Summit Ministries

By Ronald H. Nash

Boredom is an affliction of the human spirit, a degenerate state of the soul to which Christians need to give more attention. The New Testament speaks about many human moods or emotions—worry, anger, envy, lust, greed, hatred—but it says nothing about boredom. Given the extent and seriousness of the problem, that silence is surprising, unless the hope and help offered by the biblical message of regeneration and sanctification have application to problems like boredom.

One reason boredom merits scrutiny is that serious consequences frequently accompany it. Many people have sought to escape boredom in activities that are dangerous, degrading, or damnable. The ancient Romans instituted the circus as one such diversion. People sought relief from boredom by watching human beings maim and kill each other. Thanks to modern technology, the simulations of gruesome murders, accompanied by vivid, stomach-wrenching displays of blood and gore, on display in many movie theaters today provide a vicarious alternative to the butchery of the coliseum.

Technology has also come to the aid of modern men and women through the production of mind-altering chemicals. At best these produce temporary emotional release followed by addiction and debilitating physical and spiritual consequences. If people thought their boredom was bad, the straits into which they are often led by their desire to escape it are even worse. Abraham's nephew Lot was bored so he moved into the city of Sodom. The Israelites became bored in the wilderness and rebelled against God. David got bored one evening and went for a walk on his roof, from where he noticed Bathsheba.

But boredom is a misery wholly apart from its frequently disastrous consequences. Christians believe that our chief end, in the words of the Westminster Catechism, is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Obviously, the victims of boredom are falling short of the end for which they were created. The presence of boredom is a symptom of much wasted potential. In the words of the contemporary psychologist Franz Goetzl, boredom "means to feel 'full of emptiness,' possessed by a longing without aim, depressed and resigned, powerless, worthless, paralyzed; it means to be lacking in incentive, to be incapable of experiencing joy and zest. Extensive boredom is a sense of nothingness, of despair, of a vacuum of the spirit." The twentieth-century existentialist Martin Heidegger described boredom as that which "makes all things and other human beings and myself fuse into a colorless indifference." Something this bad is wrong in itself, not merely because of its consequences.

Boredom differs from idleness, though the two frequently occur together. A person can be bored even at those times when most active. Think of the experience of many persons who work on assembly lines. Conversely, some people can be idle without being bored. This may explain the fascination many have with the sport of fishing. Some victims of boredom have been described as "Sunday neurotics." These are people whose chronic boredom is obscured by the diversion afforded by their work and other activities during the week. The Sunday neurotic becomes acutely conscious of boredom on Sundays or vacations or during other periods when normal diversions are absent.

Two types of boredom may be distinguished. One is a more temporary and simple kind of boredom, closely related to a situation characterized by monotomy. My students have occasionally been victims of this simple kind of boredom. As soon as my lecture ended, however, they once again became their normally happy selves. As unpleasant as the emptiness of simple boredom may be, it is a normal feature of emotional life for most people. Indeed, it can have some value, as individuals who desire to end the unpleasantness are motivated to initiate new activities.

There is also a more serious kind of boredom, sometimes called chronic or pathological boredom. While simple boredom usually disappears as soon as the situation changes, chronic boredom tends to persist in spite of changes in the situation. Chronic boredom is a much more pervasive and timeless kind of boredom, not clearly related to any specific situation. It can be harmful, even dangerous, to suppose that the victim of chronic boredom can be helped by simply providing some new distraction.

Chronic boredom belongs to a class of experiences that might be called objectless moods. Many human feelings—fear, pain, and annoyance, for instance—are responses to some specific object. When people are afraid, the are afraid of something, when they are annoyed, they are annoyed by something. Objectless moods, however, are not directed toward any specific object. The onset of moods like chronic boredom and despair cannot be related to any particular object. The moods seem to be attitudes toward existence and life in general, rather than postures toward a specific being in the world.

The nineteenth-century philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard has provided a perspective from which the Christian may receive help in the effort to cope with boredom and other objectless moods. Kierkegaard's major writing on the subject is an essay "The Rotation Method," which appears in the first volume of Either/Or. One must exercise care in reading this essay for, like so many of Kierkegaard's writings, it is an exercise in indirect communication. Recognizing that many important truths cannot be communicated directly, through literal prose, Kierkegaard frequently posed in his writings as someone representing views and values different from his own. By placing himself in the shoes of such people, and writing as they themselves might have written, he hoped to bring the reader to see important existential insights for himself.

"The Rotation Method," then, is to be read as the statement of a clever, observant, and articulate spokesman for what Kierkegaard called the aesthetic way of life. The aesthetic individual is characterized most by an obsession for detachment and freedom from responsibility, by the single-minded attempt to escape the snare of boredom. Such a person will do practically anything to avoid responsibility and to evade commitment. The exact means used will vary with the individual. The classic Don Juan type flees boredom through sensuality; others seek relief through more cultured means, through an appreciation of the fine arts, or even the study of philosophy. But no mater how the aesthetic individual lives, he or she believes that "boredom is the root of all evil." While Scripture warns that all are sinners, Kierkegaard's aesthetic person is offended most by the belief that all are bores. "It is a curious fact," he observes, "that those who do not bore themselves usually bore others, while those who bore themselves entertain others."

