What happens if we are never bored?
Boredom is a thoroughly modern feeling; or rather, one etymologically contiguous with modernity. The noun did not enter the language until the middle of the nineteenth century, and its cause and effect continue to be subject to discourse. It has remained a mainstay of culture for the last hundred-plus years, most obviously in the case of the novel, a form whose origin is underwritten by boredom and for which boredom is also a primary subject. The modern novel helped relieve the boredom of the bourgeoisie, even as, in everything from Madame Bovary to Oblomov, it was this boredom that was narrated. Indeed, one of the first recorded uses of boredom in English literature was in 1852 in Bleak House. In some way, then, boredom and storytelling are inextricably linked.
Boredom indexes a disjunction between ourselves and our surroundings. When we are bored, we feel something is missing but do not quite know what—only that whatever we are doing no longer holds our attention. Though it might not feel like it, boredom is thereby intimately connected with possibility: it is an emotional state embedded with an opening towards change, the need for something new. In this light, we might understand boredom as an experience of possibility somatically coded as its absence. This dual character is why boredom is so irritating to the senses, why it feels interminable. Boredom is also vague, which makes it resistant to interpretation. For instance, while Spotify offers algorithmically generated mood-based playlists titled “Drained Mix” or “Alone Mix” or even “Sleepy Weepy Mix,” there is no corresponding “Bored Mix” or “Boredom Mix” on offer.
More recent forms of storytelling—like narrative television—retain and reconfigure boredom’s essential relationship to narrative. Consider the HBO series The White Lotus, Mike White’s wildly popular unhappy marriage of the whodunit to the satirical melodrama. Since it premiered in 2021, White Lotus’s three seasons to date have followed the same pattern: open with indications of murder(s) at a luxury hotel resort, then flashback a week to show its pampered and star-laden cast arriving in blissful ignorance.
Boredom is central to the show’s satire: showing the lives of the ultra-rich in their sanitized enclaves as being essentially dull, suited to the bland exoticism that the titular resort’s name epitomizes. But boredom is not simply depicted—half its characters lack the self-awareness required for existential boredom (ennui, as it is often termed). Rather, boredom is constructed formally and visually via alternations of bickering, sunbathing, pathological behavior, sterile opulence, carbon-copy sunsets, and brunch. On some basic level, this hollowness is reassuring. Their parties are grim, their relationships poisoned, and their encounters with Hawaii, Italy, or Thailand positively vanilla. In fact, the locations hardly matter at all: the hotel smothers their specificity into an undifferentiated mass, then serves up morsels of their culture as light entertainment during dinner. The guest characters’ egregious wealth insulates them from the repetitive patterns of work that determine the lives of the locals and the hotel staff, providing them with leisure time that offers only the most illusory escape from monotony. The guests have everything one could wish for, and it has led them to…this washed-out, milquetoast spa. That said, this is hardly groundbreaking as social commentary and, given the show’s effect on tourism, does not appear to be working as satire or critique either.
More interesting to me is the way this boredom works at the level of narrative in tension with the show’s detective elements. In a move that, like much of the series in general, seems almost gleefully formulaic, the luxury void is injected with intrigue by the repetitive solution of the flashback. Every breakfast fruit plate becomes a prelude to catastrophe.
These two forces, boredom and mystery, then cannibalize one another as they compete for screen time. Boredom works for satire by distancing the viewer from melodramatic pathos, ensuring that the pathologies and identity crises of the rich are not taken too seriously. Against this, the whodunit invites tension and speculation, attempting to transform the ungraspable into a readable configuration of reality. This formula turns every inanity into an omen, but in doing so, makes each inanity only meaningful in relation to the telegraphed murder; stifling pathetic identification at the root. Correspondingly, when the dénouement reveals the murder and its circumstances, the majority of the once-mystical inanities become inane in retrospect once again. By inscribing all events under the sign of death, trying to make everything boring mysterious, it makes the mystery boring.
Melodrama and the detective genre both work as efforts at legibility, of inscribing human action and the chaos of the world within recognizable configurations. The dynamic pressure of the personal and the social by which melodrama is animated is undercut not only by satire but by a different regime of coding: the forensic. The individual struggles of the cast are reduced to bits of evidence in an unsolved case. Insulated by wealth, and inhabiting a world circumscribed by the fatal (in the full sense of that word) event, the guests’ lives are doubly bereft of reality.
