Episode 78 - Boredom Transcript

David: 0:12

Welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:14

The podcast where two friends,who are also philosophy professors, put big ideas in dialogue with everyday life.

David: 0:20

I am Dr.David Peña Guzmán,

Ellie: 0:21

And I'm co-host Dr.Ellie Anderson.Dostoyevsky calls boredom a beastial and indefinable affliction.Whether you agree that it's beastial or indefinable,boredom is quite the affliction.I remember being in middle school and being hopelessly bored over the summers, three months without school.Seems great at first, but a couple weeks into it, and I had no idea what to do with myself.I was too young to be able to drive myself anywhere, too young to be able to walk most places, living in a suburb, too young to have a job, and so I would just, like,sit and wonder "what do I do with myself?"I remember making a 50 things to do over the summer list that I color printed on our home printer in Party LET font, if anybody remembers that.Classic 90s and early- 2000s font.This was a time before wifi, before smartphones.And I just like never really knew what to do.Sure, I had friends, but how many play dates can you have when you're in middle school?

David: 1:24

So you were presumably old enough to know that you were bored,but not old enough to have the means to do something about it.

Ellie: 1:32

Exactly.

David: 1:33

Kind of trapped in this existential, dreadful condition of knowledge and inaction.

Ellie: 1:37

Other than write a list of 50things to do over the summer, which included like not exciting things like"lie outside," you know, and like "read."Well, I mean, reading is exciting, but it can't, you can't do it all the time.

David: 1:52

I mean, you mentioned that at this time you didn't have a smartphone or wifi, so I wonder whether this type of boredom that your younger self experienced would even be intelligible for middle schoolers nowadays.When they can be on social media, they can FaceTime their friends, so on and so forth.So maybe the conditions of that kind of boredom no longer hold.

Ellie: 2:15

I've wondered about this quite a bit.I did have a video camera, and one of the things I did this very same summer that I wrote 50 things to do over the summer was make a workout video loosely based on Tibo and Cindy Crawford's workout video.It was called Ellie's Eight Minute Workout.

David: 2:33

Eight minutes specifically.That's like, that's the sweet spot.

Ellie: 2:36

Yep.And I was wearing like an amazing outfit, that would actually be totally back in style, of like a limited two crop top and zip off cargo pants.But I do think, you know, nowadays,like I wouldn't just have to make Ellie's eight minute workout video.I would be able to make many TikToks and certainly interact a bit more with people than I would then.

David: 2:55

Yes, genuine engagement and excitement: that moves us away from boredom.

Ellie: 3:01

In fact, Gustave Flaubert distinguishes between modern boredom and common boredom or simple boredom.There's a kind of boredom that is just like your average everyday tedium, right?You're not happy with what you're doing and you'd rather be doing something else.But there's also this kind of modern ennui, right?Cuz boredom, here in French, Flaubert is writing in French, would be ennui.There's this modern ennui that is like a deep seated sense that something is amiss.This the sense that you're bored with life.And Flaubert, of course, is the author of Madame Bovary, which is a classic novel about this like fundamental deep boredom.Madame Bovary is a woman who is stuck as a bourgeois housewife in France in the 19th century and has this like real lack of meaning in her life,which orients the way that she lives.And you know, it's not just like about episodic boredom.

David: 3:58

Yeah, I can see that, and I could imagine articulating that distinction in terms of the difference between the kind of boredom that we experience that we know will come to cease once we inject a dose of activity or action or engagement into our lives versus that kind of deeper dissatisfaction with life that comes from maybe having a tacit understanding of the groundlessness of existence as a whole.

Ellie: 4:25

Yeah.That distinction reminds me of something that the philosopher Lars Svendsen puts in terms of situative and existential boredom.And he actually says that those broadly correspond to Flaubert's common boredom and modern boredom.So situated boredom is that boredom that is just due to the fact that you're not excited by what's surrounding you right now.That's common boredom and existential boredom, which you're describing as like something that's really much more permeating in the sense of our relation to meaning.Right?And that's what Flaubert calls modern boredom.And so to that extent, I wonder.Whether the prevalence of things to occupy ourselves nowadays through social media and smartphones is actually obviating situative boredom, but maybe revealing and who knows, deepening, perhaps existential boredom, or modern boredom.

David: 5:23

Yeah, I can see that.Maybe technological mediation and the attention economy is changing our relationship to these two types of boredom.Since we're talking here about your middle school self Ellie, I also wonder, and this is a point coming from the intersection of existentialism and child psychology, at what point in child development one makes that transition from the common boredom that maybe applies to kids when they're not sufficiently stimulated, and that deeper kind of boredom that requires thinking about the world and about the self and about the future in a particular way.So is existential boredom something that's already sort of available to a middle schooler?Is it something that's available to say a nine year old at what,you know, like at what point?Um, cuz there's been a lot of discussions in the history of philosophy about

the so-called age of reason: 6:16

at what point children break into the use of rational concepts and categories,and so we might also think about a new age of existentialism, really.At what point do humans phase these deeper existential quandaries?

Ellie: 6:34

It's so funny that you say this because this is actually something I've just been teaching with Simone de Beauvoir this week.In The Ethics of Ambiguity, she says that adolescence is the time that you break out of accepting the ready-made world around you, and start to question, right?And from an existential perspective,that's the moment of existential anxiety,which Heidegger, in fact links to boredom.But I had a student.Who was doing a meme response to this because I assigned my existentialism students memes this semester.And shout out to Charlene if you're listening to this.And she had all of these memes about the movement from age nine to age 10and like how that's the moment when existential anxiety comes about.So it'd be like a meme of somebody who's nine years, 11months, and 29 days like happy.And then the next meme would be the day they turn 10 and then they're all sad

David: 7:29

The next day they're wearing a black turtle neck.

