Having been a provocative and dissentient voice against racial discrimination, nuclear bombs and military interventions while wrestling with the complexities of mathematics and epistemology for nearly a century, with 70 books and 2000 articles to his name; having married four times, with friends as diverse and colourful as Niels Bohr and Maxim Gorky, one would think Bertrand Russell would have had no space to think of boredom. Yet he did, in a manner no philosopher or psychoanalyst have, contemplating this “ordinary day-to-day unhappiness from which most people in civilised countries suffer”, with astounding percipience, penetrating wisdom and lyrical elegance.
Decades before the world began kowtowing to television sets and smartphones, Russell, whose contributions to literature brought him a Nobel prize, and his collaboration in anti-war protests, two prison terms, foresaw the consequences of a society imperilled by the imprudent scramble for excitement, precipitated by a pathological fear of boredom, noting that “a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow process of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.”
In this Age of Distraction, if some remain defiant, unwilling to be little men (or women), they are the ones who would have enjoyed, in intermittent episodes, the irreplaceable joy of boredom, for it allows one, as Steve Jobs believed, “to indulge in curiosity, and out of curiosity comes everything”. Ironically, it’s when our minds slip into this hushed but restive nothingness that it becomes most fecund; unleashing our imagination, urging us to introspect, and inviting us to become inspired.
Eminent contemporary psychoanalyst Adam Phillips insists that boredom and solitude are essential for living a full life, endorsing copious scientific studies that equate creativity, innovation and critical thinking with our sense of ennui, something that philosophers intuited for ages“““the gods were bored; therefore they created human beings” said Kierkegaard, maintaining that “the impulse to escape the present by keeping ourselves busy is our greatest source of unhappiness”.
But a society that attaches excessive importance to being busy, links success to inaccessibility and prestige to our unavailability even to ourselves, considers being bored, by contrast, symptomatic of mental dullness and lethargy, associated with loafers and underachievers. Boredom is so undesirable that it warrants immediate escape, and the 2.5 trillion dollar global entertainment industry is testimony to how eager and desperate we are to do so.
Children who are ‘lonely’ or with ‘nothing to do’““ who would eventually, invariably invent something to do if left alone ““ gets robbed of their boredom by anxious adults for whom introversion and day-dreaming are nothing more than unpleasant habits like bed-wetting and thumb-sucking from which every child eventually outgrows. And those who don’t, spend their adulthood in the far-flung fringes of the society branded as incorrigible recluses and misanthropes.
Unfortunate. Because boredom and solitude facilitates a mental activity scientists call default mode, brought about by deep internal reflection, when big ideas enter the mind. Great artists, scientists and philosophers associate their epiphanic episodes to this mental state, often induced by monotonous, routine and repetitive activities ““ Douglas Adams cleaned chicken sheds, William Faulkner sold postal stamps.
Physicist Fritjof Capra, describes how his pioneering work linking Eastern mysticism and Western science came about: “I was sitting by the ocean one late summer afternoon, watching the waves rolling in and feeling the rhythm of my breathing, when I suddenly became aware of my whole environment as being engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance… I felt its rhythm and I ‘heard’ its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva”
In Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll illustrates this monotony-induced mental state through Alice who, while chasing the pink-eyed rabbit, falls through the rabbit hole, and during this seemingly endless and dreary fall, her creativity blossoms and imagination takes wing““ “I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downward”; “Ma’am, is this New Zealand or Australia?”; “Do bats eat cats?”; “Do cats eat bats?”.
Despite the negative connotation it carries, thanks to perhaps Charles Dickens’ description of Lady Deadlock’s suffering in Bleak House ““ that she’s ‘bored to death’ by her marriage, boredom is a healthy mental state that needs to be embraced. It compels us to seek alternate, better paths and goals by presenting the existing situation as inadequate and inferior to our expectations. It challenges status quo, motivating us to seek a better condition for ourselves. It opens our eyes to the real world, and offers us creative, imaginative solutions to live in it. That is if we do not reach for our smartphones for instant gratification and escape to the virtual one, to become cut flowers in cheap vases.
