But can we? Living, by contrast, not in a work of fiction but in the real world? Eastwood certainly thinks so.įinding meaning in boredom is the theme of Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom, Eastwood’s latest (and very timely) book, co-authored with James Danckert, a fellow boredom researcher and cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo. No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it.” Beckett puts these words into the mouths of vagabonds who, hobbled by impotence, ignorance and, yes, crippling boredom, can never escape the emptiness of their existence. As the playwright Samuel Beckett so bluntly informs us in Waiting for Godot, his absurdist masterpiece about the boredom of living, “We are bored. It’s worth figuring out, because we all contend with boredom. Why is that a problem? “You’re seeing yourself as an empty vessel that needs filling, as opposed to seeing yourself as a meaning-making creature that needs to effectively express itself in the world,” Eastwood says. Going for quick fixes like binge-watching Netflix or repeatedly scrolling through social media feeds is often a misguided attempt to escape having to face the void. But not everyone knows how.Īs Eastwood has observed, people often confuse “satisfying activity” with stimulation. It signals to the brain that something is not well and that some sort of action is needed to address the problem. “It’s an unfulfilled desire to be engaged in satisfying activity.” The way he sees it, boredom is not unlike a toothache. “I think of boredom as a certain mental state,” says Eastwood, who is also a clinical psychologist. But boredom is much more complex than that. As the director of the University’s Boredom Lab (tag line: “Exploring the Unengaged Mind”), he has spent two decades examining what many people might call having nothing to do.
None of this is entirely surprising to John Eastwood, a York psychology professor who studies boredom for a living. Desperate for distraction, we have also allowed Meghan and Harry to mesmerize us with their celebrity-meets-monarchy woes. For them, having idle time on their hands would be a luxury.īut the rest of us? So bored we have made a virtue out of online shopping for clothes only our mirrors will see, mainlining gardening shows or buying up shares of GameStop, the hot-ticket retailer for gamers trading at record prices on the stock market. OK, so maybe not front-line health-care workers who haven’t had a break in over 12 months, or working mothers who suddenly find themselves juggling homeschooling with a spike in work-from-home Zoom calls on top of the usual heaps of household laundry and spousal support, emotional and otherwise. Who hasn’t experienced soul-crushing ennui in this year of mass lockdowns and stay-at-home orders? Like, tell us something we all don’t already know. So many people have been grumbling about how bored they are during the pandemic that, frankly, it’s boring just listening to them.
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