Paradoxically, however, it is through this same mechanism that The White Lotus comes closest to a replication of, and reflection on, some kind of affective dimension of contemporary social experience. In short, the formal make-up of the show (and the narrative dynamic of conflating mystery with monotony) usefully models the wider societal dynamics of boredom. It is a congruence resting on a certain relation between the production of meaning and the revelation of that meaning, and the mode of its production, as arbitrary. In this way, The White Lotus stages the experience of meaning in capitalism, a satire far beyond any joke about losers who own yachts.
So what? Well, if nothing else, one reason to think further about boredom’s potential is the fact that the contemporary world imagines it as pathology. Any lulls in our everyday psychic lives are met with an ever-expanding array of external stimuli to fend them off. The threat, or promise, of boredom is rampantly commodified, serving as the horizon for the attention economy. This social culture is intertwined with subjective affect: boredom feels shameful in the face of the horror of contemporary events and in the manic imperative to experience. If we are bored, we are not “living our best life.” To be engaged feels like a demand of political, social, and moral imperative—even if the engagement is rage or hatred.
What happens if we are never bored? What would be the consequences of giving in to the imperatives of being always-on? In “The Handkerchief,” a short text published in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1932, Walter Benjamin linked the modern decline in the ability to tell stories with the fact that “there is no longer any place for boredom in our lives.” Here, the loss of boredom, understood as a receptive and disinterested attention, registered an atrophy of the possibility of experience.
In essence, for Benjamin, modernity eroded pre-modern rhythms of ancestral repetition and tradition that accrued experience over lifetimes and generations, replacing it with a disjointed and ceaseless barrage of stimuli and events without meaningful connection. Instead of storytelling, transmission was now effected through information, a communicative mode of immediacy and verification concomitant with life becoming increasingly regulated by administrative processes. Rather than the unconditioned state of boredom, life becomes oriented around waiting—its affective correlate being impatience. This, I think it’s safe to say, has only accelerated in the intervening years.
As far as tolerance for boredom goes: in a 2014 medical study designed to test human capacity for periods of boredom, large numbers of participants chose to receive electric shocks rather than being left alone with their thoughts. Meanwhile, the neoliberal and technological refiguring of the human sensorium has made impatience, like most other states of affect, atomized and micrological. I get impatient refreshing a feed, or trying to load emails on mediocre Wi-Fi, or at the very first hint of buffering. What else am I going to do while the kettle boils but count likes? I find myself scrolling internet tabs or checking feeds even when writing—the slightest pause in activity can be redirected.
Similarly, the use of social media as an insulating mechanism within physical social space transforms the promise of boredom through the presence of information. White Lotus guests are similarly incapable of relinquishing their phones (unless as a way to hide their own financial crimes) constantly breaking the restaurant’s no cell phone rules. For those that do, the ability to switch-off repackages the lost attentive form of boredom as commodified mindfulness that contains an intense double irony. First, that the luxury of relinquishing technology to “truly experience” the resort is done in such a monument to the death of experience. Second, that it is used as a plot point to generate suspense, producing the anxieties in the spectator it is ostensibly designed to preclude.
Why, then, in the face of so much information and activity, are we still bored? Benjamin suggests boredom of another kind develops in modernity: boredom as a mitigating shield against excessive stimuli—a counter-measure in a society in which the commodity has reformed both work and leisure in its own leisure: repetition as novelty, arbitrariness presented as abundant plurality. At the level of a single experience, there is perhaps no clearer distillation of this process than Jennifer Coolidge’s character Tanya McQuoid informing her husband over dinner in Sicily: “I was told that the cheese here was made by a blind nun in a basement.” The novelty of the cheese’s production, the whiff of secrecy accorded by the narrative of religious sensory deprivation, is only an absurd cover for the ever-same economic logic of exchange: one more false promise of boutique, tailored, luxury sensory pleasure.
As such, newness gets old fast. The excess of information, like the overload of omens and portents, means that every event arrives always-already pre-inscribed with explanation. Experience is coded in advance with myriad outlets for desire: erotic promises or those of health or youth or rebellion or communication. Choices multiply, but those choices have all the distinctiveness of the “personal wellness programme” designed for each guest at a White Lotus resort—uniqueness and the promise of micro-analytic self-improvement merely helping to sell three different kinds of yoga. Boredom acts as a psychic defense mechanism against this unyielding stream of impressions, distancing us, however briefly from the pre-narration of the present.
Social media, itself an entanglement of narrative impulses with those of social production, similarly brings this dynamic contradiction into focus. As a set of tools whose function we might summarize as a technological reconfiguration of storytelling in the act of self-narration, social media erodes previous forms of sharing who we are. In the worst case: asking for a date becomes a thumb swipe; telling someone who I am becomes sharing an @. It also gets us to participate in and intensify this erosion. My selfies and stories present signs of the legible world—but it is a legibility whose confirmation is the flicker of a dopamine hit, gone almost before it is felt. The only real demand is to care enough to keep looking, as an undifferentiated abyss of content and product stares back.