Ellie: 7:31

Yep.It's kind of a parody of the idea that there could be one exact moment, right?Because it's gonna differ for different people.But I think you're right, David, that this situative versus existential boredom also tracks to the lifecycle of individuals,which is maybe a little bit of a different point from Flaubert, who in distinguishing between common and modern boredom seems to be saying something more social, right?That we're living in an age of boredom as a culture.

David: 7:55

Yeah.And I do think it's really important to think about boredom from a cultural perspective, but sticking with the individual for a few more seconds.It's possible that new forms of technology and engagement and the attention economy are changing our relationship to boredom, especially during these early stages of our teenage years, perhaps around middle school.But there's been this whole discourse around millennials and Gen Zs having difficulties adulting.So being stuck in this expanded or protracted adolescence, and that would mean that not only do we enter the age of existential awareness or anxiety in a particular way, but that maybe we get stuck in it for longer than maybe other generations have, because we don't transition out of that, say around the same time, quote unquote, as what is considered normal or normative.So being stuck perpetually as a teenager because social, cultural and material conditions prevent an exit from teenage years.

Ellie: 8:58

Yeah.I hear a version of that narrative a lot about protracted adolescence.I'm not sure what I think about it, but how do you think this relates to boredom?

David: 9:06

Well, the question that appears often in philosophical discussions about boredom is how do you get out of it.And that often can be by throwing yourself into activity or by taking up, let's say, quote unquote serious projects, which is what we would then associate with being an adult.And so here the difference would be that now we have a generation of individuals who are staying in that protracted adolescence for longer and not really having at their disposal a materially viable path for getting out of it in the way that maybe previous generations did, but then we would have a debate about whether that exit that other generations had of becoming a real adult,living a traditional life that's already scripted would be, or would not be an authentic way of dealing with boredom.So that would be a separate debate.

Ellie: 9:57

Today we are talking about boredom.

David: 10:00

What does boredom teach us about human existence and the nature of the human condition?

Ellie: 10:05

How should we respond to moments of deep unmitigated boredom?

David: 10:10

And what is the relationship between boredom, rank, and class?

Ellie: 10:21

All right, so I recently presented at the Boston Phenomenology Circle, and I heard an amazing talk on boredom by Andreas Elpidorou, a philosopher who has written like a ton of articles and a book on boredom.It's like, Elipdorou is the least bored by boredom of any possible human because he is constantly publishing on it.In fact, that's what led to this episode idea, because I texted you from the conference and I was like,we have to do an episode on boredom.

David: 10:52

Yes.So for our listeners, we had planned to do another episode that Ellie was really really excited about and that I was, um...less excited about which was an episode on the very concept of essence.And then when you proposed this shift, I was very very excited to talk about boredom.

Ellie: 11:11

Listeners, tell us how much you want the episode on Essence,because I actually think it's a really fun and exciting idea.But it was a win-win situation because I did feel like the boredom episode was calling our names a little bit more.And so I wanna share a bit of what Elpidorou said in his talk for the conference.Granted, keep in mind, he has published a ton of articles on boredom, one of which we will talk about later.So I'm talking here about work that's a little bit more in progress, but part of what I found really interesting here is not only how Elpidorou describes boredom, but also what he thinks the implications of that are.So let me say first how he describes boredom.Elpidorou describes boredom as a state that indicates the presence of a cognitive disequilibrium.So when we're bored, there's a mismatch between our desire to be engaged by our environment and our sense that our current situation is not giving us that engagement.

David: 12:05

Yeah.You talked about middle school and for me,this throws me back to high school when I lived in the desert in, uh, rural Nevada.And I remember wanting to be engaged by my environment and looking around and seeing nothing but sand all the way to the horizon.And for me, boredom is exemplified by the desert, not just, um, conceptually,because it's a kind of barrenness,but also because of this biographical detail about my life, which is that I actually experienced those teenage years in the desert, deeply bored.

Ellie: 12:37

Yeah, the association of boredom with the desert goes back really far.I'm thinking about the early Christian fathers known as the Desert Fathers here who write of this, like what we would probably now call existential boredom.And indeed, this lack of engagement with your environment that you're describing is what Elpidorou would call a lack of satisfactory cognitive engagement.But he knows that there are a couple of different ways that our environment can fail to engage us.So one is when there's nothing we can cognitively engage, as in when the landscape is just empty, right?But another one is when we can't satisfactorily engage the object we are engaging with.So I think about when I was in middle school doing math homework, and it was horribly boring to me, either because I couldn't understand it or because I could understand it,but it just didn't interest me.So there's this object in front of me.That would interest a lot of people.And maybe it would've interested me at other points in my life, but there was a mismatch at that moment between the task before me and my own cognitive engagement with it.

David: 13:45

And yeah, this raises a question about what it is about an object that triggers interest or curiosity in a particular subject.And so this would be one way of making sense of why, for example, some of my students find reading philosophical texts deeply deeply boring, but others don't, you know, others love it and they can't get enough of it.When the text is right in front of them, some really can interact with it.They know how to move through it.They find it engaging in satisfactory.

Ellie: 14:12

Mm-hmm.

David: 14:12

But others just don't connect.

