Boredom

A souvenir seller appears bored as she waits for customers.

In conventional usage, boredom, ennui, or tedium is an emotion characterized by uninterest in one's surrounding, often caused by a lack of distractions or occupations. Although, "There is no universally accepted definition of boredom. But whatever it is, researchers argue, it is not simply another name for depression or apathy. It seems to be a specific mental state that people find unpleasant—a lack of stimulation that leaves them craving relief, with a host of behavioral, medical and social consequences."[1] According to BBC News, boredom "...can be a dangerous and disruptive state of mind that damages your health"; yet research "...suggest[s] that without boredom we couldn't achieve our creative feats."[2]

In Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity, Elizabeth Goodstein traces the modern discourse on boredom through literary, philosophical, and sociological texts to find that as "a discursively articulated phenomenon...boredom is at once objective and subjective, emotion and intellectualization—not just a response to the modern world, but also a historically constituted strategy for coping with its discontents."[3] In both conceptions, boredom has to do fundamentally with an experience of time—such as experiencing the slowness of time—and problems of meaning.[4]

  1. ^ Koerth-Baker, Maggie (2016). "Why Boredom Is Anything but Boring". Nature. 529 (7585): 146–148. Bibcode:2016Natur.529..146K. doi:10.1038/529146a. PMID 26762441. Archived from the original on 8 June 2017. Retrieved 28 April 2018.
  2. ^ Robson, David. "Psychology: Why boredom is bad... and good for you". bbc.com. Archived from the original on 24 August 2017. Retrieved 28 April 2018.
  3. ^ Goodstein, Elizabeth S. 2005. Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 3.
  4. ^ Weiss, Emily R.; Todman, McWelling; Pazar, Özge; Mullens, Sophia; Maurer, Kristin; Romano, Alexandra C. (2021-04-30). "When Time Flies: State and Trait Boredom, Time Perception, and Hedonic Task Appraisals". Psychological Thought. 14 (1): 150–174. doi:10.37708/psyct.v14i1.559. ISSN 2193-7281. S2CID 236539890.