Sickness and death from Covid 19 were visited upon many, but a whole lot more of us were afflicted by boredom. Whether rich or poor, young or old, living in the countryside or in a city we were left with empty holes of time in our lives, holes we could not fill with meaningful activities. And most of us I bet cursed our boredom time and again and scornfully cast it in the heap of things we loathe.
But read more about boredom and you may start having a change of heart and mind. The New York Times had an article about boredom during the pandemic, but it looked at it narrowly as the emotion that might have changed our consumption habits in temporary or even more permanent ways. It so happened though that around this time I was reading a book about work by the anthropologist James Suzman,* and in its pages I discovered another perspective on boredom; a perspective that is more positive and informative.
To be sure, boredom can be the mother of some bad things. It can drive people to alcohol or drug abuse, others to binge-eating, and others yet to binge-buying (look at Amazon’s sales). Boredom as an emotional condition can be associated with chronic depression, or inability to pay attention to things we do, or a lack of capacity to find meaning in anything. Boredom is leisure time that goes bad. To be bored means to be self-aware and unfulfilled. The 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer considered boredom to be a reminder of the meaninglessness of human existence. Wow!
For most of us, however, the boredom we have been feeling during the pandemic is the result of the lockdown that replaced hours of work, socialization, recreation, entertainment and traveling with hours of – should we say nothing? Full of energy and desires but nothing to do and nowhere to go. Just the state of affairs that fits Leo Tolstoy’s definition of boredom: The desire for desires.
To have desires we must be aware of things we can do. We must have experienced pecuniary or other pleasurable activities we desire to pursue. And this brings us to the interesting questions about boredom. What happens, for example, if you have a singular goal in life and you achieve it? I knew nothing about Timothy Kim, but looking for answers to this question I came across his case. Timothy always wanted to be vastly rich. At age 31 he became a billionaire with his platform TubofCash.com and then he confessed he was bored! Who runs the higher risk for boredom, a rich or a poor person? Rich people can satisfy a lot more desires than poor people. Does that make them more prone to boredom than poor people? Well, I suppose it depends on whether boredom is a relative or an absolute emotion. If it is relative, rich people suffer worse because they are deprived of relatively more pleasures than poor people. But if boredom is absolute then rich people suffer less because they can still do some things (like ordering food from good restaurants) not available to poor people.
Instead of comparing contemporary rich and poor people, let’s compare ourselves to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Contrary to the popular belief that hunter-gatherers were struggling every minute of their lives to secure food and stay alive, they actually managed to be well-fed and sheltered with no more than two hours of work a day. Remarkably then they had a lot more leisure time in their hands than their descendants who had the misfortune to discover farming and millennia later the world of machines and the intense work culture the industrial revolution brought us.
How did they spend those hours of leisure? The anthropologists tell us, they sat around the camp fire, slowly learning the art of socializing, mediating frictions among clan members, finding some ways to entertain each other, and eventually developing the tool that would make these activities more communicative, that is, language.
With all this free time, they had to feel bored at some point. But we can safely guess not as much as we do. Their lifestyle was simple and their basket of desires was really small and shallow. Not only they were able to meet their material needs very reliably and plentifully, they also had no serious desires for social status to pursue. Their egalitarian social structure made sure that those with the potential or intention to acquire a higher status were brought back into line through shaming.
Nonetheless, boredom must have been too much to some hunter-gatherers that it set their minds loose to explore ways to escape it. One of these mind-wandering moments discovered artistic expression. Representational art in primitive sculptural form appeared 70,000 to 90,000 years ago, and the first cave wall paintings about 35,000 years ago. Even Homo Erectus, our ancestor of 600,000 to 800,000 years ago, took the time (because they had plenty of it!) to put some aesthetic finish in the stony tips of their spears that was not all that necessary to their effectiveness. Thus, boredom brought out of leisure might have possibly been the impetus for the emergence of art and language.
The comparison of our lives to those of our foraging ancestors then suggests that the negative consequences and the intensity of boredom are another curse of our contemporary life-style and civilization. Aware of the countless experiences and pleasures that are open to us and with our bottomless basket of desires, boredom becomes so much more salient and unbearable.
Back then, thousands of years ago, when time was in abundance and not the precious good it is today, boredom played its evolutionary role by giving our innate trait of curiosity an outlet to imagination, creativity and pursuit of meaning. Eventually though, available free time and its offspring boredom conspired to push us into food producing methods and social structures that bonded us to work, generated novel experiences and gave us a world of desires from which it has become almost impossible to escape.
Thus, that ancient boredom that gave us the innovations that took us beyond our basic desire to just stay alive with food and shelter is now responsible for all the discontent its modern version visits upon us today.
* James Suzman, Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time, 2020.
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