Early discussions of boredom all suggest an uncomfortable feeling of wanting to engage in gratifying activities but not being able to.
In Bleak House, the British writer Dickens first introduced the word "boredom". Although the English word for "bored person" (bore) existed before this book, and the French word for ennui to describe a feeling of burnout, it was not until the late 19th century that the word boredom was widely used in in English. But just because there are no words to sum up the experience doesn't mean boredom doesn't exist.
In his brilliant book Boredom: A Living History, Peter Toohe traces the origins of boredom to antiquity. The ancient Roman philosopher Seneca was perhaps the first to describe boredom. Feeling the monotony of everyday life, he associates boredom with nausea and disgust:
How long have you been living like this? Of course, I will be sleepy, I will sleep, I will eat, I will be thirsty, I will be cold, and I will be hot. Is there no end to such days? Everything is a cycle of reincarnation. Day and night alternate, seasons change. The past will come again. I didn't do anything new, and I didn't see anything new. Sometimes, it makes me sick.
In the eyes of many people, life is not painful, but very empty.
Seneca complained of the day-to-day repetition, and apparently his lament didn't sound out of date. One might say that the lamentation of the monotonous days in the Book of Ecclesiastes predates Seneca's description. After outlining the splendor that wealth and fame bring, the narrator of Ecclesiastes says: "What has been will be done again; what has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun. . ”
Whether it is Seneca or Ecclesiastes, both complaints emphasize the two-layered connotation of boredom. One, boredom is a negative experience; two, it makes you feel meaningless and makes life seem empty.
Boredom stems from a lack of passion for everyday life, a sentiment that was also evident in the Middle Ages. The endless repetition of the daily routine, dubbed the "noonday devil" by the people of the day, created a strange feeling among the reclusive monks—both listless and restless (the strange allies always is repeated).
Seneca and the monks not only point to the oppressive nature of monotony and aimlessness, but show us that boredom has been with us long before Dickens described it.
It wasn't until the mid-to-late 19th century that psychological discussions of boredom began to emerge, and it was the Germans who fired the first shot. Theodore Weitz, then known for his anthropological studies, and the philosopher Theodor Lipps studied what the Germans called "Langeweile" (literally "half an hour"). For Weitz, boredom has to do with the flow of consciousness. When one thought leads to the next, we have an anticipation of the end of the thought. When this expectation is not met, boredom occurs, and the flow of consciousness thus breaks – the mind goes off the rails. Lipps argues that boredom arises from a conflict in which we crave "strong mental activity" but are unable to stimulate it.
The English-speaking pioneers of psychology, the polymath Sir Francis Galton and the philosopher William James thought similarly about boredom. Galton studied the concept of agitation known to medieval monks as "the noonday devil." Constantly looking for ways to measure people and their behavior, Galton recorded a fidgety, swaying audience in a dry science lecture—a clear sign of irritability and boredom. In a speech in the early 20th century, James lamented that "a hopeless boredom is about to sweep the world." For James, this boredom and the boredom that comes with it, arises from information Growth in quantity, but at the expense of quality.
These early discussions of boredom all suggest an uncomfortable feeling of wanting to engage in gratifying activities but not being able to do anything about it. They both underscore boredom at its core: it's a signal that our minds are empty.
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