion to God and to your monastic vows," Matt says.

This is how, according to Matt, boredom became a sin. It evolved over the centuries, migrating beyond the monastery by the 12th century.

"Now the average person could suffer from it as well if they weren't super into doing their prayers," Feifer says. "Around the same time, the French developed a similar word, ennui, which was not specific to religion. It just meant 'a draining listlessness.'"

By the 18th century, ennui had been adopted into the English language. And in the burgeoning United States, ennui was regarded as a scourge.

"It could lead to drunkenness or drunkenness could cause it depending on who you consulted. It could lead to masturbation, or perhaps, masturbation could cause it," Matt says. "So there's this whole litany of Victorian sins that are linked to idleness and ennui. So that comes up in a lot of asylum reports and newspaper reports."

Importantly, ennui, like acedia, was still predominantly a concern among the elite.

"Just like acedia in early Christianity was thought to only afflict monks, ennui in early America was thought to only afflict the wealthy," Feifer says. "The working people, it was believed, had plenty to keep them busy, so ennui was what people felt when they had too much leisure and not enough to do. It was a very real boredom, but also a kind of guilt or shame for all their excess time, which made ennui a complex experience."

Luke Fernandez, also a professor at Weber State University and the other author of Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid, explained that working people certainly experienced what we might call boredom, but they were more likely to use words like wearisome or dull. And they didn't ascribe a moral function to it — it was just a product of their work.

"When you're out there on your farm or on your homestead and trying to plow the land or harvest a crop, there's a lot of tedium and monotony involved in that activity, but you don't attach much import to that because you see so much virtue in the actual work you're doing," Fernandez says. "And so, people from the middle classes, the yeoman farmers, the people out in the homesteads, they felt tedium, they felt monotony, but they didn't worry about it the way upper classes did."

Rather than fighting the boredom or trying to atone for it, many working people simply accepted it as a reality of life — using the time to daydream or read. That is, until the Industrial Revolution.

Boredom changed because our relationship with work changed

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the concept of work changed dramatically because of industrialization. And with this change came a change in the nature of what boredom was, who experienced it, and how.

"When industrialization increased in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it changed the way people thought about work. Beforehand, many Americans worked for themselves," Feifer says. "Now, more people were working for others doing a single task in a factory over and over. And they found very little virtue in that."

It is under this backdrop that the word "boredom" finally takes centre stage.

"In the 18th century, the word 'bore' described a very dull person," Feifer says. "And then in the mid-19th century, that evolved into the word 'boredom,' which was a state of mind. This became a useful word because of course, the word ennui was still associated with the wealthy, but anyone, no matter their job or status, could be bored."

But if the overriding sentiment about work is that it generates boredom — rather than some intrinsic value — that creates a problem for employers. What value system can be used to keep enough people in the jobs for the enterprise to continue?

"This was a revolution in how many conceived of life's meaning … Many came to believe that pleasure, happiness, excitement and novelty were their birthright."

"When work sucks, then your off-the-clock time must compensate for it," Feifer says. "Very quickly, the entertainment industry also stepped in to fill this void and this, workers were told, is your reward for a hard day's work. You will be bored earning money so that you can spend that money in non-boring ways. And workers took the deal. I mean, not like they had much choice, but they did like all of this new leisure."

This shift in work brought about a deeper shift in how we view our lives in general.

"This was a revolution in how many conceived of life's meaning, it altered their expectations for what they were entitled to, rather than sadness and passive acceptance of routine drudgery. Many came to believe that pleasure, happiness, excitement and novelty were their birthright," the authors write in Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid.

The need for distraction

Not surprisingly, this is also when we begin to see the seeds of our current concern about the role of sensory distraction and overstimulation in public discourse.

"The entertainment industry itself was now seen as the cause of boredom, or at least the trap that kept people from truly accessing their minds."

"In the 1920s and early '30s, there [was] a real discourse among psychologists, sociologists and other commentators who are wondering: is it good for humans to be exposed to movie theatres, to concerts, to radio's blaring?" Matt says. "Is this too much sensory stimulation? Is it going to lead to sensory overload, is it going to lead to nervous people who demand ever more excitement in their lives?"

As time went on, these questions transformed into professional concerns and major topics of debate.

"That's when doctors and intellectuals start saying, 'Wait a minute, I don't know if all this entertainment is very good for you people,'" Feifer says. "By the 1950s and '60s, the narrative had shifted even further, the idea of boredom and the entertainment that helps people escape from boredom melded into one singular thing. The entertainment industry itself was now seen as the cause of boredom, or at least the trap that kept people from truly accessing their minds." Continue reading

• Jesse Damiani is a senior writer at Freethink covering emerging technologies.

Now that we have time on our side and no concern about the deadlines of the jobs to be accomplished, we might be confused with the frightening prospect of doing nothing. But we do not have to feel debilitated.

There is a lot that one can do with this new flourish of free time.

There was a time when we complained about not having enough time when we felt constraints by the things that we had to do and the time that we had at our disposal.

Today things have reversed.

We have all the time and fewer things to do. But this new condition that finds ourselves is imposed from outside.

It has come in a sudden disruptive mode. That is why it is difficult to accept and we all find it to be a great challenge to stay at home and do little or nothing.

While there are several things that we can do creatively to wile our time and boredom, it is time to take on the phenomenon of boredom head-on.

