Editor's Blog
Please, readers! If you experience disinterest, apathy, ennui, malaise, dysthymia, lassitude, or neurasthenia as you peruse this essay… click away to safety! If you sense your cognition tumbling towards a fetid swamp of brain-paralyzing boredom — abandon me! I don’t want your death on my conscience.
Boredom is a killer, suggests an essay in the April 2010 International Journal of Epidemiology. Researchers Annie Britton and Martin Shipley at University College London examined questionnaires completed by 7,524 civil workers in 1985-1988 that queried the bureaucrats on their interest level regarding work. Multiple-choice options ranged from experiencing boredom “not at all” to “all the time.” In 2009, the surveyors reconnected with their subjects. They discovered that those who expressed severe job boredom were 2.5 times more likely to be dead of cardiovascular disease. Their conclusion: “those who report being bored are more likely to die younger than those who are not bored.”
Were the victims “bored to death”? Can their employers be imprisoned for murder? In the future, can we indict all droning bores on charges of “assault with a lethal weapon”? Not really, no, and no. Shipley and Britton admit that boredom is not the specific cause of the victims’ demise. Nobody suddenly collapsed face-first on their keyboard, crushed by an actuarial task. Truth is — small amounts of daily boredom won’t hurt you. You can safely continue to launder your clothes and ride your exercise bike.
But when boredom becomes chronic, it’s dangerous. The numb condition lures desperate humans into “make-me-feel-alive” behavior like over-eating, alcoholism, sex addiction, smoking, drug dependency, self-mutilation, fist-fighting, off-road racing, pathological gambling, and vandalism. It can plunge one into poor grades in school or poor work performance. Boredom can spiral into depression, which carries a high risk of heart disease. Anxiety produced by boredom and depression releases hormones such as cortisol. These hormones damage the circulatory system. “Anger suppression” in boredom is also detrimental. Bottled rage increases blood pressure and weakens the immune system.
Health experts are attacking the Ennui Enemy by advising the usual cures: walking, exercise, dancing, puzzle-solving, reading, writing, drawing, get-a-pet, tend-a-garden, watch-funny-shows, learn-new-things-that-you-find-interesting. Obviously, anyone who’s feeling apathetic needs to avoid dull environments. Forbes.com’s “America’s Top Ten Most Boring Cities” fingered Aurora (Colorado), Hialeah (Florida), Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert (Arizona), Henderson, North Las Vegas (Nevada), and Santa Ana, Chula Vista, Bakersfield (California) as voids to avoid. Website chatters have nominated the “most boring” in multiple categories: Boring food? Oatmeal, tofu, celery. Boring names? James, Mary. Boring books? Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, everything by Charles Dickens. Boring jobs? Envelope stuffers. Poultry processors. Boring habits? A survey says, “complaining about oneself” and “muttering trivialities.” And finally, my tip if you’re malignant with malaise is… don’t vacation in Baltic or Slavic nations! The five top suicide spots are Lithuania, Russia, Latvia, Estonia, and Belarus, with Slovenia, Ukraine, and Croatia close behind.
The word “boredom” is modern. Charles Dickens (yes, him again) first coined it in his 1853 novel Bleak House. Philosophers and psychologists have embraced boredom. Martin Heidegger wrote 100 pages on the tedious mood. Arthur Schopenhauer categorized boredom as inherent in the human condition. Soren Kierkegaard defined boredom and its cousin despair as “inner death” in The Sickness Unto Death and postulated that all human life is in motion towards boredom. Sigmund Freud theorized that boredom was the result of repressed emotions and Albert Schweitzer concurred with this diagnosis when he compared boredom to African’s sleeping sickness. “Your soul suffers if you live superficially,” Schweitzer warns, advising readers to combat “indifference” by searching in “their inmost selves” for their “inner voice.”
And finally, my tip if you’re malignant with malaise is… don’t vacation in Baltic or Slavic nations!
A more recent philosopher — Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams of Cambridge and Berkeley — addressed boredom in a context that has provoked intense transhumanist rebuttal. Williams’ 1972 essay, “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” asserted that immortality would doom us to a joyless existence that would be horrifically boring. Williams’ guidepost was a play, The Makropulos Affair by Karel Čapek, later an opera by Leoš Janáček (both Czechs, see Slavic warning above). Both works feature a 342-year-old woman who can’t die because she’s been given a magic elixir. Her “life sentence” fills her with anguish, and Williams regards this emotive state as unavoidable. He accepts the “Death Gives Life Meaning” maxim that’s enclosed in the anti-immortality stance. On fightaging.org, Australian transhumanist Alejandro Dubrovsky informs us that he randomly surveyed people who opposed life extension. “Boredom,” Dubrovsky reports, “is the reason most people give for not wanting to live for 150 years.”
