BOREDOM

Despite our extraordinary variety of diversions and resources, our frenzy for spectacles and feverish pursuit of entertainment, we are bored. The abundance of efforts made to counter boredom has defeated themselves, and boredom has become the disease of our time. No authority is willing to guess at the number of people, who are bored, but there are millions, and the number is growing.

Young people are particularly subject to boredom. A leading psychiatrist who specializes in problems of the young, estimates that as many as 20 per cent of adolescents are handicapped by significant boredom and depression. This handicap often leads to loss of self-esteem and, in extreme cases, to suicide.

True boredom, of the sort that causes outburst of violence, aggression, revolt and family upheavals is very different from the momentary feeling everyone gets from time to time that “this will never end”. As psychiatrists see it, severe chronic boredom is withdrawal from one’s surroundings, a refusal to participate. Boredom is defined as “the co-existence of dissatisfaction and a disinclination to action; longing and inability to designate what is longed for; a sense of emptiness; a passive expectant attitude with the hope that the external world will supple the satisfaction; a distorted sense of time in which time seems to stand still”.

In less scholarly terms, boredom can be described as a state of apathy and unhappiness.

With all the variety of sensations offered us, why is boredom increasing? For one thing people are more demanding of life than they once were. In an earlier, simple time, most people accepted a certain measure of boredom as inevitable. Schools required reams on memorization, temple sermons lasted for hours, entertainment events were presented once a year rather than every 15 minutes, and the working week for many was 60 or more hours instead of 33 or 40.

These days however, boredom is felt to be intolerable, something that must be vanquished by turning a switch or swallowing a pill or taking off in a car. At the same time, the very abundance we have created for ourselves dulls the senses and makes us more vulnerable to boredom. Except among the very poor or the strict, few youngsters today have to wait long for that bicycle, they feel they must have. Yet looking forward to something you deeply desire is one of the most satisfying of all experiences; those who are deprived of it are deprived, indeed.

The challenges posed to most citizens in their daily lives have diminished, too. There are still hard hikes to make, tough seas to navigate, high mountains to climb, but such challenges have to be sought out. They are no longer part of one’s routine existence. Life offers only two basic alternatives; a state of constant security and assurance, or one of challenge and risk. “In the first state, you are bored much of the time”, he explains. “In the second, you are often scared. If life is too easy, it’s no fun. You have to take some risks”.

Methods of heading off boredom are available at every age level and in every situation. Parents can help their children by teaching them to be willing to defer satisfaction, to wait and work for what they want. Children should be taught that life cannot be an unending series of happy moments. Boredom is often an effort to avoid pain. Many children refuse to accept the fact that pleasure and pain part alternate; they refuse the pain part of the cycle and retreat into boredom.

Employers’ responsibilities towards their employees are similar to that of parents toward their children. They have an obligation to make the jobs they provide as stimulating as possible, both for the sake of the workers and to make their business productive. The worker needs to know that what he does to deal with their workers on a basis of mutual respect, listen to their suggestions, and give them as much control over their time and schedule as possible.

If there is one central, universal prescription for avoiding boredom, it is this; diversify your interests and involvements into areas and activities beyond your normal routine. Making a commitment to some idea or objective outside one’s familiar world, finding a new challenge can end boredom almost immediately. Another avenue with great potential rewards for bored people lies in working with handicapped and underprivileged people, teaching, working with prisoners and hospital patients, or devoting time to lonely, elderly people.