We have applied our mind's attention to several things but may have not given sufficient attention to this phenomenon that is all around us.

This may be another important lesson that we can learn from the corona moment of humanity. To hold our heads with calm serenity, we have to deal with boredom.

Although no one is dying of boredom, everyone has his/her share of boredom.

Boredom is not something that has befallen on us at this time of human distress.

It has been there amidst us for a long time.

We live in a culture of boredom and at this time we feel it acutely due to this general lock-down.

Maybe we have an opportunity to consider the philosophy of boredom.

Boredom is human and has to be critically studied.

Today when we have all the leisure in the world and can enjoy the luxury of relaxation and do nothing, the prospect of having nothing to do is producing boredom.

Hence, this corona moment of humanity is an opportunity to reflect on boredom that is eating into our life.

We do not have an exact concept of boredom.

It is simply a blank label to everything that fails to hold our interest.

It might surprise us to know that the boredom that afflicts us today is a recent human invention.

It is a product of over rationalization of our society.

We are indeed living in a rationalized society that rations us time for everything.

We seem to be living always catching up with time to board a bus, train or flight.

Some of us are fighting time to reach our office or an appointment with a doctor, engineer and lawyer.

This sense of catching up with or fighting the running time has its benefits.

It brings efficiency and productivity to our society.

It also has its costs.

Boredom is one important price that we pay to live on side of the linear notion of passing time.

The inability to catch up with time is one important triggering factor of boredom.

Boredom is complex; it is not just lack of mastery over time that produces it there are other factors too.

They have to do with the repetition of something. Routinized repetitions produce familiarity and hence there is no novelty, we have to face boredom.

Maybe we are facing this situation for now. There is nothing new. Everything seems to be the same.

Time today is running slow.

We do not have to catch up with it.

We have a desire to escape it.

We do not like fixations of any kind.

But fixations are never abstract. They are different to different people.

Boredom, therefore, is an aesthetic condition. It is a matter of likes and dislikes.

One can get bored with the same taste of food. Thus, boredom is dynamic, plural and complex and is felt differently by each of us.

Here we may have to consider how the desire to see is the mother of all our desires.

All desires are scopic. This means all desire is a desire to see.

Even a desire to taste a food item is a desire to see how it tastes.

The desire for sex is also a desire to see how it feels.

This is why when we are angry we say ‘I will show you or I will see you.'

This desire to see is complex and operates differently in different people.

We face boredom when our desire to see cannot animate or likes and dislikes. This is a time when what we like or even dislike begins to become a source of our boredom.

We are not condemned to boredom.

We can do something about it; boredom being an inner-state of mind which shapes our moods can be dealt with effectively.

Awareness of what triggers boredom is one way of overcoming boredom.

We also have other ways of reframing our minds.

Mostly when we are bored, we feel that we have to kill time. This sense can give us signals that we are heading into a condition of boredom.

The corona moment of humanity has brought us to the prospect of having to kill time. When we are trapped in this condition, we are not only bored but we bore others.

Awareness that we have spoken of can come to our rescue in this situation.

Such awareness can ignite an understanding that time is a powerful resource but we do not have to catch up with it or fight it when we feel we lack it or have to kill it when we feel we have it in abundance.

A reframed mind then can creatively imagine ways of putting up with the surplus time that we have for enjoyable use.

This does not mean that boredom will not come catching back at us.

It will come back but we will not be enslaved to it.

We have the power over it and can transform it into enjoyable moments and live happily.

Time is open and not closed. There is novelty and surprise for us to enjoy.

• Fr Victor Ferrao of the archdiocese of Goa is the dean of Department of Philosophy at Rachol Seminary, Goa. First published by Matters India. Republished with permission.

Entitled, "The Taste of Silence," the book chronicles her own struggles after being diagnosed at age 19 with ALS, commonly called Lou Gehrig's disease, a degenerative neurological condition that always results in a massive debilitation of one's body and almost always results in death not long afterward. Not an easy diagnosis for a vibrant young woman to accept.

But, after a deep, initial depression, she found meaning in her life through meditation, silence, literature, art, poetry and, not least, through a relationship that eventually led to marriage. Unexpectedly, too, her disease went into remission and she lived for another 20 years. Among the many rich insights she shares with us, she offers an interesting reflection on boredom.

Discussing the prevalence of boredom today, she highlights an irony, namely, that boredom is increasing among us even as we are daily producing every kind of gadget to help us avoid it.

Given that today we carry in our hands technological devices that link us to everything from the world news of the day to photos of our loved ones playing with their children, shouldn't we be insulated against boredom?

Ironically, the opposite seems true. All those technological gadgets are not alleviating our boredom. Why not? We still wrestle with boredom because all the stimulation in the world doesn't necessarily make for meaning.

Meaning and happiness, she suggests, do not consist so much in meeting interesting people and being exposed to interesting things; rather they consist in taking a deeper interest in people and things.

The word "interest" is derived from two Latin words: inter (inside) and esse (being) which, when combined, connote being inside of something. Things are interesting to us when we are interested enough in them to really get inside of them.

And our interest isn't necessarily predicated on how naturally stimulating something is in itself, though admittedly certain events and experiences can be so powerful as to literally conscript our interest. Continue reading

• Oblate of Mary Immaculate Father Ronald Rolheiser is a specialist in the field of spirituality and systematic theology.