Will life be fun if we live forever? Sir Williams’ negativistic argument — that we’ll all be drained of interest in everything there is to be interested in — is attacked by extropian Max More in his 1991 essay, “Meaningfulness and Mortality” that concludes with the sharp remark: “ennui has to do with laziness rather than the availability of too much time.” Aschwin de Wolf of depressedmetabolism.com analyzes Williams’ theory in similar fashion: “Perhaps arguments of this kind do not so much reflect logic but temperament… tell[ing] us more about the philosopher in question than about the nature of the universe.” Link
John Mellencamp’s ageist, lyrical opinion, “Life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone” was critiqued by George Dvorsky of sentientdevelopments.com at the Institute of Ethics & Emerging Technology (7/13/07). Eliezer Yudkowski of singinst.org tackles the topic in his “Singularity Fun Theory Sequence.” Michael Anissimov of acceleratingfuture.com suggests in a comment to a post on “Existence Is Wonderful” that the future will offer apathy-annihilating stimuli: “the number of new nations, cultures, trends, and philosophies… developed by posthumanity, will greatly outclass the current menu.” But the most surprising commentator in the debate is Harry R. Moody, director of the Institute for Human Value in Aging. In his essay, “Who’s Afraid of Life Extension?” Moody admits that he first viewed radical longevity as “a delusion — an appeal to vanity, to narcissism and denial of reality.” His scientific mind abandons these biases as he dives into the data and faces his own emotional reservations. He concludes his examination of boredom in eternity with pragmatic advice: “Life extension will require creating new institutions to help people overcome boredom…. second careers, lifelong learning, new varieties of marriage and other forms of social relationship.”
Boredom, I believe, will vanish in the future, especially after all redundant work is performed by robots. The brain is plastic, ever-changing. As it transmutes, new interests, passions, goals and fantasies arise for each of us. I think Freud and Schweitzer are correct when they claim that boredom only cripples us when our animus is chained, when our ambitions are thwarted, when our lusts are denied. Hunger — the desire to be, to know, to experience — obliterates boredom. If we weren’t bored at 20 we won’t be bored at 200. If our curiosity is insatiable we will never be finished. The bored can die if they want to. They can go to Belgium today and get euthanized if they wish. I don’t care… because I think… their anti-immortality arguments… are just so… extremely… boring!
Hank Hyena blogs at http://hedonistfuturist.com and he’s senior editor of The Extropist Examiner.
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17 Comments
As for me, the root of the problem is the activity after work for balance the boredom at work as said in the article: “behavior like over-eating, alcoholism, sex addiction, smoking, drug dependency, self-mutilation, fist-fighting, off-road racing, pathological gambling, and vandalism.”
Many careers right now are taking a hard hit for hiring new graduates and the new spectrum of 20 people trying for the one job is very frustrating. So the majority of these young college graduates take part-time jobs just to pay rent. Part-time jobs that actually reinforce “not-thinking”. Follow the rules and nothing more. That is exactly the mindset that they don’t learn in college. So it becomes a double downer. Boredom and more threatening: not being allowed to think, to create to develop ideas.
Many kids take this and do actually what the articles suggests: do some extra on the side that gives the balance of “feeling-alive”.
I believe boredom is a symptom, not a cause of depression. With all the resources for learning and activity of all kinds out there, someone who is bored is just tired of the possibilities in life. I find with myself (though I’m not a depressed person), my own feelings of boredom tend to coincide with sadness, confusion, or anxiety.
I have heard from russian statisticians that deaths from suicide exceed deaths from traffic accidents in Russia. But they do not have good statistical data . If somebody died few days after car crash in a hospital he does not get counted as car crash victim. I knew three persons who have died in car crashes and no one who committed suicide. It doesn’t mean we have low suicide rates, it’s just there are more dangerous things to be worried about. And do you really think that depressed person will get worse from visiting Klaipėda(Lithuania) or Sochi(Russia) – both popular resorts, or Moscow? Sounds rather ridiculous. Why should he?
