‘The age of boredom… has now passed”. So begins On Boredom, a 2021 essay collection that claims the likes of TikTok and YouTube have driven it to extinction. These days, “the time needed to be bored is no longer available”. This view, that boredom has been blotted out, is widely held – so much so that psychologists have started to worry that we have lost something in the process: attention spans, or the state of blankness from which creative thoughts must spring.
But last week a study came along to confirm what has been lurking at the back of our distracted minds all along – scrolling through endless content actually makes boredom worse. Of course it does. Open up your phone while in a queue or on the bus, and your brain goes into a restless kind of limbo. If I’m honest, it’s not boredom that makes me reach for Instagram but the urge to quiet other thoughts and emotions under a hum of static, like putting a blanket on a bird cage. Watching other people’s travel slides and home videos was once seen as the epitome of tedium – now it’s all some of us do.
We’re more bored these days, not less. It’s a paradox of modern life. We can’t stand boredom but plan for nothing else. Humans thrive on purpose, peril and other people, but are busy building a world that cuts these things out. It’s instinct, of course, to make life smoother and easier – but the impulse to create boredom extends even into our fantasy futures. When we try to design perfect places – suburbs with their identical squares of grass, utopian new towns with their ideally spaced houses and wide, regular avenues – we end up in nightmares of monotony. Stimulation is a part of human happiness – it drops in repetitive places and people stand about uncomfortably, casting about for a point of interest, or hurry through. But still we work to eliminate conflict and disorder.
In fact, paradise itself, as we tend to imagine it, would be horribly dull: predicable bliss for all eternity. How we would hate it. In Boredom: A Lively History, author Peter Toohey considers a painting of Odysseus on an island with the goddess Calypso, the prospect of immortality before him, “bored stiff in this unchanging seaside paradise”.
We rarely talk about boredom as a modern problem, but it’s a dangerous emotion, even more so perhaps than anger, which can be slaked with an apology or a reversal. Boredom seeks drama, rather than a particular endpoint, and is therefore hard to get rid of – provoking all sorts of irrational behaviour. Being really bored is a sick kind of feeling – close to disgust – so unpleasant that eventually you’d do almost anything to get rid of it. Animals whirl, pace and scratch, and humans can empathise. In one famous experiment, people chose to give themselves electric shocks rather than sit quietly alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes.
It is boredom, I think, that is ultimately harnessed by Elon Musk and X’s agents of chaos – the platform having provoked the emotion in the first place, in a business-savvy act of vertical integration. We tend to think of keyboard warriors as spitting with anger behind their screens, but that can’t possibly apply to everyone joining a pile-on, or an outburst of racial hatred, or needling others into a riot, as happened in the UK this month. It is surely more likely that aimless passersby are making up the numbers – joining for a hit of dopamine, the relief of something to do. And could this apply to the real-life rioters themselves – who aimed their blows at blameless communities and the wrong religion? Anger tends to know its targets. But many of these brick throwers seemed confused about what they were trying to protest against or prove.
The dangerous consequences of boredom have been itemised. A host of recent studies place it behind a number of sadistic behaviours. Bored participants, given the option, were more likely to shred a (virtual) worm in a coffee grinder. Cruel behaviour bubbles up in the military during those tedious periods of waiting for the next mission. Parents who report boredom are more likely to be vicious towards their children, if that tendency already lurks beneath. And in bored people sadistic fantasies emerge – one study found that these included avenging a rival, robbing a bank, or “shooting someone for fun”. In fact, a “surprising number of shootings”, remarked the researchers, “are carried out by perpetrators out of boredom”.
The mantra of Silicon Valley – smash it and see what happens – appeals to a bored populace. How much provocative online behaviour is motivated by boredom, like a child in a lift pressing all the buttons? The dangers spread from there, to populism to racist rage. America spent the past two decades churning out films about midlife crises – men trapped in sterile comfort who buy the motorbike, have the affair, create the drugs empire, start the terrorist fight club. This was prescient. After too much dull democracy, the US is in its own midlife crisis, contemplating a second term of Donald Trump.
We are luckier in Britain. Our flirtations with populism – Brexit, the Rwanda policy – became tedious bureaucratic nightmares, and we lost interest. But the wider quandary – the rise of boredom – is a difficult one to solve. You can’t reinsert hazard and uncertainty back into modern life without tipping it over. We are safe, cosseted and dangerously bored. It’s a problem.
• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
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