Just think how many geniuses of mankind have written about boredom: Baudelaire, Chateaubriand, Sartre, Mallarmé… This should reassure us: we can be bored, but this does not mean that nothing is happening! Moreover, periods of boredom seem to help ideas make their way, decisions mature, and lives run their course.
There is no fullness without pauses: if there were no moments of emptiness, we would never feel full. And vice versa, this excessive saturation, overflow, days without a single gap cut us off from fullness and make us perceive boredom as something unbearable.
Meanwhile, sometimes boredom is a condition for flourishing. Getting bored in a museum or on a nature walk often means setting the stage for a surprise. Suddenly there is beauty. But what if boredom “prepared” me for this? What if boredom made me more inclined to embrace beauty? There is also a metaphysical side to boredom. “To be bored,” wrote Emil Cioran, “means to be chic, to enjoy pure time”1. When we are mired in worries, time becomes just a frame within which we do something. And when we are bored, we touch the true nature of our state: we exist precisely in time. That is why animals do not have a sense of boredom: they have not yet developed self-consciousness for this.
Of course, one should distinguish between existential boredom with its possible exquisite pleasures and forced boredom that we hate: when we cannot get out of an endless meeting or are stuck in a traffic jam, and the battery in the phone is dead and therefore it is impossible to call friends. At the very heart of this boredom, we have the feeling that a part of our life has been stolen from us: and sometimes, when anxiety builds up, it seems to us that every minute taken away brings our death closer. Remember: the meeting was already coming to an end, freedom was very close. It was just a ritual remark: «Do you have anything to add to what has been said?» Oh yes: there is a pointless question asked by the person you hate with all your heart at this moment. And now you have to stay for another 10 minutes.
This boredom, which is more like impatience, is difficult to «rescue». And yet, or perhaps “even more so,” we can remember at this moment that we also have an inner life, that we can think about those we love, or about the meaning of our existence. The experience of boredom reminds us that time does not flow objectively. The time that we live is not measured by hours, and this, in essence, was what Bergson was talking about.2. When life is interesting to us, when we like a person, when an idea attracts us, time speeds up. When we are bored, it seems to slow down. Slowing down and speeding up is the movement of life itself.
1 Emile Michel Cioran (1911-1995), Romanian and French thinker, philosopher, essayist
2 Henri Bergson (1859-1941), French philosopher