"But that's really boring!!" "She is beautiful and good, but I am bored with her." "Give me something to munch on. Classic style is boring.” Vary as you like, but each of us has heard and said sentences like these countless times. And again, what exactly do we mean? education, energy, style...? And how could we even establish that?
It would be easy to think of boredom as the opposite of something and say that it is something or someone who is not interesting, fun, inspiring, who does not bring novelty, excitement, humor... But, as we learn already in high school, the approach of negative definition never helps us in understanding the phenomena or concepts we want to deal with.
The Germans say that boredom is what makes you feel like it lasts a long time. You're sitting in a movie theater, at a concert, on a train, wherever, and you start to catch yourself looking forward to the end. At the same time, nothing special is waiting for you, you are not impatient, tired or distracted. Only nothing "holds" you.
That feeling that something lasts a long time includes changes in your concentration, thinking, perception... Your mind wanders, maybe you fantasize about something, maybe you look out the window, maybe you draw or scribble something pointless. Your mind goes in any direction just to avoid staying where you are forced to sit. At the same time, the body can't be still either, so maybe you've already started fidgeting, shifting from one leg to another, scratching, yawning, maybe even pinching yourself so you don't break yourself. Discomfort and pressure are growing in you, the feelings are not as "sharpened" as they are intense in the body and the desire for this hassle to end once and for all and you get permission to move, relax and choose for yourself what is being done to you.
ABSENCE OF PASSION & ROUTINE
One of the few things I can accurately say about boredom is the speed with which it grips people. On some of the most famous American university, it turns out that students only listen attentively to the first twelve minutes of lectures. Of the other seventy-eight, they catch something, while eighty percent of them have sexual fantasies, and twenty percent think about the duties that await them after the lecture (which, by the way, is a perfect illustration of Freud's model of personality structure).
Twelve minutes! And among some of the best students the world has. Think high school students, highway truck drivers, newspaper vendors... Or, really, anyone. If an activity is not my choice, if it is imposed on me, sooner or later it will surely turn into a source of boredom. Maybe it could even be a kind of definition: I'm bored of everything that feels forced and that I can't design and vary freely.
And indeed, one can find many examples of this. "What's boring here!", repeats the character from the novel Dervish and death (I think he is played by Pavle Vujisić in the film), sent to the "kasaba" to judge something, and everything is foreign, irrelevant, temporary to him. This is probably the case with anyone who is exposed to something they don't care about at all, when we don't care what the result will be, when we feel no passion for either the process or the outcome.
The second, more obvious situation for us, when boredom is brought about by external restrictions, is what happens in the spirit of Marxism, calls alienation from work. Everything repeats itself every day, I just wait for my salary and die of boredom for eight hours a day (and over time, inexorably, I start to wonder if Nachtigal was a Bogumil or a Presbyterian). And finally, boredom can easily be caused by repeating something, even a pleasant one, anything that we allow to become routine is boring. Psychology he knows a lot about the habituation mechanism, which is very useful when you have to endure something unpleasant or senseless, since your reaction weakens over time, but it also leads to the fact that everything you regularly enjoy becomes boring and you are forced to increase the dose, change the circumstances, add something exotic.
Unfortunately, this cannot be the whole story. There is boredom even in the most exciting circumstances. There is also boredom that comes from inner emptiness. All of us, if we're being honest, know that some people are more boring than others, although we don't have to agree on what makes people boring or whether a person is or isn't boring. It's simple. From where, that is the question, can inner emptiness, deadness, disinterest, lack of sense of humor, indifference appear in someone? And should this worry us, should we, in other words, rush to help the annoying person? And what kind of help could that be (without, of course, reading books with advice on how to develop "aura and magentism for people")?
