Boredom

Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times expounds the dilemma of boredom in the workplace: routine, meaningless, repetitious, mindless work that results in fatigue. Such boredom at work has not been alleviated by increased technology or by the introduction of the information society—a cultural shift that may have escalated the problem by overloading people with information. Not even a challenging career can guarantee freedom from boredom. Executives reach the top and, with nowhere else to go, ask, “What is it all for?” Culturally North America is “bored to death,” “bored stiff,” “bored to tears,” “bored silly” and even “bored out of one’s skull.” Surveys indicate that up to half of North Americans are either temporarily or permanently bored (Klapp, p. 20), a trend that is all the more disturbing for a society that is saturated with fun industries. Perhaps that is part of the problem. Being “amused to death,” to quote Neil Postman’s penetrating analysis, does not seem to offer anything more than a cultural placebo. Klapp (p. 30) suggests the analogy of aspirin: frequent usage means not the absence but the presence of extreme pain. “Bored? How could you be bored when there is so much to do?” the exasperated father shouts at his teenagers. And for the Christian hardly any more damning comment can be made at the conclusion of a worship service than “It was boring.”

Though this article will focus on boredom at work, we will explore boredom as a social and cultural problem that affects everything from relationships to church life. People are bored with their marriage partners, bored with school, bored with sex, bored with work, bored with television, bored with church, bored with prayer, even bored with the thought of going to heaven. A Catholic philosopher once said, “Heaven did not seem to me worth going to.” While among the French aristocracy boredom was once considered to be the lot of being a courtier, it is now the privilege of the common person. Popular culture, high culture, literature, music and philosophy all witness to it. Indeed boredom is not merely a personal problem; it is systemic to the culture, incarnated in the icons, norms and communication patterns of everyday life. It is also one of the most pressing questions for the theologian today, perhaps overshadowing guilt and finitude (Dean).

Types of Boredom

The church has traditionally named boredom—under the Latin title acedia—as one of the seven deadly sins. Frederick Buechner describes it as a voluntary form of death. Boredom is an absence of feeling, emotional flatness, passivity to life, lack of interest in anything. All these states are covered by the French word ennui, which was used in England before the word bore was invented in the eighteenth century and its derivative boredom a few decades later.

Some boredom (we could call it basic boredom) is surely not sinful: to lapse into daydreaming at the concert because one is not engaged with the music at that moment is harmless, possibly even a sign of health since leisure requires the freedom to move in and out of consciousness. Some boredom theorists argue that there is a holy boredom implicit in life in this world because nothing in this age can fill the God-shaped vacuum in our souls. This inspired boredom keeps reminding us, as C. S. Lewis once said, that if we find nothing in this world that completely satisfies us, it is a powerful suggestion that we were made for another life, another world—for heaven.

But boredom that is alienating from God and destructive of human relationships becomes, as Buechner suggested, a form of voluntary suicide. It is an oversimplification to say, as some do, that this is the boredom we choose over against the boredom that overcomes us. This terrible boredom is part of the human predicament. As Blaise Pascal said, “Man is so unhappy that he would be bored even if he had no cause for boredom, by the very nature of his temperament.” Not only is this boredom endemic to fallen human nature, it is now embodied in the cultural forms and institutions of society, part of the principalities and powers that shape our life in this world and that must be overcome by cultural stewardship and spiritual warfare. Boredom is both a personal and a systemic problem.

Since medieval times two deadly sins were almost always considered together: boredom and sloth. Sloth is the inability to fulfill one’s religious duties or secular responsibilities. In addition, sloth is the inability to enjoy leisure (who thinks of this as sloth today?). In other words, sloth is the rejection of interest in both work and leisure. Paradoxically, workaholism (see Drivenness) is a form of moral sloth, since it involves the neglect of certain basic duties. But boredom is the rejection of interest in life itself, being emotionally flat, passionless. It is, as Byron said, “that awful yawn which sleep cannot abate.” How are sloth and acedia related? For Kierkegaard sloth was not the source of boredom. Boredom itself was the root of all evil. In contrast, Richard Baxter, in his Puritan exposition of sloth and idleness, considered sloth the source of most other sins, citing, for example, the idleness of David watching Bathsheba bathe when he should have been out at war; sloth in this case led to lust, adultery, lying and murder. With great wisdom the church has always considered sloth and acedia together as capital sins (caput from “head,” which is the source of other sins; Healy, p. 17). In reality they are interdependent, each influencing the other and feeding on the other.

Many Puritans did not have an adequate doctrine of leisure; neither have we. But Baxter made a substantial contribution to thinking and acting Christianly by understanding both sloth and boredom as sins against our calling: “Suffer not your fancies to run after sensual, vain delights; for these will make you weary of your callings” (p. 382). He could have just as easily said, “When nothing interests you at all, ask whether you are responding to the call of God in your life.” Every person (and not just ministers and missionaries) is called of God to live purposefully for God and the common good. Sloth and boredom are vocational sins, living as though one had not been summoned by God to a holy purpose (Ephes. 4:1). It is an immensely challenging, venturesome, interesting vocation. Kierkegaard did not use vocational language but witnessed to the same truth in relation to acedia: we are summoned by God to live wholeheartedly and joyfully for God. Acedia for Kierkegaard was the “despairing refusal to be oneself.”