Ellie: 14:15

Yeah.Well, and you could think about this back to the Madame Bovary example where Madame Bovary as a housewife stuck in a small town in France, doesn't have a very engaging environment, but there's also a way to understand her as not engaging with her environment in the proper way.This was something that came out in a really interesting exchange in Q&A with an Overthink listener and grad student, Miriam.So, hi Miriam, if, if you're listening to this!And Miriam suggested here that there's a lack of recognition of spiritual values for Madame Bovary.She reduces all spiritual values just to like simple aesthetic or kitschy values.In other words, she's just sort of superficial and materialistic, she's unable to actually engage with what could be satisfying to her around her.

David: 15:01

Yeah.And so this raises a question about maybe not individual responsibility, but the role of the subject in the bringing about, of this mood or state of boredom.Because yes, we can say that the world is boring or that our environment is unengaging.But we can also say that we find it boring and that we have a hand in the creation of that state as well.

Ellie: 15:26

And I think we'll come back later to this question of the situations that may or may not deepen boredom.

David: 15:32

Mm-hmm.

Ellie: 15:32

But I think here what is right,no matter what is causing the boredom,is that the state of boredom has a particular quality to it in all cases,which is that you try to escape it.Mm-hmm.Nobody is in the state of boredom and wants to remain bored.So Elpidorou says that boredom is aversive.No one enjoys it.Nobody wants to stay there.Right?

David: 15:57

Yeah.I mean, by definition, I don't think anybody enjoys being bored if boredom is the absence of enjoyment.But I agree that there is something about boredom that makes us want to flee from it when we're in it.

Ellie: 16:10

Yeah, although there, of course,are ways to be bored that aren't just about enjoyment either, right?Like boredom is this lack of satisfactory cognitive engagement, right?Enjoyment is one way of cognitively being engaged, but of course there are others as well.And so for instance, even if I have some interest in exploring the state of boredom, like from a research perspective,and I find thinking about the nature of boredom, cognitively engaging, I don't find the experience of boredom cognitively engaging in any satisfactory way; I'm trying to get out of it.And this leads to what I think is the most interesting part of the conference discussion, whether boredom has redeeming qualities or not.Elpidorou said that when he first started researching boredom, he was somewhat optimistic about its potential.In fact, you can read about this in some of his earlier publications.But especially in light of the pandemic, he's grown increasingly convinced that boredom does not have redeeming qualities in and of itself.All those people during the pandemic who were saying that boredom was making us creative.

David: 17:10

Yes, we're friends with many of them on Facebook.

Ellie: 17:14

Sure.Yeah.And it's like, oh, let this boredom have a silver lining.And he says that those people were misunderstanding the nature of the phenomenon.Boredom itself wasn't making us creative.Rather, it was our attempts to get out of boredom that were doing so.

David: 17:29

Okay, I can see that.But the question is whether when you get out of this experience of boredom,you come out of it a change person who is more likely to behave and act in a different way in the face of the world.Right?Because even if we grant that boredom is this flattening of our existence that has no redeeming qualities.It could have a redeeming value if it leads to new modes of worldly engagement that themselves are, say more creative, more pro-social, more cognitively engaging, more self-aware.So boredom could have value by precisely catapulting us into creativity, even if it itself is not particularly positive.

Ellie: 18:14

But I think we need to be really careful there about what the possible outcomes of boredom are and what is baked into boredom itself.So if we're saying that boredom has redeeming qualities, we're saying that there is something redeeming that is baked into boredom itself.But if we're saying that possible good things could come out of boredom, then boredom is not redeeming in and of itself.The question then is about what characterizes boredom versus what characterizes escaping boredom.And I think those are two different things.So there's a Dorothy Parker quote where she says, the cure for boredom is curiosity.There is no cure for curiosity.So curiosity, I think,in her view can be good.We have an entire episode on curiosity, if you wanna hear what other philosophers think about this But the idea here is that boredom isn't good.But the cure for boredom is, and Elpidorou too writes about this and says that our responses to boredom can be beneficial or harmful, moral or immoral.

David: 19:14

I see.

Ellie: 19:14

Profound or mundane.And so for instance, boredom tells us we need to escape it,but boredom doesn't tell us what we should escape boredom towards.And we could escape boredom towards like very bad things, right?Like Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov murders his neighbor because he is bored.

David: 19:34

Bored, yes.Okay.So I can see that in this, in this regard, boredom would be similar to something like struggle, where, you know,some people say, oh, there's something inherently good about struggling, but it all depends on what the struggle leads to.If it leads to growth, then yes.If it leads to a shrinking of your moral compass, then maybe not.Yeah.And even talking about a cure for boredom makes it already seem like a condition that stands in need of a cure.Exactly.It's aversive.

Ellie: 20:04

Yeah.

David: 20:04

And so nobody would say that being in physical pain is inherently good.

Ellie: 20:08

True.

David: 20:08

Even if it could lead in some cases to better outcomes.Now, the question that I'm drawn to here is what the cure for boredom would actually be.Because for Parker, the answer to boredom is curiosity.And that's very different than the view articulated by Immanuel Kant, who also thinks that we need a cure for boredom,except that he links the cure, not to curiosity, but to the activity of work.He wrote an essay called On the Duties of Life in Relation to States, and in this essay Kant argues that human beings often fall victim to boredom.And he's thinking about this from an anthropological perspective in terms of our transition from quote unquote primitive life to civilized life, or in terms of the advent of culture.And for him, originally, individuals cannot be bored in the state of nature because primitive humans are trying to survive.They're fending off predators,they're trying to meet their needs.

Ellie: 21:08

Mm-hmm.

