The present moment is filled with joy and
happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it. --Thich Nhat
Hanh
Why The Capacity For Boredom Is A Good Thing
--by Maria Popova, syndicated from brainpickings.org, Jul 09, 2014
“Boredom
… protects the individual, makes tolerable for him the impossible experience of
waiting for something without knowing what it could be.”
When
was the last time you were bored — truly bored — and didn’t instantly spring to
fill your psychic emptiness by checking Facebook or Twitter or Instagram? The
last time you stood in line at the store or the boarding gate or the theater and
didn’t reach for your smartphone seeking deliverance from the dreary prospect of
forced idleness? A century and a half ago, Kierkegaard argued that this impulse
to escape the present by keeping ourselves busy is our
greatest source of unhappiness. A century later, Susan Sontag wrote in her
diary about the
creative purpose of boredom. And yet ours is a culture that equates boredom
with the opposite of creativity and goes to great lengths to offer us escape
routes.
Children
have a way of asking deceptively
simple yet existentially profound questions. Among them, argues the
celebrated British psychoanalytical writer Adam
Phillips, is “What shall we do now?” In an essay “On Being Bored,” found in his altogether spectacular 1993
collection On
Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined
Life (public
library), Phillips writes:
Every
adult remembers, among many other things, the great ennui of childhood, and
every child’s life is punctuated by spells of boredom: that state of suspended
anticipation in which things are started and nothing begins, the mood of diffuse
restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for
a desire.
Phillips,
of course, is writing more than two decades before the modern internet had given
us the ubiquitous “social web” that envelops culture today. This lends his
insights a new layer of poignancy as we consider the capacity for boredom — not
only in children, though especially in children, but also in adults — amidst our
present age of constant access to and unmediated influx of external stimulation.
This is particularly pause-giving considering the developmental function of
boredom in shaping our psychological constitution and the way we learn to pay
attention to the world — or not.
Phillips writes:
Boredom
is actually a precarious process in which the child is, as it were, both waiting
for something and looking for something, in which hope is being secretly
negotiated; and in this sense boredom is akin to free-floating attention. In the
muffled, sometimes irritable confusion of boredom the child is reaching to a
recurrent sense of emptiness out of which his real desire can crystallize… The
capacity to be bored can be a developmental achievement for the child.
Because
of how
profoundly our early experiences shape our psychoemotional patterns, it’s
inescapable to contemplate how this translates into our adult capacities. How
easily and uncomfortably the phrase “modern adult” can replace every mention of
the child in the following passage from Phillips’s essay:
Experiencing
a frustrating pause in his usually mobile attention and absorption, the bored
child quickly becomes preoccupied by his lack of preoccupation. Not exactly
waiting for someone else, he is, as it were, waiting for himself. Neither
hopeless nor expectant, neither intent nor resigned, the child is in a dull
helplessness of possibility and dismay. In simple terms the child always has two
concurrent, overlapping projects: the project of self-sufficiency in which use
of, and need for, the other is interpreted, by the child, as a concession; and a
project of mutuality that owns up to a dependence. In the banal crisis of
boredom, the conflict between the two projects is once again renewed.
It
is unsurprising then, Phillips notes, that the child’s boredom evokes in adults
a reprimand, a sense of disappointment, an accusation of failure — that is,
provided boredom is even agreed to or acknowledged in the first place. In a
certain sense, we treat boredom like we
treat childishness itself — as
something to be overcome and grown out of, rather than simply as a different
mode of being, an essential one at that. Phillips adds:
How
often, in fact, the child’s boredom is met by that most perplexing form of
disapproval, the adult’s wish to distract him — as though the adults have
decided that the child’s life must be, or be seen to be, endlessly interesting.
It is one of the most oppressive demands of adults that the child should be
interested, rather than take time to find what interests him. Boredom is
integral to the process of taking one’s time.
That,
perhaps, is what Cheryl Strayed alluded to so beautifully nearly twenty years
later, when she wrote that “the
useless days will add up to something [because] these things are your
becoming.”
Phillips
goes on to consider more directly the evolution of boredom from childhood into
adulthood:
As
adults boredom returns us to the scene of inquiry, to the poverty of our
curiosity, and the simple question, What does one want to do with one’s time?
What is a brief malaise for the child becomes for the adult a kind of muted
risk. After all, who can wait for nothing?
[…]
We
can think of boredom as a defense against waiting, which is, at one remove, an
acknowledgement of the possibility of desire… In boredom, we can also say, there
are two assumptions, two impossible options: there is something I desire, and
there is nothing I desire. But which of the two assumptions, or beliefs, is
disavowed is always ambiguous, and this ambiguity accounts, I think, for the
curious paralysis of boredom… In boredom there is the lure of a possible object
of desire, and the lure of the escape from desire, of its meaninglessness.
[…]
Boredom,
I think, protects the individual, makes tolerable for him the impossible
experience of waiting for something without knowing what it could be. So that
the paradox of the waiting that goes on in boredom is that the individual does
not know what he was waiting for until he finds it, and that often he does not
know what he is waiting… Clearly, we should speak not of boredom, but of
boredoms, because the notion itself includes a multiplicity of moods and
feelings that resist analysis; and this, we can say, is integral to the function
of boredom as a kind of blank condensation of psychic life.
Lamenting
that we tend to treat boredom as a handicap and to deny it as an opportunity,
Phillips cites the story of “a precociously articulate eleven-year-old boy” who
was once a patient of his, brought in by a mother who believed her son was “more
miserable than he realized,” in large part due to his “misleading
self-representation.” Phillips found that this superficial self, which the boy
donned as a shield for disapproval, was largely tied to the experience of
boredom. Once again, Phillips offers a passage all too intimately applicable to
the modern human condition beyond just childhood:
[The
boy] was mostly in a state of what I can only describe as blank exuberance about
how full his life was. As he was terrified of his own self-doubt, I asked him
very few questions, and they were always tactful. But at one point, more direct
than I intended to be, I asked him if he was ever bored. He was surprised by the
question and replied with a gloominess I hadn’t seen before in this relentlessly
cheerful child, “I’m not allowed to be bored.” I asked him what would happen if
he allowed himself to be bored, and he paused for the first time, I think, in
the treatment, and said, “I wouldn’t know what I was looking forward to, ” and
was, momentarily, quite panic-stricken by this thought.
Phillips
directed the treatment toward the boy’s “false self” and his belief that being
good, by the token of his mother’s approval, meant having lots of interests that
didn’t leave room for the vice of boredom. Over the course of the following
year, Phillips helped the boy develop his capacity to be bored. He recounts:
I
once suggested to him that being good was a way of stopping people knowing him,
to which he agreed but added, “When I’m bored I don’t know myself.”
This,
I think, is how we as grownups in the modern world often go through life. Our
version of being good is being productive. Choosing constant distraction or
busyness — two sides of the same coin — we seek to avoid not boredom and
passivity, but end up robbing ourselves of presence,
because presence presupposed a detachment from what we look forward to, what is
to come, and a mindful groundedness in what is.
This
is the cultural pathology of our time: If we stopped doing what we do, we might
not know who we are. As I’ve reflected
before, to cultivate the art of presence in the age of productivity is no
easy feat.
On
Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored is a beautiful and psyche-stretching read in
its entirety. Complement it with this cultural
history of boredom, then revisit Phillips’s fantastic conversation with Paul
Holdengräber on why
psychoanalysis is like literature for the soul.
Be The Change:
Instead of checking your email or social media
the next time you have a free moment, savor the feeling and discomfort of "being
bored." Write down any insights you learn in that moment.