At the very least then, boredom is an expression of the failure of some activity to maintain its hold on our attention. This makes it an underlying factor in everything from “mid” as a category of cultural reception to forms of anti-productivity resistance like “quiet quitting” or even “bed rotting.” Capital’s wager, like that of the ideal White Lotus resort experience described by Murray Bartlett’s hotel manager Armond in the first episode of the show’s first season, is staked on creating docility through a satisfying “overall impression of vagueness,” a state in which we seem to have what we want but don’t know what we want, “or what day it is, or what the fuck is going on.”
Boredom is a universal motor and product of social being in capitalism, yet its formal make-up contains a (negatively felt) kernel of the future. The constricted futural moment of boredom is acutely diagnosed by essayist and clinical analyst Adam Phillips in his 1994 book On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: boredom, he writes, entails an absurd, paradoxical wish: “the wish for a desire.” It is a state of both waiting and searching in which “hope is being secretly negotiated.” This is why in Buddhism (or, as Parker Posey’s character on The White Lotus would say, Bew-dism) boredom serves as a pathway to meditation. The lack of desire it embodies is desirable. By suspending the animation of desire, boredom enables the recognition, however fleeting, that the present state of things is not as it should be.
Simply turning to Eastern religion, however, is not the solution when its narrative forms of meaning have similarly been re-coded by capital. In The White Lotus, the Buddhist teaching about self-forgetting and human life being a drop of water flying up from the ocean then falling back (“death is a happy return,” the monk says) functions only as a guide for helping Jason Isaacs’s character Tim Ratliff determine whether to murder his family or face becoming poor. The emptying of the self becomes one more omen, one more motor for suspense, contemplation subsumed by the logic of the show. In a further irony, as a character who believes they know what doom lies in front of him (whilst his family remains unaware), Ratliff becomes a kind of cypher modeling the mystery/monotony dynamic of the show at large. Forced, like the viewer, to see omens in every fragment of religious doctrine or inanity uttered by his wife and children, his defense mechanism is detachment: numbing himself with prescription drugs.
Bew-dism aside, boredom makes time, and potentially the question of what to do with it, present. But not only that. Boredom also unites us. The repetitive drudgery of wage labor, the boredom of leisure time, and the naturalized “total” boredom of the wealthy, share historically-specific constitution and circumstances: a common experience oriented by the logic of accumulation. Boredom returns as a communal rhythm. By starting to recall that older form of boredom, boredom’s resistant potential starts to emerge. It is via the communal character of boredom that Benjamin seeks to push the “futural kernel” from an individual psychological condition to a collective historical one. Where the logic of the commodity plays on individual desires and fears, mystifying collectivity and transforming action into docile consumption and spectacle; boredom stimulates an awareness of the overlooked banal components of everyday life, fixable only by attending to the deep social contradictions of the present.
If the mix of shame and lack of specificity make boredom so receptive to alleviation and advertising, its diffuse character not only questions the content of what is trying to engage our attention but opens the suspicion that the whole thing is pointless. This is the ungovernable element in every blind nun basement cheese or luxury vagueness.
Crucially, despite how it may feel, we do not live inside a foregone conclusion. Our world is not a resort circumscribed by an enervating eschatology. In fact, the inevitability of capitalism is part of its self-presentation: TINA is only a slogan. One of the reasons it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” is that capitalism sustains itself in part by helping us feel that the world (in the sense of a contested project of possible futures) has already ended. Though there is a correspondence in the way meaning is produced and nullified, in The White Lotus what is presented as open is in fact foreclosed. For capitalism, the persistence of openness is what the sense of catastrophe elides. The narrative dynamics of mystery/monotony in the former crystallizes boredom’s wider societal dynamics: boredom stands as a form of pharmakon in the emotional matrix of capitalist sensory experience, a remedy and curse disturbing the stories capitalism is telling us and itself.
Within this framework, boredom’s critical potency lies in antipathy without any legitimating antagonism. Boredom stimulates an awareness of the arbitrariness of the present forms of relation, from the endless re-hash of Netflix shows to the laughably inhuman futures offered by supposedly opposing political parties. Boredom shields us from capital’s unyielding effort to make us care. By avoiding critical reflection on boredom, we allow the exhausted and exhausting novelty machine to take us out for one more spin. We should stay bored.
Daniel Fraser is a Humanities Excellence Scholar and tutor at University College Cork (UCC). He lives by the sea with his partner and twin boys.