David: 21:09

But as we move into a more cultured society, suddenly you have leisure time.You have the release of this demand that we meet our primary needs because they're already met.And that's what opens up the possibility of boredom.It's tied to an excess of free time.And once that happens, Kant says, what we need in order to deal with boredom is work.And the reason that he goes to work is interesting because he's not just saying like, "oh, well you need to be productive in order to get out of a state of boredom."Rather, he believes that there is an inherent connection between working.And sort of having a feeling of being alive.

Ellie: 21:56

Ooh!

David: 21:56

So it, it's like it gets kind of close to a vitalist argument, even though Kant is not a vitalist himself, but work does give you this rushing feeling of life itself, and it's that feeling of life that can snap you out of boredom.

Ellie: 22:12

This is kind of funny to me because the product of Kant's work,namely his thousands of pages of writing,I think a lot of people find boring.

David: 22:21

Yes, yes.And who knows, maybe that's why he was so prolific as a philosopher,because he needed to work his way out of cultured boredom.Yes.Um, so his corpus is a performative enactment.Of his solution to the problem of boredom.Work, work, work, work, work, work, work.

Ellie: 22:40

So I like this idea a lot though,you know, to speak to the substance that you laid out from, from him.Because I think so much of human achievement pertains to how we spend our free time.There's definitely this stereotype that boredom emerges when we have too much time on our hands.And you know, I began with that story of middle school.I had too much time on my hands in the summer, and that is when I felt bored.So I don't know if I wanna go full Maslow's hierarchy here.Then again, there is something to the idea that we can self-actualize when we reach a certain level of material and interpersonal security.And so in this sense, like, yeah,the boredom would arise when we have that security, when we have those needs met because we also have the capacity to self-actualize.Right?We have free time to figure out what we want to and should do.Then again, I think we need to be careful about what we mean by work here, because there are some kinds of work that can promote self-actualization and others that don't.In fact, just very recently, Elpidorou wrote a public facing article about how work is boring, and he's talking specifically about the conditions of work in which we find ourselves in in late stage capitalism.So the Amazon warehouse manager, for instance.Can't just say "get to work" if their employees complain of boredom, because that work itself is the boring stuff.

David: 23:56

Yes.

Ellie: 23:56

Not to mention alienated and exploitative, but it's like boring.

David: 24:00

Yeah.So I think here we would have to think a little bit more about what Kant means by the feeling of life, because some forms of work could produce that and some forms of work could preclude that.And for Kant, it seems to be tied to the value of effortful activity and a kind of overcoming of resistance, external resistance through action and engagement.

Ellie: 24:22

Mm-hmm.

David: 24:22

But, for him, it, it all has to do with pleasure.It has to do with his valuation of pleasure because once you have free time, you can pursue new kinds of pleasure; pleasures that are not tied to your fundamental needs.And unfortunately, in a cultured,civilized space, that can lead to a very vicious cycle where you think that the way out of boredom is through seeking new artificial pleasures.Like buying new things, you know, just going to the museum.

Ellie: 24:51

Oh, oh my God.How many online purchases are caused by boredom?

David: 24:55

Yes, exactly.And so the problem for Kant is that in our modern world, we have free time and we are hurling ourselves into empty pleasures that are not worthwhile.And that's the kind of activity that sucks the life out of the subject.You don't have a feeling for life when you're just pursuing these secondary unessential pleasures, and work can return you to that because it's a kind of action that is not driven toward just immediate satisfaction.But again, what kind of work does that remains an open question.

Ellie: 25:31

Yeah.Because it seems like there's an anti-hedonist argument going on here.Mm-hmm.Right.The claim is that pleasure is not going to solve our boredom.We might think back to that distinction about situative versus existential boredom that we talked about earlier where sure,maybe a rollercoaster or like a comedy special on Netflix is going to launch you out of situative boredom, but it's not gonna resolve the existential boredom.So what I like about this idea from Kant is that it seems to be a viable way to get at existential boredom because I do agree that work can produce this feeling of life, which gives us a really strong sense of meaning in the world.Going back to your last question though,I think we need to figure out what we mean by work here, because I'm thinking about, for instance, how when I'm on vacation, which I love being on,right?I love going on vacation.I find it really valuable to set up little habits or routines for myself so that I don't get bored, right?And so, for me on vacation, I'm not "working," but I am, say,going to the hotel lobby to get coffee in the morning, taking a walk, reading for a few hours, etc.And I think if we construed work super, super broadly, maybe we could say that those are also part of it.They're giving me the feeling of life.It's kind of the opposite point from Elpidorou's claim that work is boring because I think there,he's kind of narrowly defining work as laborsome activity in the current capitalist conditions.

David: 27:07

Yeah, so what I like about the Kant is that yes, we can all agree that there are forms of work that are deadening,that flatten your existence, that sap your excitement or your joy for living.But he's targeting his argument to the other end of the spectrum, and he's essentially saying, look, Ellie,if you think that you would have a joyful existence if you were always on vacation, that's where you're wrong.Because if you're always just enjoying leisurely activities,there is no resistance and there is no overcoming of resistance.And so, yes, I think reading this against the Elpidorou is really productive.

Ellie: 27:46

So Kant wants me to get back to work after my very short beach vacation, whereas others might say...

David: 27:54

Go on more vacation!Which then Kant would say,that's gonna leave you empty.Ellie, earlier you mentioned this book by the philosopher Lars Svenson,entitled A Philosophy of Boredom,where Svenson talks about the nature of boredom, how to overcome it,whether or not it has redeeming qualities, and there is a chapter of the book that I found fascinating.Where Svenson gives us a genealogy of our modern concept of boredom, and he argues that the very notion of boredom is a relatively recent historical phenomenon.

Ellie: 28:56

Mm-hmm.