Overcoming Boredom

How then does one agree to be oneself? Final healing will come with the Second Coming of Christ, the resurrection of the body, and the new heaven and the new earth. But substantial healing of boredom in this life is a matter both of receiving grace and harmonizing our lifestyle to the purpose and call of God. We can approach this by asking what is the opposite of boredom—joy? playfulness? passion? contentment? If joy, then we are dealing with the fruit of the Spirit. If playfulness, we are dealing with an inspired freedom from the compulsion to produce. If passion, we are dealing with that internal energy that comes from simultaneously getting the heart of God and willing one thing. If contentment, we are dealing with the grace that is “learned” (Phil. 4:12) through constant thanksgiving. Like many spiritual maladies, boredom is not healed by attacking the problem directly; it is healed by the expulsive power of the infilling and liberating love of Christ, a greater passion.

Turn boredom into prayerful waiting. As mentioned above, boredom serves as a symptom of something in our inscapes, our soul life. It is a sign that life in this world will not fully satisfy. While waiting can be boring, it can be made contemplative. It can be transformed into an active questioning of God (as it was for Job), longing for insight and meaning, waiting for God. Both the bored preacher of Ecclesiastes and the psalmist looked to God, the preacher by considering the question of meaning beyond the framework of this age—“under the sun”—and the psalmist by hearing the Word of God: “My soul is weary with sorrow [boredom?]; strengthen me according to your word” (Psalm 119:28). Waiting for God is not like waiting for Godot in Samuel Beckett’s play by that name. Godot never comes; God does. But as Job found out, waiting for God is a holy war in which, like Abraham, Jacob and Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, we refuse to take boredom (in this case) as God’s last word.

Gain an eternal perspective by keeping sabbath. Most Christian moralists equate boredom with idleness and recommend work as its cure. It is true that retirees (and others) engaging in an orgy of leisure need the balance of purposeful work, whether volunteer or remunerated. Where a choice of jobs exists, we should choose those that best fit our motives, personality and talents (see Vocational Guidance). But boredom is not simply an absence of activity. One can be busy and bored at the same time, even in Christian service. Contrary to the advice of many well-meaning Christian leaders, and most parents, the answer is not simply to work harder. Most bored people need to work less and learn how to keep sabbath, which is God’s deepest provision for a restless spirit. The world offers work and leisure (with no sabbath); the Bible offers work and sabbath (with some leisure). I am making the unpopular proposal that we probably need less leisure than we are told we need (by those who market leisure) and more sabbath.

Develop a contemplative lifestyle. Get into the meaning of what you are doing. Attend to people, things and situations in a more complete way that includes their aesthetic and spiritual meaning. Michael Raposa describes it this way:

For example, having become bored with all the useful things that I can do with a given object, I may suddenly begin to contemplate its aesthetic qualities. Bored with the conversation at a party or meeting, I may suddenly become playfully enthralled with people’s voices and with the sounds of their accents. Having grown weary with carefully observing an object for some specific purpose, I may suddenly begin to “see” it in a new way. And, having become bored with someone that I love, I may suddenly fall in love with that person all over again, but not simply “again,” because here something new has been added to that love and to the relationship. (p. 87)

Become aware of the systemic nature of the problem. Our society trivializes leisure, reduces entertainment to a consumer item and offers placebo solutions. Being titillated with the latest soap opera, fashion, concert or hit song can only divert us for a moment. As Orrin Klapp says, “Without significance, variety is not the spice of life. It can be as dull as monotony when it has nothing to say—becomes noiselike” (p. 81). Especially information about which we can do nothing (like the news) adds to boredom and learned helplessness (p. 89). Some Christians must work in the leisure and advertising worlds as cultural stewards, bringing depth and hope into the media and entertainment. All of us must do spiritual battling, discerning, praying, exorcising, interceding. As a practical (though unpopular) measure, we must reduce the amount of stimulation we receive, control the information overload and see that we choose leisure that edifies.

Boredom, in the end, is not so much subdued as it is expelled by recovering our passion for God, what some people call “being centered.” Boredom is not so much a sin as a symptom of sin, a sign that our fundamental relationship with God, life and ourselves has been broken. In Romans 1 the fundamental sin is failure to reverence God or give thanks to him (Romans 1:21). From this fundamental sin come all the sins to which God gives people up (Romans 1:24, 26, 28), including futility (Romans 1:21), which is close to boredom. The human predicament, as Kierke-gaard said, is a failure to be our (true) selves—creatures in love with God and therefore in love with life. Pascal, out of his own struggle, claimed the answer to boredom lies in an act of faith, or rather a visitation of grace: “Happiness is neither outside us nor inside us; it is in God, both outside and inside us.”

» See also: Entertainment

» See also: Imagination

» See also: Leisure

» See also: Play

» See also: Volunteer Work

» See also: Waiting

» See also: Work

References and Resources

R. Baxter, The Practical Works of Richard Baxter, vol. 1 (Ligonier, Penn.: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1990); M. Csikszentmihalyi and R. E. Robinson, The Art of Seeing: An Interpretation of the Aesthetic Encounter (Malibu, Calif.: J. Paul Getty Museum and Getty Center for Education in the Arts, 1990); W. Dean, “Theology and Boredom,” Religion in Life 47 (Spring 1978) 109-18; H. Fairlie, The Seven Deadly Sins Today (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979); S. D. Healy, Boredom, Self and Culture (Cranbury, N.J.: Associate University Presses, 1984); O. E. Klapp, Overload and Boredom (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1986); D. W. McCullough, “Anything but Boredom,” Christianity Today 35 (August 19, 1991) 30-32; N. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking, 1985); M. L. Raposa, “Boredom and the Religious Imagination,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53 (March 1985) 75-79.

—R. Paul Stevens