Hi Beo — this is Hank Hyena, the author. thanks for the comments. I have not visited Russia myself but I would like to someday. I am sure that your resorts are wonderful and that they would cheer people up. I do not know why Russian, and Slavic, suicide rates are so high — I have no idea. Let me know if you know? thanks
Why are Russian and Slavic suicide rates so high? Here are a couple wild guesses: Two cultures that have been decimated and desiccated by a brutal communist regime over the past 90+ years (including its thuggish remnants over the past 20), combined with endemic Seasonal Affective Disorder (just ask anyone living north of 50 degrees latitude). Mix with vodka, and voila!
Hi Hank. Suicide rates are so high because of all socio-economical crises which underwent people in all these countries. There is straight correlation between economical crises and quantity of mental disorders. It piked in early 90th when some bad guys crushed down the USSR. In 1998 in Russia there was another crisis and in 2009 one more so that is why it still is high. Things weren’t much better in Ukraine or Belarus. And our governments are not working hard enough with this problem .I don’t know much about resent economic history of Baltic countries and Estonia somehow has relatively low suicide rate so it’s hard to say what is going on there. Definitely there was no “Estonian economic miracle”. I have no idea why there is such drastic difference between Estonia and its neighborhood.
You can’t experiece disinterest, only uninterest or lack of interest. Disinterested means impartial.
This discussion is silly. It’s true that the boredom under Communism was horrific, even lethal. But back in Prague we could always retreat to sex. The only guys I know who killed themselves were the ones not getting it.
M is for Maude who was swept out to sea
N is for Neville who died of ennui
from The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey
What do you do after you’ve got 16 puppies?
Thank you for this comprehensive article on boredom. What you say makes a lot of sense and you certainly seem to have done your homework on the subject. I hope to read more from you in the future.
I wonder if technology will give us something like the opposite of boredom that also works against personal survival: hyperstimuli.
For example:
S Korean dies after games session
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4137782.stm
As for my boredom management strategy, I keep adding things I’d like to do or learn to my Lazarus Long list. It has started to resemble Zora Colakovic’s list of action-hero skills:
http://www.audiojournal.com/zora.html
Audio version:
http://www.box.net/shared/static/9gu8mkov84.mp3
Thanks again Hank for a stimulating, certainly not boring, article! Keep up the good work!
Hi – this is Hank Hyena – the author. Thanks for your comments. I especially like news from South Korea — I wrote about it in a previous article that you can read here:
http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/politics/next-global-superpower-korea
I’m glad to hear that you’re not bored, and thanks for the tip on how to avoid it.
Dear bandit — this is Hank Hyena, the author. 16 puppies is a mess of canine and I sympathize with your predicament. If they are large enough you could outfit two sled teams. If not, you could read this for amusement, but I am not advocating this as a solution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_meat
fix: *It peaked
Nice viewpoint and article. Boardroom takes many forms, but the board with life type just need little nudges into what some of there interest’s are normally. The Russian Ukraine problem has been going on for some time now, and there state run hospital compound some of that too. Part seem’s to be stagnation of imagination a few degrees more than are happening here in the US. I like the comment about the Korean kid who got such a electrolyte imbalance and so dehydrated he died playing a online game. I actually worried about that some recently with my self experimentation done, in drinking a case of red bull in one day, sweating all day, and staying plugged into my cluster setups in varying degrees. My hydration solution was to get a camelpak, but I still get a imbalance of electrolytic. That is part of why I still pass threw this site, and haven’t fully disappeared to the next form and namedropping. I’ve Almost finished my Laborious Cretinous gleaming/protrusion while experiencing a patent 0 point single linear prime example before the next set needed to play for the future merging.I am no one yet, I am some one. Lost in belonging and left with a felling of dystopia time placement within this society. A echoed message in a bottle is all I want to leave to some of this society as my human coil is shed at that point. Illegal drugs like ecstasy should be able to help some of thous board depressed people, as long as they embrace non conformation to other peoples tyranny or repression, or ideals that might not match. The neural dancers of Adrenalin and dopamine type cocktails will rarely need to worry about the boring depressive states of being, though some will crash as everyone is different. But then again that’s just my hunch.
Oh well back to my epic stream of tranced state, and where ever it seem’s to be pushing me to.
P.S. the Koreans where pioneers for adapting the older gamers to stock market players, & they and japan are also leaders in weird entertainment variants witch are part of the near future for most. Though 200-300+ Ping suX for web visiting and such, from this country. Russia needs more or better entertainment, reformed health care hospitals, increased wages to strengthen the middle class and such to help battle boardroom and depression of types. I still feel alien to chines and the population types I would like to find. Oh and you or others can criticize me, as I have skin of steel and titanium ball’s, but give me a break on spelling gamer as that has always been my weakness.