David: 28:56

And that if you look backwards through the history of Western philosophy in particular, you see that people talked about this kind of dissatisfaction that we sometimes have with the world,with our surroundings, with existence.Using very different terms such that you cannot talk about, for instance,an ancient, a medieval, or even a Renaissance view on boredom because the concept doesn't yet exist.

Ellie: 29:24

Mm-hmm.

David: 29:25

And he says that if you look for predecessors of the modern concept of boredom, the best place to look.Is the concept of acedia, which we find, especially in the medieval period.Now, acedia is a term, a-c-e-d-i-a, and it comes from the Greek root kedos, which means care plus the negative prefix "a".

Ellie: 29:50

Mm-hmm.Mm-hmm.

David: 29:50

So acedia means a-kedos.Lack of care.Or not caring.

Ellie: 29:56

Not caring about.

David: 29:56

Not caring about something, or not caring about anything actually.And in the medieval period, in the writings of early Christian writers and later some high medieval people,it is understood as a kind of moral affliction that sometimes affects individuals, especially monks.And so there would be these cases where monks would be in the monastery walking around feeling acedic,careless, or disinterested in the world.And it would be almost as if time stopped for those monks and the world lost its coloring.Yeah.For them.And of course this is the medieval period.Christianity is on the rise.So this affliction is understood as demonic, as a sort of spirit that enters the soul and it causes the monk to essentially hate life itself.So it's a kind of sinful.Turning away from life and therefore turning away from God.

Ellie: 30:59

Yeah.I associate this with the early Christian Father Evagrius, who I mentioned;I mentioned the early Christian fathers earlier as like, you know,kind of early thinkers of boredom,but you're right that, yeah, it's not exactly boredom as we know it, but indeed, yeah, it's considered a sin.And even though I don't subscribe to the theology behind that, I get it in the sense that the aversive state of this boredom - this listlessness we might add, you know, following this lack of caring about that you're talking about - feels wrong, like it is, it's not a good feeling.It does not make you feel like you're on the right track.It's a signal, that something is amiss, fundamentally amiss.

David: 31:39

Yeah, no, that's right.And that amiss would be something that is fundamental to human life and human thriving, which again, here is considered to be kedos or care.But Svensen argues that as you move forward in the history of philosophy,you see a fundamental transformation in the way in which philosophers talk about this listlessness.

Ellie: 32:00

Ok.

David: 32:00

So the medievals are talking about acedia and you know, they're talking about monks and their struggles with faith.But later during the Renaissance, the medieval concept of acedia evolves into the Renaissance concept of melancholy.

Ellie: 32:14

Ok.

David: 32:15

And what defines melancholy in relation to acedia is that it is less moral and much more bodily.So, for example, you suddenly start having medical, rather than purely theological, explanations of melancholy.And you also have the sense that there is something about melancholy that targets your life energies and your ability to use your body for attaining various ends.And you see this in particular in Montaigne's essays.There is an essay that Montaigne wrote called Of Sorrow from 1580.And I read that essay in preparation for this episode.And there, Montaigne talks about sorrow/melancholy as something that robs us of our movements and of our ability to act.

Ellie: 33:03

So the idea would be that it's more of an illness rather than a sin?

David: 33:07

Yes.It's a disease rather than a sin.It's an affliction.Which is, you know, earlier you mentioned the definition from Dostoyevsky as a beastial affliction.

Ellie: 33:16

Yes.An indefinable affliction.

David: 33:17

Yes!And so that would be the legacy of the Renaissance.Okay.Because when you think about bist, it has to do with animality.Yeah.And therefore with the body.Okay.

Ellie: 33:25

And also, I mean, that idea of boredom as having a cure that we found in Dorothy Parker, I think gets at this.Although I have to say from a firsthand perspective, the idea of boredom as an illness resonates with me less than the idea of boredom as a sin.

David: 33:41

Really?Oh my God, you're so Christian.

Ellie: 33:43

No, because I think the idea of boredom as an illness implies that there's no way that I can get out of it.

David: 33:50

You can cure yourself of a medical condition!Okay...No, but I, I get where you're going.

Ellie: 33:55

True.

David: 33:56

It takes out the existential element that is probably so appealing to both of us.

Ellie: 33:59

Yeah, yeah!

David: 33:59

Yes.Okay.So no, but this is actually something I wanted to point out because Svensen doesn't go into this in connection to the Renaissance notion of melancholy,but in the Renaissance, in fact,melancholy is kind of a mixed bag.So yes, it is understood as an illness of the body.Mm-hmm.But it also has this other kind of social cultural dimension that makes it more interesting than just like, oh, well,like my heart is not pumping blood in the way in which it normally should.Right?Yeah.That kind of reductionist medical account.And that has to do with the fact that in the Renaissance melancholy is something to be cured, but it,it's also weirdly chic at the time.Melancholy was kinda like culturally 'in.'

Ellie: 34:48

Yeah, yeah.

David: 34:49

Especially as an expression of a really fragile English masculinity.There was this kind of romantic disposition for young men that was valorized during the Renaissance.Sort of like the weak, thin,pale sad, like despondent white male who reads poetry.

Ellie: 35:08

It's like the precursor to Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther.

David: 35:12

Yes, exactly.Okay.Yeah, yeah, yeah.So Of Sorrow names an illness, but it also names an almost aesthetic disposition, again, limited to young men.And part of the appeal of melancholy in this cultural register is precisely that it was linked to idleness,which is a marker of class standing.

Ellie: 35:34

Ah.

David: 35:35

So you could give off the impression of being like a rich white boy precisely by being melancholic.

