Everyone’s been bored. But there’s no single definitive meaning for the word “boredom" -- not in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, education, or sociology. Even the Oxford English Dictionary argues with itself about the etymology of the word “bore:”
Usually supposed to be [...] the notion of ‘persistent annoyance’ (compare German drillen). But it seems impossible in this way to account for [...] the other senses, and of the verb itself [...] The connection must be much more indirect; possibly there is an allusion to some now forgotten anecdote. The phrase ‘French bore’ naturally suggests that the word is of French origin; bourre padding, hence (in 18th cent.) triviality, bourrer to stuff, to satiate, might be thought of; but without assuming some intermediate link these words do not quite yield the required sense.
So does “bore” originate from the German drillen, which means “to drill holes” or the French bourrer, which means “to stuff, to fill?” The lexicographer is flummoxed--the hole-drilling origin seems unable to account for the first sense of the word (“a fit of ennui or the sulks”) but the stuffing full origin doesn’t quite fit either. The lexicographer concludes there must be something missing--perhaps some anecdote long forgotten--that will not only solve the mystery of where the word is from, but will also provide some link between two seemingly opposite origins.
It seems to me that boredom is so difficult to define because boredom resides within the very tension between the two feelings of hollowing out and stuffing full. In fact, I would argue that “boredom” is an umbrella term which encompasses countless situations of tension between engagement and disengagement ranging from wanting to play but not feeling an affinity for any particular toy to trying to focus on a dry, verbose article, to watching a screen waiting for an asteroid (or enemy airplane) that never hits. A bored person, while clearly not engaged, either doesn’t want to or is unable to fully disengage from the situation at hand. As Adam Phillips’ epigraph on this site states: “We should speak not of boredom but of the boredoms, because the notion itself includes a multiplicity of moods and feelings.”
When I tell people I study boredom and its relationship to literacy, they sometimes respond by telling me that boredom is a luxury problem; I assume they mean that the bored individual has time on their hands, has the luxury of deciding between the countless activities available to them—a kid with too many toys. And sometimes this is true. But the boredom of too much time and too many possibilities is not the only boredom there is. Not knowing what to watch on television is boring, but so is being trapped in a prison cell. And during the pandemic, we’ve all become familiar with boredoms that arise from the lack of possibility, whether these arise from too much work, or too few social interactions—though clearly these obstacles were not distributed equally, but were instead distributed fairly neatly down the lines of our nation’s prejudices.
My point here is that some boredoms arise from impossibility (perceived or actual), or at least obstruction—and these imbalances of power are both more dire and more informative to those struggling to engage with literacy, especially in academic settings, than the ennui of too many choices, too many resources, and too much time. According to neuroscientists, the most boring of all tasks is something called a “vigilance task” in which the agent must wait endlessly for something which may or may not happen (the quintessential example of this is that of an air traffic controller, who must wait for hours, to see if anything out of place happens to appear on their screen). It is too reductive to argue that this boredom, the boredom of a soldier waiting to fight, the boredom of a long pandemic and the boredom of a child with too many toys are the same thing.
It is useful, for this discussion, to think of the boredoms in terms of direction: that is, boredom is not only the stagnation of being unable to decide which way to go in a sea of possible beginnings, but also the stasis arising from the tension of conflicting or thwarted beginnings: doors slammed shut just as we’ve begun to open them, currents drawing us toward places we don’t want to go while we swim in the opposite direction, being commanded to look forward when a million bees bumble in our peripheral vision, or any countless number of situations in which the actor is pulled in so many opposing directions they are unable to make any headway.
The key here is this: that which bores us still has its hooks in us. If I don’t want to read a book, for whatever reason, I just don’t read it. That is, not wanting to read a book in and of itself is not boring. But if I am required to read the book for a class, or I am under some other obligation to do so, and if I continue not wanting to read the book while I’m reading the book, I am likely to call that experience “boredom.” Or if I decide to read the book because I know that it will benefit me in some way, but my struggle with the book’s repetition of ideas, or my preoccupation with some trauma or trouble in my personal life, or the constant pinging of my phone make it difficult to concentrate on the text, I am also likely to call this experience “boredom.”
Discussions of boredom often frame the state as a deficit of attention. But I think “the boredoms” are a family of feelings separate from apathy-- not deficits, but distributions of attention that might not neatly fit the situation at hand, not mere obstructions, but sites for potential engagement. I’m interested in how to better serve the students who get left behind by current academic relationships to attention. I want to be clear: I don’t believe that people who get called “at-risk” or “basic writers” or “disabled” or any number of other uncomfortable labels are any more easily bored than other students (though some may perform boredom and attention differently than those who are labeled “normal” students.) However, because the boredoms have within them, by their very nature, tension between attention structures, they serve as good entry points for looking at conflicts of attention and power.
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