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Historians and anthropologists who have studied boredom have often concluded that it is not a universal affliction, but is instead a problem that is largely confined to contemporary society.
Perhaps this seems counter-intuitive: I mean, what could be more boring than hunting and (especially) gathering, the ecological adaptation that has been the means of support throughout most of the time humans have been on the planet? Every day you get up and look around your territory for stuff to eat, no TV, no internet, not even a book to read. We might expect that foraging groups would have an extensive vocabulary of boredom, but as far as I know that has never been reported in the anthropological literature.
In fact, it seems as though nobody in the English speaking world complained of boredom until the mid to late 18th century. Why might this be? No one knows for sure, but it is probably relevant that this is roughly the same time that modern novels started to appear. More broadly, the first stirrings of the contemporary culture of entertainment date from around this time, and as opportunities for entertainment proliferated, people began to compare their daily experience to the adventure and romance and glamour of the worlds they could experience through entertainment.
Today, we expect or at least hope for more or less continuous entertainment. Teachers and campaigning politicians need to be entertaining if they expect an audience, we expect our food to be full of stimulating tastes, we carry music with us wherever we go-obviously, this is a list that could go on and on. We live in a world where those who develop more entertaining options for anything are going to get rich, and as a result more and more of our experience is entertaining. Except when it isn't. Think about it-the moments when you are bored are those when you are not being entertained. What do you do to address your boredom? Try to find something entertaining, of course.
What I'm saying is this: We live in a society that sets us up to be bored. Everyone who has something entertaining or stimulating to sell has an interest in our being bored, and an enormous amount of resources go into making sure that if we try to step back from the world of entertainment, we will be. In our society, the opposite of bored is entertained; and more to the point, if we aren't entertained, we're bored.
Peter Stromberg is author of Caught in Play: How Entertainment Works on You (Stanford, 2009). Photo by Jason Scragz.