Ellie: 35:43

Oh my.It's like the aesthetic of the disaffected rich person.Yeah.But on like an affective level.

David: 35:49

Yes.In the 1500s and beyond that it also had this cultural meaning of obsessive behavior because a melancholic patient or subject was thought to have this kind of like obsessive, almost compulsive disposition, especially in relation to amorous subjects.So that chic white guy that is despondent is not only well off, but can come across as seeming deep and interesting and a great lover because he's so passionate that the intensity of his passions actually render him melancholic.

Ellie: 36:26

Well, in that sense that's kind of surprising because if melancholy is related to passion, then it seems pretty different from boredom because boredom is related to apathy and you know, to a sense of emptiness.So I think when we reflect on the character of boredom, This, you know,lack of satisfactory cognitive engagement that Elpidorou defines it as, we can think about boredom as having to do with a sense of emptiness of time.And an emptiness of the environment.Perhaps also an emptiness of ourselves.Right?It's like we look inward.Okay, emptiness there.We look outward, emptiness there.We are situated within time, and there's an emptiness there as well, right?That, that worries us because it doesn't seem to have a natural end point.Yes.And I think for obvious reasons,the theme of emptiness appears in a lot of writings about boredom.

David: 37:24

And, you know, even in, in a more religious context, which you said you prefer when thinking about boredom, this is precisely how Pascal thinks about it.He says, man is nothingness and without God we become aware of this nothingness.Mm.And so there is a sense in which, for Pascal boredom is when we turn away from the positivity that God is and there is nothing but nothingness.Mm-hmm.Which is what we are.Yeah.

Ellie: 37:50

Hence the scramble to get out of it.Also, the sense that there's nothing to hold onto.I think about a particular episode of The Twilight Zone, where it's a bunch of characters who are stuck in the bottom of this giant cylinder with no handhold.They wanna get out of this giant silver cylinder, but there's nothing to climb on.And so they're just, oh God.They're just fundamentally stuck.Spoiler alert.You find out at the end that they're toys at the bottom of a trashcan.Classic Twilight Zone move.

David: 38:22

Whaat?But I think about boredom as that just feeling in your chest of like,I can't get out and it's not, it's not like, and I can't get out.I'm actively in danger sense.It's just like, there's nowhere for me to go.I put my hand on the wall and it slips down, so, okay.I'm gonna make a random connection here on the spot because more random than my Twilight Zone connection.Well, almost, yes.Based on it.Because you said in that, in this case, the people which turn out to be toys are at the bottom of a cylinder.And in animal research there is this way of studying boredom in other animals through what is known as the learned helplessness paradigm.Yeah.And it, one way in which that has cashed out historically is that people would put primates, especially really young babies, that were separated from the mother at the bottom of a steel tank that is a sort of sensory deprivation chamber.

Ellie: 39:14

Oh my god.

David: 39:15

And the animals would break down to the point that their boredom,their, their lack of any kind of stimulation would be internalized because they couldn't get out.And even after the researchers would take these primates out, they had internalized the boredom so much that they wouldn't do anything,even when there were things to do.Which goes to that earlier point that you made that maybe there is nothing intrinsically valuable about boredom.Especially if the boredom is so intense that it buries into your body and into your psyche, as it did in the case of these animals.

Ellie: 39:48

Hence solitary confinement as a form of torture.

David: 39:50

Yes, that's exactly right.

Ellie: 39:52

Okay.It seems like a weird transition to go from solitary confinement back to the Twilight Zone, but I did actually think of one other episode that's really.Related to this which is an episode of The Twilight Zone, where there's a guy who all he wants to do is read,like he just wants more time to read.And his biggest stress in life is that he doesn't have time to read.So yes, definitely not as like fundamentally existentially crisis oriented as the examples that we were just mentioning.A much more banal example.There's some sort of like atomic event and he's the only survivor.And he finds himself surrounded by all of the books that he wasn't able to read when he was stuck in the rote monotony of his day job.He's so excited.He's like, finally I can escape this existential boredom.His glasses break.Oh my God.He is alone in the world with nothing to do, no one to be around, nothing to see,cannot even entertain himself through this means of leisure that is reading.

David: 40:52

I mean, honestly,that sounds catastrophic.So I don't know why you said that it was not catastrophic.

Ellie: 40:56

Well, I just- I don't wanna, I don't wanna analogize that to the actual lived experiences of solitary confinement.But yes, no, I mean, it is like, I think that's the point of the episode though,is that this thing that seems really banal is actually catastrophic for him.

David: 41:12

Of course.And if you're talking about an apocalyptic scenario where you're the last person alive, then that's like the highest form of solitude.For sure.For sure.It's actually.Not confined solitude.It's open solitude.Cause there is nowhere,there's no outside it anymore.

Ellie: 41:27

Okay.Yeah.So there's this inversion, yeah.Of the experience of being stuck alone in a room in a world that has things to offer.

David: 41:36

Well, in all these scenarios that we are thinking about the case of the toys or the animals in these horrifying experiments.The case of somebody in an apocalyptic setting.These are all cases in which boredom is triggered by external circumstances.Right.There's something about our relationship to the environment that, yeah, that catapults us into boredom without us having much power over it.But earlier we also mentioned that perhaps there are cases where the boredom is the result of what we bring into a situation, perhaps because of our values, as in the case of Madam Bovary.So I'm curious about that, Ellie,what you think about the role that we sometimes play in locking ourselves into a state of boredom.

