When my children were little, I would respond to their complaints about boredom with less than complete compassion. Whenever one of them came up to me saying, “I’m bored,” I would stick out my arm as if to offer a handshake, and say, “Nice to meet you, board. I’m stick.”
My children did not think this was very funny, and they were right, but then, humor wasn’t really the point. The point was to refuse to accept the idea that their boredom was a problem that I should solve for them. I deflected their complaints because I wanted them to learn to see boredom as carrying an implied question: “What is worthy of my interest right now?” I wanted them to find the answer to this question for themselves.
After they walked away in irritation with me, they would usually do so.
People who have found a sense of purpose in their lives tend to have little patience with boredom, because boredom is an emotion based on the feeling that there is nothing interesting going on. The challenge of boredom is to look past the superficial appearance of tedium, and recognize the clues, contained within ordinary objects and settings, of drama hidden beneath the surface.
Sherry Turkle, who studies the cultural impact of technology at MIT, advises that, “Boredom is your imagination calling to you.” Everyone gets bored now and then. What matters is what we do with our boredom. Do we accept its dull judgment, or do we heed the call to inquire further?
Actor and activist Viggo Mortensen urges people to get beyond the first flush of boredom to achieve a more worthwhile frame of mind. “There’s no excuse to be bored,” he says. “Sad, yes. Angry, yes. Depressed, yes. Crazy, yes, but there’s no excuse for boredom, ever.”
Mortensen’s admonition would make sense in a world in which human beings could operate as consistently strident moral beings, always dedicated to doing the right thing. That’s not the world we really live in, though. We aren’t the masters of our own minds, much less masters of the world. It’s one thing for an actor to give a totally focused performance for a limited amount of time, but actual living is quite different from that.
There is a really good excuse for feeling bored sometimes, actually. We’re not angels or bodhisattvas. We’re human beings, strange animals with complex minds that have feelings such as being bored even if, according to some ideologies, being bored is morally unacceptable. Maybe when parents, preachers, and high achievers feel uneasy with us for failing to find enchantment in the present moment, that’s their failure of character, not ours.
A society that won’t accept the validity of boredom is a society with no room for emotional honesty, uncertainty, or skepticism. Without the freedom to reject the value of our surroundings, how can we ever truly find worth in them?
