How to Fill A Yawning Gap
Out of My Skull
By James Danckert and John D. Eastwood
(Harvard, 273 pages, $
27.
95)
Is boredom really all that interesting? Thanks perhaps to the subject’s dreary durability, it has generated a considerable literature over the years. Alberto Moravia wrote an engaging novel called “Boredom,” and psychologists, philosophers and classicists have also had their say.
“Out of My Skull,” the latest work on this strangely alluring topic, has an exciting title, but nothing about the book is wild or crazy. James Danckert and John D. Eastwood, a pair of psychologists in Canada, know an awful lot about the subject (Mr. Eastwood even runs a Boredom Lab at York University), and they examine it methodically. “In our view, being bored is quite fascinating, and maybe, just maybe, it might even be helpful,” they write, echoing predecessors who find boredom salutary. “Boredom is a call to action, a signal to become more engaged. It is a push toward more meaningful and satisfying actions. It forces you to ask a consequential question: What should I do?” A taxonomy of boredom, if it’s to avoid exemplifying what it describes, ought to be simple. So let’s just say that boredom is of two kinds. The first is better known to us as ennui, and the democratization of this once-rarefied feeling is one of civilization’s triumphs. At first the preserve of aristocrats and later taken up by intellectuals, nowadays
it is available to affluent citizens everywhere. Our endless search for palliatives in the face of this affliction underpins the consumer economy. The other kind of boredom is the version that most of us get paid for. Commentators on boredom usually genuflect briefly toward factory workers, nannies and other hardworking members of the hoi polloi whose tasks can be mind-numbing. But such people live with a version of boredom that intellectuals find, well, boring. So the focus is usually on the self-important existential variety.
Such is the case with Messrs. Danckert and Eastwood, although many of their observations apply to both varieties. They note, for example, that there are four prominent factors that lead to boredom: “monotony, lack of purpose, constraint, and poor fit between our skills and the challenge of the moment.”
The fourth—that boredom results from a mismatch between skills and challenge—reflects an important insight. It turns out we get bored if work (for example) is too easy or repetitive, and we get just as bored if, having majored in English, we wander into a graduate-level presentation on particle physics. As proof, the authors cite a study in which two groups of people watched videos. One showed a mime teaching basic English vocabulary with exaggerated slowness. The other, on computer graphics, bristled with impenetrable math and charts. “In both cases,” the authors report, “people could barely endure the ordeal. Boredom levels didn’t differ.”
Messrs. Danckert and Eastwood offer a speculative account of how boredom and technology “collude,” but it’s a plausible one. “Boredom pushes us into the arms of technology so much so that we cherish it and endlessly seek to develop new and better forms of distraction. On the other hand, technology leaves us ultimately unfulfilled, ensuring boredom’s continuance.”
Technology, they suggest, may be changing how we live in ways that swaddle us ever more thickly in ennui by transforming us from “creators of meaning to passive consumers of experience—as containers to be filled rather than agentic sources of meaning.” By substituting distraction for engagement, the authors complain, the internet undermines even our ability to recognize when we’re bored. Regular consumers of pornography, for instance, seem to suffer from “sexual boredom,” as some have called it.
“Boredom is neither good nor bad,” the authors argue; what matters is how we respond to it. The main thing is to do something. They recommend “mindfulness,” whatever that is, and the pursuit of “flow,” which means getting so absorbed in a task that we lose track of time and forget ourselves. But rather than offer practical advice, the authors wax philosophical: “When we are bored, we catch a glimpse of the ultimate futility of our actions in the face of the infinity of time.”
One wonders, more prosaically, if we all made a great mistake by giving up on hobbies. Numismatics, golf and other homely pastimes were once rabbit holes in which we could lose ourselves. Such calming respite, won through engagement, contrasts with our tendency to work on ourselves at the gym or divert ourselves by bingeing on Netflix. FDR’s stamp collection allowed him to escape the burdens of Depression and war. How many of us today could do likewise?
Boredom may not be pleasant, but it can be useful—a goad to action and a reason to ask: What exactly should I be doing instead?
More important, and more difficult, would be to cultivate a larger sense of meaning and belonging. Lack of purpose is one of the authors’ four horsemen of boredom, after all, and they note that boredom and loneliness go together. Perhaps cultivating ties of kinship and community can combat both, or at least make boredom more tolerable. Parents will understand this instantly; child rearing can be quite boring at times but yields massive satisfaction, so we don’t mind so much.
It gives me no pleasure—I swear it!—to report that this new book on boredom is a bit dull. Reasonable, informative, concise—yes. But there is something pedestrian about the whole exercise. Those who can’t quite muster the authors’ enthusiasm for the topic will wish the professors had a grander sense of the absurd and a wickeder wit. On the other hand, surely it’s childish to expect to be entertained at all times. The authors aren’t vaudevillians, and they rightly imply that each of us must own our boredom. If I am left a bit bored by their earnestness, I am probably just as much at fault as they are.
Mr. Akst, a former science columnist for the Journal, writes the weekend news quiz.