Ellie: 42:25

Yeah.Yeah.Because there are certainly some cases that like seem like they shouldn't be boring, and yet are my grandma always used to say growing up.If you're bored, you're boring.When my cousin Alex and I would go to her and be like, we're so bored.It would be like, if you're bored, you're boring.And then that led Alex and I to like all kinds of weird behaviors.Like my grandparents lived by a dock and we would sometimes go into other random people's boats and like play house.

David: 42:51

Oh wow.Just like she's just producing these like weirdly creepy children, who are mostly afraid of boring their grandmother, because that would mean that there is no substance to them.

Ellie: 43:03

Right.But I, but I think something about that really stuck with me,like there is something wrong.You're the problem if you're bored.And I think that can't always be the case, but there might be some cases in which it is the case, right?Like if I am finding myself in a foreign country that has lots of exciting things for me to do, to explore, and I'm just staying in the Airbnb, sitting and rewatching some TV show that brings me comfort.That seems like a bit of a failure to engage in the environment for which I am culpable.

David: 43:39

I see.And so this phrase from Grandma June, um-

Ellie: 43:44

My middle name is June after Grandma June.

David: 43:46

Oh, I didn't, okay.I didn't make the connection.I knew that your middle name was June,that if you are bored, you are boring.It seems to connect the internal state of the subject with the external perception that others have of the subject.Mm-hmm.So if internally there is no activity, others will see no activity coming from you and will see you as just an inert, kinda object.

Ellie: 44:06

Ah.Which is why we do see some people as boring.

David: 44:09

Yeah.Yeah.As boring.Uh, but it might not mean that they are internally bored.And so one way to split the difference there, and this is a quote from Kierkegaard that I'm getting from the Lars Svensen book.Kierkegaard says that plebeians, so like the average person, they are boring in the sense that they bore other people.They don't seem particularly interesting.Oh my God.Yeah.But the nobles.Are maybe even worse because they bore themselves.And so the way in which I choose to interpret this quote-

Ellie: 44:43

That is so absurd!

David: 44:44

Well, the way I choose to interpret this quote to make it less absurd is that maybe plebeians, again let's just use that term, they bore others simply because they give off the impression of not having a lot of interesting things going on about them.But that doesn't say anything about the richness of their inner life.It's just a commentary on the surface about what others see.Oh, okay.Whereas the problem with the nobles is that they might have the surface, but they don't have the internal richness because they're constantly bored with themselves.Maybe because of that same excess of leisure time and excess of artificial pleasures that Kant talked about.So I want to appropriate this Kierkegaard quote,

Ellie: 45:26

For the lower classes?

David: 45:27

Yeah, for the lower classes.We might be boring, but we don't bore ourselves.

Ellie: 45:31

Well, I know we're gonna get into a more explicit class analysis in a moment.I wanna venture a different hypothesis,which is that people who are boring.Are probably not bored.And people who are not boring,like the most exciting, fun people probably are bored.Right?Like they're fun because they are trying to escape their existential boredom.Whereas people who are boring,like they're just chilling.

David: 45:57

I see.So the, the people who are boring are quite content with themselves and that would make them like bad interlocutors cause like they're so self content that they have no reason to add anything to the conversation.

Ellie: 46:08

Exactly.Exactly.

David: 46:09

Well, no, you okay?Now I would wanna turn that around and say that the people who are boring or seem boring are actually the best interlocutors because they're content with themselves.That's why they give off this impression of being boring.And that makes them much more interesting people to chat with because they're not trying so hard to give off a different impression because they're self content.

Ellie: 46:33

I think you're giving them too much credit.

David: 46:42

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Ellie: 47:01

David, it's time to turn the stereotype that boredom is the affliction of the rich on its head.In one of his articles, one of his many articles on boredom, many, many,Andreas Elpidorou writes about the experience of boredom and poverty, and he says that the poor are more bored than the rich specifically, people of low socioeconomic status are more likely to experience boredom and are less likely to be able to escape from it.Boredom is not just an individual problem, it's a social problem, and poverty makes boredom more frequent,changes its experience and affects the ways that we can respond to it.I mentioned earlier that there are certain kinds of work that are more boring than others.I mean, it is actually the case that most Americans are bored at work much of the time.There's a lot of research on that.Yes.But I do think that there are obviously some forms of work that are more fulfilling than others, and if you are having to do the kind of grunt or repetitive work, Beauvoir, for instance,talks about the repetitious nature of housework, that's really unsatisfying.But you might also think about, yeah,like I said, being the Amazon worker in the warehouse, Those forms of work that are alienating, I think are also often more boring and even outside of work, poor people are forced to spend a lot more time doing boring activities.For instance, going to the laundromat and having to wait out the cycle of your laundry rather than having it in the comfort of your home while you watch Netflix on your flat screen TV.

David: 48:32

Yeah, that's a really good example.As somebody that currently does not have a washer and dryer in the apartment, it is a time suck and it is something that.Makes you wonder how you should spend your time, and there is never a good answer.You just go to the laundromat and you watch the cycle go round and round.But there are other activities that people of lower socioeconomic status would have to do that would allow us to make a connection between poverty and boredom.For example, think about not having a car.And having to wait for the bus,and especially in places where the public transportation system is not particularly robust, you know, sometimes you have to wait for the bus a long time in order to just get to the work where you're going to continue to do tedious, monotonous activity.

Ellie: 49:17

And it's a luxury to have a smartphone with unlimited wifi access and AirPods that would allow you to say, listen to a podcast during that experience,or while waiting for your laundry.Also, vacations.So a lot of people can't afford the fun of going on vacations.Or if they can't afford to go on vacations, they might not be able to afford some of the fun activities that others might be able to do.So let's say that you're able to afford a hotel room on the beach, but you can't afford to get the jet ski special or to go on the boat ride, the booze cruise.

