Almost a year has passed since my first feature was published: the informative essay La enfermedad del aborimiento. In that title he summarized a decade of multidisciplinary research around a phenomenon as common as the fact that human beings get bored.
Yes, we get bored. We get bored with those situations that are not sufficiently stimulating to us, we get bored by repeatedly exposing ourselves to what is too familiar to us, we get bored when we don’t know what to do –even when we are aware that we want to do something– and we get bored when we do things that are not significant to us.
Are we all bored, without distinction? Are the privileged few bored? Or only the most unfortunate? Do those with a non-conformist character get bored? Or those who are lacking in interest in the world around them? Are smart people bored or only dumb ones?
With this work, he intended to make known what the experience of boredom consists of from its different aspects, to show what role it plays in our daily life, to explore what its main causes and consequences are, and to guide people on how to get rid of the suffering that we experience. aboca.
However, I often have the feeling that I have achieved the complete opposite. I’ve spent the last few months responding, in countless forums, to some of the questions posed two paragraphs ago, debunking the most entrenched beliefs in our popular culture about boredom.
Although I am pleased to know that the subject of boredom has reached the public dialogue, I am also frightened by the amount of prejudice with which it is approached, especially because of how much it costs to overcome them to convince those who propagate them of their error. Mantras that are repeated ad nauseam by renowned intellectuals and that easily permeate the collective imagination – like those who say that the study of boredom is in its infancy, that tedium is born within modern societies dominated by capitalism, that to get bored it is necessary to have free time or that boredom is the source of creativity. Myths that are intended to pass as truths, ignoring that about what they preach there is science sensu stricto.
Many of them are harmless, simple narratives that have been installed in our present. Others, however, have the power to condition the way in which we perceive reality, to the point of becoming stigmatizing for those who experience boredom in a problematic way.
A clear example of this is the expression that only fools and lack of creativity get bored. Another very hackneyed case is the one that says that boredom is the privilege of the idle and the carefree.
We all get bored – 3% of every 30 minutes of our lives – but nobody wants to admit it because it is considered a defeat. The boredom that modern societies exude –although they are not the only ones in which this state is suffered– is an open secret. However, we do not want to assume our responsibility in the first person. We fear being blamed for our misery, as if avoiding boredom was always a mere matter of voluntarism.
Getting bored is an acquired condition of our species –but not exclusively– that helps us to know what is of true value to us and what we should discard, fulfilling the function of avoiding stagnation in situations that have become obsolete or that do not contribute nothing to our lives.
You don’t have to be stupid to fall prey to boredom. Being more or less intelligent will not prevent us, on occasions, from ending up witnessing scenarios that seem tedious to us or committing ourselves to insignificant activities that seem contrary to our expectations.
On the contrary, I dare to affirm that fools are those who boast of never getting bored, flaunting their exceptional ability to delight in each of the wonders of creation and belittling the rest of us mortals who do not enjoy their infinite curiosity. Either they take us for idiots, or what happens is that they have no filter at all.
Then there are those who say that they are not bored because they do not have time due to their many occupations, as if these same occupations could not be boring and even arouse a deeper, quasi-existential tedium. We fall into the trap of thinking that boredom is only born in the time of power -that is, the time in which we choose what to do-, when it is evident that what arouses the most boredom is what we do in the time of duty -that in which tasks are imposed on us.
I cannot resist bringing up the famous quote from the French writer Abel Dufresne that, from time to time, some enlightened person rescues on the networks to criticize the lazy: “Boredom is the disease of lucky people; the unfortunates are not bored, they have too much to doâ€. But has anyone asked the latter if what they have to do bores them? Or if the scarcity of free time condemns them to ennui de vivre? Doesn’t their boredom make them doubly miserable?
Getting bored is not necessarily the consequence of being empty inside or being unproductive – for example, we get bored at work because many of the tasks we do are repetitive, monotonous, or perhaps too easy.
This boredom thing is much more complex than it seems at first glance –it has been studied for centuries for something. We have forgotten that, sometimes, we have no choice but to submit to it, that it is not always in our power to get rid of the sources of boredom that torture us.
I am thinking of those who suffer from chronic boredom and who, for reasons beyond their control, find it difficult to design escape strategies from what bores them. Also in those others who, even going so far as to design them, are constrained when it comes to putting them into practice due to the same context in which boredom is born –as happens to older people who live institutionalized or prisoners in jails–.
The one who admits to being aware of the effects of this bittersweet liquor, as Unamuno said, is not more cowardly, nor lazy, nor stupid, nor worse person. He is astute in corroborating his experience, for only then is he successfully heading towards his own redemption.
Josefa Ros Velasco is an MSCA postdoctoral researcher in Boredom Studies at the Complutense University of Madrid.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
