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In conventional usage, boredom, ennui, or tedium is an emotion characterized by uninterest in one's surrounding, often caused by a lack of distractions or occupations. Although, "There is no universally accepted definition of boredom. But whatever it is, researchers argue, it is not simply another name for depression or apathy. It seems to be a specific mental state that people find unpleasant—a lack of stimulation that leaves them craving relief, with a host of behavioral, medical and social consequences." According to BBC News, boredom "...can be a dangerous and disruptive state of mind that damages your health"; yet research "...suggests that without boredom we couldn't achieve our Creativity feats."
In Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity, Elizabeth Goodstein traces the modern discourse on boredom through literary, philosophical, and sociological texts to find that as "a discursively articulated phenomenon...boredom is at once objective and subjective, emotion and intellectualization—not just a response to the modern world, but also a historically constituted strategy for coping with its discontents."Goodstein, Elizabeth S. 2005. Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 3. In both conceptions, boredom has to do fundamentally with an Time perception—such as experiencing the slowness of time—and problems of meaning.
The French term for boredom, ennui, is sometimes used in English as well, at least since 1778. The term ennui was first used "as a French word in English;" in the 1660s and it was "nativized by 1758". The term ennui comes "from French ennui, from Old French enui "annoyance" (13c.), a back-formation from enoiier, anuier. "The German word for "boredom" is , a compound made of lange "long" and Weile "while", which is in line with the common perception that when one is bored, time passes "torturously" slowly.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Psychometric Measures of Boredom: A Review of the Literature" The Journal of Psychology. 137:6 p. 569 "Indeed, a shortcoming of the boredom literature is the absence of a coherent, universally accepted definition. The lack of an agreed-upon definition of boredom has limited the measurement of the construct and partly accounts for the existence of diverse approaches to assessing various subsets of boredom." Boredom has been defined by Cynthia D. Fisher in terms of its main central psychological processes: "an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest and difficulty concentrating on the current activity." Mark Leary et al. describe boredom as "an affective experience associated with cognitive attentional processes." Robert Plutchik characterized boredom as a mild form of disgust. In positive psychology, boredom is described as a response to a moderate challenge for which the subject has more than enough skill.
There are three types of boredom, all of which involve problems of engagement of attention. These include times when humans are prevented from engaging in wanted activity, when humans are forced to engage in unwanted activity, or when people are simply unable for some other reason to maintain engagement in an activity. Boredom proneness is a tendency to experience boredom of all types. This is typically assessed by the Boredom Proneness Scale. Recent research has found that boredom proneness is clearly and consistently associated with failures of attention. Boredom and its proneness are both theoretically and empirically linked to depression and similar symptoms. Nonetheless, boredom proneness has been found to be as strongly correlated with attentional lapses as with depression. Although boredom is often viewed as a trivial and mild irritant, proneness to boredom has been linked to a very diverse range of possible psychological, physical, educational, and social problems.
Absent-mindedness is where a person shows inattentive or forgetful behaviour. Absent-mindedness is a mental condition in which the subject experiences low levels of attention and frequent distraction. Absent-mindedness is not a diagnosed condition, but rather a symptom of boredom and sleepiness which people experience in their daily lives. People who are absent-minded tend to show signs of memory lapse and weak recollection of recently occurring events. This can usually be a result of a variety of other conditions often diagnosed by clinicians such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and depression. In addition to absent-mindedness leading to an array of consequences affecting daily life, it can also have more severe, long-term problems.
During the fin de siècle, the French term for the end of the 19th century in the West, some of the cultural hallmarks included "ennui", cynicism, pessimism, and "...a widespread belief that civilization leads to decadence."Meštrović, Stjepan G. The Coming Fin de Siecle: An Application of Durkheim's Sociology to modernity and postmodernism. Oxon, England; New York: Routledge (1992 1991: 2). Pireddu, Nicoletta. "Primitive marks of modernity: cultural reconfigurations in the Franco-Italian fin de siècle," Romanic Review, 97 (3–4), 2006: 371–400.