David: 49:51

Or, another version of the doing your laundry is the doing of the dishes.I remember that.When I was younger, I was a teenager.Our family just didn't have the money to afford a dishwasher, and we associated our extended family members who did have a dishwasher as that that was a marker of their wealth because it would save them the time of doing this,again, tedious activity, which is just taking the sponge to the dirty dish.For.40, 50 minutes after a dinner.And for us, the dream was to eventually get a dishwasher.

Ellie: 50:24

For all of the Buddhist texts that I've read about taking joy and appreciating the moment of washing dishes, I cannot say that I actually find that activity anything other than intolerably boring.

David: 50:36

Yes, in the conclusion that Elpidorou draws from all the sociological research that he cites about the connection between poverty and boredom, is that people from lower socioeconomic status simply are more prone to boredom, especially because boredom is linked to time, and time is fundamentally about work and about class.

Ellie: 50:59

And you might think that boredom is a trivial experience, right?Like.Poor people have a lot bigger fish to fry than the fact that they're more prone to boredom.But Elpidorou makes a really compelling case that boredom is not trivial at all, especially when the circumstances of our lives are making boredom impossible to avoid and more problematic for helping us achieve our goals.I'm gonna quote him here quickly.He says, as a chronic condition or a propensity to experience boredom in a wide range of situations,boredom is far from trivial.Decades of research has documented the numerous harms and dangers that boredom proneness poses.The propensity to experience boredom often has been positively correlated on the one hand, with depression, loneliness,and hopelessness, and on the other hand,with anger and aggression and hostility.

David: 51:52

Yes, and so.Boredom would have this effect on the lower class, which is, you know, depression.Uh, maybe what was the term that you used?Aggressiveness or aggression.Yeah.Um, he also gives another example that stood out to me, which is that boredom,somewhat paradoxically, perhaps inclines people to engage in high risk activities.So when you're bored maybe you seek in an almost compulsive way to produce meaning in life by engaging in very risky behaviors.And he gives the example of gambling,which would explain why gambling is often such a problem precisely for people for whom it is a much more dangerous activity because they are risking something that they have very little of, which is money.

Ellie: 52:39

And this takes us back to our earlier discussion of whether there's a silver lining to boredom, because it seems here, like the answer is no.

David: 52:47

Mm-hmm.Yes.And here we've been talking about the psychological.Consequences of boredom, how it impacts the psyche of the individual,maybe leading to depression, to high-risk behaviors such as gambling.But for Elpidorou, there is also this existentialist consequence of boredom,which is that it prevents us from finding and from producing meaning in the world, which again is less psychological and more philosophical.But he gives us some clues as to what this means for him.He cites research indicating that once you are bored, you lack the ability to engage in goal-directed activities.And that's the, the trickiness about boredom, that it actually prevents you from getting out of it.And that is something that is aggravated by poverty because people who are poor.Often have difficulties because they lack the material resources needed to do that, to actually engage in goal-oriented behavior.And if you have these obstacles and constraints to achieving your goals systematically, you are less likely to posit goals for yourself and to try to seek them out.So it sort of locks you in the present.And that's what earlier I described as learned helplessness.I think people of lower economic status suffer from a version of learned helplessness, where in the past their goals have not been met.And so they stopped trying to pursue new goals.

Ellie: 54:13

And I'm not sure where we currently stand in literature and learned helplessness, because I know at least from a feminist perspective, that used to be a term people would use and now have kind of stopped using to figure the way that many women in society have a structural and felt inability to achieve their goals.Mm-hmm.But I do think this also resonates with feminist accounts of the way that women have been more prone to boredom because they have been inhibited from attaining certain goals.So I think, David, what you're talking about here is this sense of meaninglessness that structural boredom produces and also Elpidorou talks about the constraints that poverty places on people and constraint is closely linked with boredom.There's one other piece of this in addition to constraint and meaninglessness that Elpidorou mentions, and this is attention.Boredom and attention are closely related.And poverty also shifts attention in ways that are not conducive to wellbeing,for instance, and there's more to say here than we have time for, but for instance, think of scarcity mindset.If you are stuck in this scarcity mindset, which many people of lower socioeconomic statuses are where you're trying to figure out how to be able to afford your next meal or make rent for the month, your attention.Is directed right towards meeting those material needs such that you're not able to devote your attention to questions that might be more existentially satisfying for you.Financial hardship and scarcity mindset induce these concerns that are really preoccupying and this prevents you from allocating your attention in other perhaps more satisfying directions.

David: 56:06

Yes.And for this, just keep in mind that Elpidorou has defined boredom as a state of cognitive disequilibrium.And so the poor person that's constantly thinking about how to make ends meet would be constantly in that state of disequilibrium because all of their attentional resources would have to go to survival without any of them being possibly directed toward non-scarcity.Mm-hmm.Directed activities like socializing,like bonding, or also what Elpidorou calls cultural life.The problem with not having money is not just that you don't meet your primary needs, but it also means that you're excluded from cultural activities that give you a bond to others.Like going to the movies, going to the dance, maybe even travel, and that adds to the meaninglessness.Of poverty.It's a cultural as well as an existential meaninglessness.

Ellie: 57:00

And I think this leads us to conclude that not only is boredom something that we should aim to escape as individuals as much as we can.In fact, we already are doing that in the state of boredom because it's an aversive state.But we should also collectively strive for a society that limits the proneness to boredom because pervasive boredom speaks to social inequalities.