In his article Boredom as an experience of time, Pascald David mentions the pianist Hélène Grimaud who looks back on her childhood days in Aix-en-Provence: “… in my room stretched these endless and delicious beaches of boredom, these empty hours that my parents did not fill with extraordinary activities or television “. The author adds that not all children today have this chance, this possibility of being bored.

Delphine Rémy explains why it is important to let a child be bored:

When bored long enough, the child uses all his imagination, relying on his own desires. To get out of this growing boredom, he is able to move mountains. He ends up finding on his own how to get out of the unpleasant feeling. Alone. In its own way. He develops his singularity. He learns to differentiate himself as long as we let him do it. He finds solutions he would never have had access to if his loving parents had intervened to save him this pain. He explores. He invents. He created. He shows the world who he is.

Delphine Rémy seeks to show that it can be almost dangerous to force-feed children with activities and images rather than letting them develop dreams and promises, to experience this impatience for the next day. For her, as for many authors, it is urgent to let boredom regain its educational virtue in the lives of children. The illusion that it is the permanent stimulation that brings this feeling of being alive must be fought from an early age. It is this terrorism of “always more”, of “always faster”, of “always doing” that would satisfy them even before they recognize the nature and depth of their needs.

These days, it is very difficult to admit to others that you are bored. Some also claim to never get bored. Are we to understand by this that they never leave “time to time”? That they “kill time” as soon as the boredom points the tip of his nose? Why do you want to run away from boredom, let alone brag about it? What is he hiding? What does he reveal that is so important that we want to hunt him down at all costs? What discoveries would we make if we agreed to go through boredom, like a trip?

Many artists and therapists have a proposal for an answer: deep boredom, experienced “to the end” would have a sometimes creative, sometimes redemptive and even curative value. More than a heavy burden to bear, it would be an invaluable privilege: that of taking one’s time.

One of Paul Valéry’s poems entitled “Palmes” summarizes the idea according to which boredom, provided it is deepened, holds unsuspected resources in reserve. No doubt the author was bored before writing it …

Those days that seem empty to you

And lost to the universe

Have greedy roots

Who work the deserts

So is it enough to be bored to be creative? Delphine Rémy specifies: “ it is not enough to be bored “like a dead rat”, but rather, perhaps, to learn to be royally bored, like the boredom of a king without entertainment. It is an art. The art of being royally bored also has a name, it is called: philosophy. »

Certain situations are conducive to the emergence of boredom such as repetitive activities, the daily grind (metro-work-sleep), monotony, fatigue, inaction, loneliness. Sometimes an unusual situation leads to boredom, such as when we miss a train and have to wait for a while.

To some degrees, boredom can seriously harm those who fail to let go of their hold. She leads him slowly but surely towards self-loathing, sadness, weariness, disgust, sending him back to the burden of his existence. This boredom is opposed to the occasional boredom, applauded by the romantics. For Heidegger, this boredom is easily identifiable: I am not bored because of something or someone that would be boring; I am not bored because I wait, the wait can even be a moment that I would like to retain; I am not bored because I have nothing to do or because one or the other of the activities that I have chosen or undergo has taken too long. I get bored when I feel the inevitable and painful gap between what I would like to do with my time, with my existence, and the deliberate blandness of my daily life. If boredom were a disease, its etiology would be on the side of the ideal.

But how is it born? Precisely from this desire to flee ordinary boredom at all costs. It is this refusal of boredom, demonized by today’s productivist society, that digs the groove of melancholy boredom. It is this desire to act at any cost, to kill time, not to have to find his own desires, that the individual paradoxically accesses deep boredom.

And this boredom is very different from ordinary boredom! It is not linked to a specific situation or a specific reason: it is self-boring. 

« Boredom is neither an impression nor a feeling. It is the gray of existence, the rare tone of the moments when it vacillates – and sometimes recovers itself; the moment of helplessness without which there would be, perhaps, no creation ». Chloe Salvan in The gray of existence

« Perhaps we have unlearned ourselves to be bored, as we have learned to be bored – hence the abysmal void that this widespread addiction called television fills today ” Pascal David, Boredom as an experience of time

« My favorite pastime is letting time pass, having time, taking your time, wasting time, living off the beaten path » Françoise Sagan