Boredom also plays a role in existentialism thought. Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche were two of the first philosophers considered fundamental to the existentialist movement. Like Blaise Pascal, they were interested in people's quiet struggle with the apparent meaninglessness of life and the use of diversion to escape from boredom. Kierkegaard's Either/Or describes the rotation method, a method used by higher-level aesthetes in order to avoid boredom. The method is an essential hedonism aspect of the aesthetic way of life. For the aesthete, one constantly changes what one is doing in order to maximize the enjoyment and pleasure derived from each activity.
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Martin Heidegger wrote about boredom in two texts available in English, in the 1929/30 semester lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and again in the essay What is Metaphysics? published in the same year. In the lecture, Heidegger included about 100 pages on boredom, probably the most extensive philosophical treatment ever of the subject. He focused on waiting at in particular as a major context of boredom.Martin Heidegger. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, pp. 78–164. Søren Kierkegaard remarks in Either/Or that "patience cannot be depicted" visually, since there is a sense that any immediate moment of life may be fundamentally tedious.
Blaise Pascal in the Pensées discusses the human condition in saying "we seek rest in a struggle against some obstacles. And when we have overcome these, rest proves unbearable because of the boredom it produces", and later states that "only an infinite and immutable object—that is, God himself—can fill this infinite abyss."
Without stimulus or focus, the individual is confronted with , the meaninglessness of existence, and experiences existential anxiety. Heidegger states this idea as follows: "Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals being as a whole."Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? (1929) Schopenhauer used the existence of boredom in an attempt to prove the vanity of human existence, stating, "...for if life, in the desire for which our essence and existence consists, possessed in itself a positive value and real content, there would be no such thing as boredom: mere existence would fulfil and satisfy us."Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, Penguin Classics, (2004), p. 53 Full text available online: Google Books Search
Erich Fromm and other thinkers of critical theory speak of boredom as a common psychological response to industrial society, where people are required to engage in alienated labor. According to Fromm, boredom is "perhaps the most important source of aggression and destructiveness today." For Fromm, the search for thrills and novelty that characterizes consumer culture are not solutions to boredom, but mere distractions from boredom which, he argues, continues unconsciously.Erich Fromm, "Theory of Aggression" p. 7 Above and beyond taste and character, the universal case of boredom consists in any instance of waiting, as Heidegger noted, such as in line, for someone else to arrive or finish a task, or while one is travelling somewhere. The automobile requires fast reflexes, making its operator busy and hence, perhaps for other reasons as well, making the ride more tedious despite being over sooner.
In some Nguni languages such as Zulu language, boredom and loneliness are represented by the same word (isizungu). This adds a new dimension to the oft-quoted definition of ubuntu: "A person is a person through other people".
In a learning environment, a common cause of boredom is lack of understanding; for instance, if one is not following or connecting to the material in a class or lecture, it will usually seem boring. However, the opposite can also be true; something that is too easily understood, simple or transparent, can also be boring. Boredom is often inversely related to learning, and in school it may be a sign that a student is not challenged enough, or too challenged. An activity that is predictable to the students is likely to bore them. Ed.gov – R.V. Small et al. Dimensions of Interest and Boredom in Instructional Situations, Proceedings of Selected Research and Development Presentations at the 1996 National Convention of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (18th, Indianapolis, IN), (1996)
A 1989 study indicated that an individual's impression of boredom may be influenced by the individual's degree of attention, as a higher acoustic level of distraction from the environment correlated with higher reportings of boredom. Boredom has been studied as being related to drug abuse among teens. Boredom has been proposed as a cause of pathological gambling behavior. A study found results consistent with the hypothesis that pathological gamblers seek stimulation to avoid states of boredom and depression. It has been suggested that boredom has an evolutionary basis that encourages humans to seek out new challenges. It may influence human learning and ingenuity. The Psychology of Boredom – Why Your Brain Punishes You for Being Comfortable and Safe
Some recent studies have suggested that boredom may have some positive effects. A low-stimulus environment may lead to increased creativity and may set the stage for a "eureka moment".
A "banishment room" (also known as a "chasing-out-room" and a "boredom room") is a modern employee exit management strategy whereby employees are transferred to a department where they are assigned meaningless work until they become disheartened enough to quit. Since the resignation is voluntary, the employee would not be eligible for certain benefits. The legality and ethics of the practice is questionable and may be construed as constructive dismissal by the courts in some regions.
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