Boredom Is Dying A Not-So-Boring Death
A philosophical exploration of boredom from the perspectives of Byung-Chul Han, Bertrand Russell, and Søren Kierkegaard.
“Boredom: the desire for desires.” - Leo Tolstoy
Boredom has always fascinated me because it seems to be going extinct.
Toddlers on iPads inside of restaurants, commuters glued to their phones whilst taking the subway or the bus, and our general, society-wide obsession with constant stimuli and information are examples of this. Boredom, it seems to me, is dying a not-so-boring death.
With this in mind, is a world devoid of boredom something that we should be genuinely concerned about? Is it even worth worrying about the fact that our ability to tolerate boredom is slowly deteriorating? To answer this question, we’ll be exploring ideas from three different philosophers, two of whom considered boredom to be important and valuable, and one who thought it did nothing but cause misery and suffering.
Based on your philosophical perspective, boredom can either be something that has played an integral role within civilizational development or an aspect of life that has brought us a ton of misery…