HER MAJESTY - IGRA
With children it is simple. The basic activity by which a child expresses his personality and comes into contact with the world is playing, not competitively, with rules and results, but imaginatively, when he is "lost" in time and space. That's exactly why everyone will tell you that children are the cutest between the ages of three and six, when they can express their fantasies and the school hasn't yet robotized them. A simple, playful child has no idea what boredom is. It can only cry because you interrupt it in the game, since everything else is boring compared to it. Only children who can't play and always look for a way out of boredom outside themselves, in another person or a planned activity, and adults who can't or don't want to join the child's game, cause concern.
If this makes sense, civilization has a serious problem since almost all our institutions forbid gaming and require "order, work and discipline". The world of an adult is designed with boredom at its core, but we all pretend that renewing the ID card makes sense and plays an important role in anything. If we agree that it is not boring where some adults have managed to preserve traces of childish playfulness, then we must be clear that it is limited to creativity, the circus, some Summerhills, if they still exist at all, and hobbies to which one devotes himself with great passion and without any ambition. And of course, all these attempts have been turned into industries (mostly entertainment, primarily the "film industry") and are almost completely under the control of money trends.
RAJ, ANGRY AND IMPORTANT PEOPLE
Among adults, boring is usually considered humorless or humorless. I don't mean something that should cause laughter, but rather someone's capacity to tell a story in an unexpected way, with a surprising twist, in a way you never thought about it, or in a way of your own, where enthusiasm and fervor engage you perhaps more than the plot and denouement. Or to jobs, trips or relationships that always contain something unexpected. Here is the answer to the question of why heaven, if it existed, would have to be a boring place - not because everyone there would be polished and flawless, but because there could be nothing unexpected, exciting, uncertain.
A little more than ten years ago, I had the idea to suggest to Professor Peragraš that he add Gnjavatori to the appendix, a creepy creature that stuns children so that their breakfast, like in a slow motion movie, lasts at least until noon (and that flees at the speed of light at the mere mention of magic words like "ice cream"). But, such a thing seems to really exist. Most people who are not boring can become more boring as they get older, or as they get titles and think they are important, or when they get up to their necks in an ideology of any kind, don't hang out with kids, do everything with a plan and a purpose... "Never mind" lurks from countless angles. Psychotherapists often become bored because of the conviction that they must understand everything, be moderate and focused on the feelings of others; patients may become bored, because boredom is sometimes associated with, for example, depression. Rilke's "those who have nothing but adulthood" and the question at the end smell of boredom Nostalgia: "And you, the normal ones, what will you do with your normality?"
BECKETT AND THE MODERN AGE
And there is even worse. There can certainly be debate as to which is the most important work of art of the second half of the twentieth century, but there is no doubt that a very serious contender would have to be Beckett's play. Waiting for Godot. Which is strange at first glance, because no great piece of art has ever been as boring as Godo. Or rather, nothing in art has been so planned and successfully boring as Godo - nothing happens, there is nothing, everything is empty and horrible, those characters are not persons, there are neither conversations nor events. There is no other way than that Beckett wanted to maximize the impression of boredom and emptiness in the viewer, in order to show that this is not a problem of individuals, that our age is boring because everything that happens in it is devoid of any meaning.
The original version, in French, was written by Beckett almost eighty years ago. Even when he was dying, in 1989, he certainly could not have imagined the problem with boredom that plagues us today. I am sure that there is no one who has not noticed that as soon as a child says that he is bored, he immediately gets a tablet to watch something, and adults organize the same for themselves. This is an important mistake because boredom can be a source of frustration and effort to come up with an interesting and fun activity. More importantly, neuroscience has shown us that when we are doing nothing, there is very intense activity in our brain in the areas associated with understanding social relationships, so it turns out that boredom and staring at the ceiling are necessary for us to continue understanding social life and we must not sacrifice them to the latest video of pets doing something funny.
So if you want your children to understand messages that are not completely obvious, and to remind yourself of humor, flirting or negotiation, get off the Internet and allow yourself to be bored sometimes. Okay, okay, I stop, I realize that this preaching of mine has long since become boring.
The author is a psychologist
