Boredom World 1: Boredom, Overload, and Meaning Collapse

In a couple of my most recent posts, I’ve been gesturing at the notion of ephemerality as a source of overload and anxiety, and trying to determine some strategy for alleviating it. Here I’m going to give this problem a new name: boredom.

Boredom may seem like a strange name for an anxious state of overwhelm brought on by having too much going on. After all, we normally associate boredom with sitting around unable to think of anything to do. Indeed, Tolstoy called boredom the “desire for desires”. And while this resonates with my own experience of boredom, I’m going to recklessly generalize it further: boredom is the inability to make a decision.

Boredom is not about being unable to think of anything to do, but being unable to choose. Crucially, this indecision can be brought on by both too little information/stimulation, or too much: information overload is indecision arising from having too much information to adequately integrate.

Sharday Mosurinjohn lays this out well:¹

Whereas one of the archetypal scenes of modern boredom was repetitive labour on the factory line, in the age of globalised, flexible, late capitalism we find ourselves twisting and turning through the digital information network, unsure if we’re ever really punched out and driven to distraction by clickbait, the need to update and emails stacking up like a losing Tetris game.

We can’t choose something to focus on, or what to prioritize, due to an overload of possible options. She explains further:

Given that other scholars have built an historical case about boredom as a modern phenomenon construed by 19th century artists and thinkers in terms of a “spiritual crisis,” what we are doing is arguing that it’s productive to understand late modern boredom – what I (Sharday) have called “overload boredom” – as a spiritual crisis. Overload boredom is what comes, perhaps unexpectedly, from not too little stimulation, but by too much – too much information to parse for meaning, too much connectivity to engage with any one connection, too many options, from consumer goods to ideologies, to do anything other than stand before them, paralyzed. Its key feature is that it makes us withdraw from engaging the very problems that cause it, making it even harder to recognize an already elusive affect.

From here we can start to see boredom as more than sitting idly on a Sunday afternoon, but indeed, as a source of a crisis of meaning – the inability to know ourselves, our desires, our needs.

It is exactly boredom in this sense that is thus described by the anxiety produced in response to exposure to the ephemeral environment. Ephemerality can produce a crisis of meaning.

I think this is a big and interesting topic – something I’ve been thinking about for some time now – so I think I’ll call this the first post of a new blogchain: Boredom World.