This post is by Lorraine Besser. Lorraine is a philosopher, author, and professor at Middlebury College in Vermont. In this post, Lorraine addresses the topic of boredom.
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| Lorraine Besser |
Boredom. We’ve all experienced it and we all want to avoid it. But wait: isn’t it sometimes good to be bored? My answer is no, and that the very asking of this question reveals the ambiguous nature of the concept as it is used in ordinary discourse. This ambiguity is dangerous: because boredom is inherently bad, yet also quite natural for us to experience, it’s important to know how to alleviate it. Yet, we can’t begin to understand how to alleviate it unless we are clearer on what boredom is.
Most often, when someone claims that boredom is sometimes good, what they mean is that it is sometimes good for our minds to be at rest, and for us to experience the peaceful, calming nature of a mind at rest. Without question, it is sometimes good for our minds to be at rest. A restful mind, however, is not a bored one. A bored mind wants to engage and strives to engage but fails to engage. Its nature is always aversive.
The most influential philosophical understandings of boredom explain the aversive nature of boredom in terms of the absence of desires or meaning. These accounts imply that boredom itself is all about a lack of desire/meaning and so that boredom can be resolved by developing a desire or by meaning in whatever one is doing.
It takes but a moment to recognize how misleading these views are, and that neither desires nor meaning have anything to do with boredom. That something has meaning, and that something is desired, doesn’t make it interesting; why think a lack of these things makes something boring? It is common to desire to do something yet find ourselves bored by it, and it is certainly possible to be bored while doing something meaningful.
To explain boredom in terms of desires or meaning is to make a category mistake. There is a sense of dissatisfaction and frustration inherent to the state of boredom, but it’s not about desires or meaning. Quite simply, when we’re bored, it is because we are dissatisfied and frustrated by the level of cognitive engagement we are experiencing. That’s why boredom is always bad.
This analysis of boredom has some interesting consequences. Not only does it point clearly to how we can alleviate boredom (by finding something to engage our minds with), it reveals the prudential value of cognitive engagement itself, even when that engagement is not in the service of desires or purpose, nor embedded in meaning. This analysis shows that any form of cognitive engagement is prudentially valuable because it engages the mind. Even when unstructured, cognitive engagement is prudentially valuable.
One significant implication of this is that, even when one has lost their capacity for rational thinking, they can still experience value by engaging their mind. Human agency is not all about satisfying desires, pursuing goals, or finding sources of meaning; the more we think it is, the more we inhibit a subject’s ability to experience prudential value.