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By David Charbonneau

Eyeview

CHARBONNEAU: Unlock the potential of boredom

Jun 6, 2019 | 3:44 AM

BOREDOM DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A DRAG.

Although everyone experiences boredom from time to time, defining it is hard. To complicate things, there are different kinds, says Canadian Philosopher Mark Kingwell — there is the everyday boredom and philosophical boredom.

“The most important distinction, I think, is between the boredom of restless engagement —mostly with technology or with modern life — and philosophical boredom, which is this interesting tradition that runs at least from Schopenhauer and Heidegger through Kirkegaard. But you could even trace it back to Aristotle where philosophers want us to reflect on the conditions of life when we feel like our desires are stalled. Stalled desire: that’s what boredom is,” he told CBC Radio’s Spark. (May 5, 2019)

“Stalled desire” maybe, but I like Adam Phillips’ definition: “the paradoxical wish for a desire.” It’s paradoxical because you think that a wish would end in a desire. Schopenhauer (1788-1870) had a similar idea: “tame longing without any particular object.”

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Vague, tame longing pervades modern life.

Social media engages in an insidious way. It provides a shallow connection to the world. Designers of Facebook and YouTube want us to be glued to our screens, not because they care about us but because our eyeballs generate advertising revenue.

“It’s an obvious point in some ways,” says Kingwell, “but social media, endless engagement with Twitter feeds, Facebook scrolls, all the things that we know so well, I think they do have this function of exacerbating what I call neo-liberal boredom — not just because it’s contemporary but because it’s profitable. We’re not participants; we’re lab rats and the advertisers are gathering our data, and they’re feeding it back to us in forms like triangulation of desire.”

It’s hard to look away from social media. The wish to escape boredom drives us back where we purposelessly scroll and swipe.

Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, quotes Robert Louis Stevenson who defined “busyness” as a “sort of dead-alive.”

“I’m kind of haunted by the feeling that life is passing me by and [I’m missing it] if I’m engaging with something that is actively cutting me off from my own life. We can’t sustain a train of thought. We’re constantly flitting from here to there,” she told Gayle MacDonald of the Globe and Mail. (May 21, 2019)

MacDonald lets boredom guide her to an environment of reflection: “For me, it’s going to places like parks or gardens or libraries. Public spaces that aren’t commercial, that have a restorative and reflective function. In my day to day, I take any moments that I can to quiet my mind enough to perceive what is actually around me, and I’m often humbled by how much there is that I haven’t noticed.”

Kingwell suggests that we return to the philosophical mode of boredom that can open us up to the question of meaning of life, human nature, the nature of the self, and other deeply thoughtful perspectives.

I find that boredom can be productive. Whenever my thoughts are flitting about like a butterfly in a jar, I sit quietly in a chair and open the lid to the jar.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or the Jim Pattison Broadcast Group.