Kierkegaard's title, "The Rotation Method," is instructive. Just as farmers frequently rotate their crops to increase the productivity of their land, many of those obsessed with overcoming boredom vary their routine. If a man gets bored at his job, he may take up golf. When he gets bored playing golf, he may try playing different courses. If he continues to get bored, he may try new diversions. As Kierkegaard put it, "One tires of living in the country, and moves to the city; one tires of one's native land, and travels abroad ... one tires of porcelain dishes and eats on silver; one tires of silver and turns to gold; one burns half of Rome to get an idea of the burning of Troy." Crafty aestheticians move from activity to activity, always seeking diversion from the inactivity that confronts them with a consciousness of their boredom, despair, and the threat of meaninglessness.

Since Kierkegaard's essay is to be taken as the reflections of a sick soul preoccupied with the avoidance of boredom, its analysis of the malady does not proceed to any real solution. The "cure" proposed by the clever aesthete, we know, will turn out as unsatisfying as the crude rotation method practiced by the witless aesthete. Undoubtedly, a good reason exists for the lack of any apparent cure in the rest of Kierkegaard's writings. This is due, no doubt, to Kierkegaard's assumption that the mood of despair, to which he gives much attention, is similar in its nature, cause, and cure to boredom.

In Kierkegaard's view, maladies like boredom and despair have their ground in human nature itself. Two aspects of existence (the finite and temporal and the infinite and eternal) compete for dominance in the life of every human being. Unless a person succeeds in getting these two dimensions into proper relation and manages somehow to unify them, he or she will never really be a self.

Clearly each of us is finite in many respects. We are limited and restricted by our bodies, by our circumstances, by our surroundings. A constant and unavoidable reminder of the limitations of our existence is provided by death—the actual death of others and the realization of the inevitability of our own death. But there is also another side to our existence, a side that takes on dimensions of infinity or eternity. For one thing, our desires seem to transcend the finite limitations of our bodies. Human beings always desire more than they have; they always want more than they can possibly achieve. No mater what we have accomplished or attained in the way of fame, fortune, pleasure, or happiness, we want more. In a very real sense, our appetites are never satisfied. This is not to ignore times when thoroughly satiated individuals pause, momentarily content with the most recent satisfaction of their desires. But the contentment soon disappears and they are back on the trail, searching for more.

The frustration resulting from the human inability to ultimately satisfy all of one's desires is just one manifestation of the tension between the finite and infinite poles of our being. Another example is the tendency of many individuals to seek to escape reality through flights of fantasy. Rather than confront the truth about the closed frontiers of their existence, many people prefer to live in a world of dreams and illusions. In spite of their physical age, such people suffer from lifelong immaturity. They never really grow up.

Because most people never succeed in pulling the finite and infinite sides of their being together, they go through life suffering the spiritual and emotional consequences of being divided selves. Despair is one result of the failure to put the various parts of one's life together, to achieve equilibrium. What we have called chronic boredom may be another consequence of the same problem. It is unclear whether chronic boredom is a form or a symptom of they despair Kierkegaard described. Perhaps, at different times and in different individuals, it is both.

Despair is essentially enthusiasm that has gone astray, that has lost its bearings; it is a zeal for things that either disappear when they are most wanted or fail to deliver all that they seem to promise. In the case of boredom, the zeal or eagerness disappears before the thing does. If, in a person's unconscious, he or she begins to feel that all the deepest yearnings of the soul will eventually end up unsatisfied, the onset of chronic boredom makes a kind of perverse sense. It is perfectly understandable how one's unconscious, under these conditions, might react by repressing enthusiasm.

The victim of objectless moods is frequently unaware of the problem. Kierkegaard clearly states that despair is often unconscious; likewise, there seem to be times when people are unconscious of their chronic boredom. They may sense dimly that something is wrong. But they fail to become fully aware of the nature of their problem. The widespread lack of consciousness of despair and boredom may be one more result of the refusal of many people to face the truth about themselves and their world. The truly unhappy person who mistakenly believes himself or herself happy tends to regard everyone who threatens that illusion as an enemy.

Moods like boredom and despair are also indications that the major source of human trouble lies not in our external circumstances, but within. Consider the contrast in the Pauline epistles between sins, the overt acts, and sin, the depraved nature within. Human beings are not self-sufficient; they cannot cure themselves. They can become selves, they can grow up and develop into complete human beings only through a proper relation to God. The finite and infinite must be joined from without, by God himself. Chronic boredom is but one symptom of estrangement from God and consequently from oneself. Divided selves can achieve the unity of selfhood only in a faith-relationship to God.

One final aspect of Kierkegaard's analysis deserves attention. My colleague Bob Roberts observed in these pages some months ago that moods like despair and boredom indicate that people are not wholly or ultimately made for this world. There is "something eternal" in us. We are to find the fulfillment of our passion for meaning and security, which is expressed in a distorted way by our typical immersion in thisworldly projects, in a realm which is not subject to disappearance. A human being is not an absurdity, a futile passion, doomed either to repression or the most poignant unhappiness. He is, rather, a wayward child of God, whose restlessness and anxiety and despair can and should drive him into the arms of his Father. His despair is indeed a sickness, but it is curable when he finds his true home (RJ, June 1979, p. 11).

The eternal factor which God has implanted within leaves all of us ultimately frustrated, unhappy, restless, and bored until we finally enter into his rest.

As Augustine says, God has made us for himself and our hearts are restless until they rest in him. Human beings are driven to seek an eternal peace, in which everything will finally be in its proper place, in which perfect order both in the world and in the soul will be attained. Boredom may be one way God informs us that we are to look beyond ourselves for our ultimate peace. It is one of several moods and affective states which ought to remind alert believers that we should know better than to think that our highest good can be found in this life.
Copyright © 2004 Ronald H. Nash. All rights reserved. This essay is used by permission of the author.