Abstract
In this essay, I argue for the value of studying boredom as a social and organizational phenomenon. Recently, an interest in the more active side of boredom has led to the publication of a number of popular psychology books on boredom’s motivational capacities. A key point in this literature is the focus on the individual ability to distinguish between activity and productivity, and to exploit boredom for self-development purposes. I argue that this trend in boredom studies should prompt us to look closer, not only at the moral history of boredom, and at how social reality has organized around it, but also on what boredom, and the countermeasures it represents, “produce” as a central experiential component of alienated labor.
“Demon, I’m bored.”
Introduction
A recent study, initiated during the first wave of the coronavirus in 2020, asked people in China and the US to write down five words to describe their feelings from the previous week (Li et al., 2021). As could be expected, both Chinese and Americans experienced more negative emotions than usual at the peak of the pandemic in their respective countries. At the onset of the viral outbreak, people in both countries reported feeling anxious and worried. An increase of negative emotions such as scared and nervous was accompanied by a decrease in low-arousal, positive emotions like relaxed and calm. What surprised the researchers most was that the usual suspects in times of crisis were closely matched and even exceeded by one reported feeling in particular: boredom. The study shows that Americans went from 5% of them being bored in February 2020 to 24% of them at the peak of the pandemic in April. In China, the numbers were even higher at a 40% rate during their peak period in February. In the same period, online searches for the word “boredom” more than tripled worldwide. Numbers like these obviously tell us that lockdowns, shutdowns, and strict regulations of social distance has a severe impact on the public’s emotional profile. They also tell us that although the streaming numbers for disaster movies like Contagion (2011) and Outbreak (1995) have been huge during the crisis, the depiction of pandemics as dramatic, even action-packed, is really not that accurate. In fact, as the situation is unfolding, the opposite turns out to be true: the current COVID-19 pandemic is arguably accompanied by a pandemic of boredom (Li and Mousavi, 2020). As people are forced to give up their scheduled habits and stay at home, a scourge is spreading across the planet that no hazmat suit can protect us against.
It may be difficult to muster any serious concern over this particular aspect of the current global health crisis, especially given the many other—arguably both more immediate and mortal—threats that we are currently facing. Boredom is easily dismissed as a sort of individual failing, a personal lack of imagination. We associate it with childhood memories having nothing to do, or with the conspicuously tedious, like filling spreadsheets or standing in line. During the recent COVID lockdowns, we have learned to think of it as a short 5 m commute from bed to desk, and the anticipation of yet another incredible dull meeting on Zoom. Research on boredom often describes it as a passive state (Elpidorou, 2018; Vogel-Walcutt et al., 2012), defining it as for example as a “demotivated affect, characterized by a state of apathy” (Loukidou et al., 2009: 383) or as “a state of relatively low arousal and dissatisfaction” (Mikulas and Vodanovich, 1993: 3). Generally, it is attributed to an environment unable to satisfy the need to be engaged and somehow mentally occupied (Davies et al., 1983; Fisher, 1993, 2017), and linked to lack of interest and the feeling of stagnation (Costas and Kärreman, 2016; O’Brien, 2014). What is more, boredom is mostly viewed as a transient and easily alleviated state (Elpidorou, 2018). Hardly anything as serious as, say, mental health issues like depression or anxiety.
However, in this essay I want to argue for the value of studying boredom as a social and organizational phenomenon. Unlike the moral, social and often anti-capitalist critique of boredom that philosophy tended to offer a while back (Benjamin, 1999; Heidegger, 1995; Kierkegaard, 1987; Kracauer, 1995), much of the contemporary, predominantly psychological research on boredom is unpolitical and offers mostly individual solutions (Elpidorou, 2018; Fisher, 2017). There is even a recent strain of popular literature suggesting that although boredom is an unpleasant feeling, what it aims to do is to drive us—its beneficiaries—into productive action. Boredom is a signal to reengage that needs to be heeded carefully. So, while the struggle with living in a limited environment with limited activities may be alleviated by kicking back and watching the latest installment of The Matrix, what we should do instead, is to come up with activities that will actually make us happier and more productive (Danckert and Eastwood, 2020; Elpidorou, 2020; Zomorodi, 2017). This normative injunction to heed the calling and make the most of boredom connects the contemporary boredom literature with the moral tradition in which the notion has its historical root. Based on this, I will suggest that the current psychological trend in boredom research should be complemented by more studies, not only of the social and organizational structures that produce boredom, but also of what boredom produces, both as a conceptual category and as a social and organizational phenomenon. With this call for more research, I hope to open a debate that can help us to highlight the moral and political implications of boredom that arguably the psychological perspective neglects.
In the following, I will first turn to a brief discussion of the discovery of an active dimension of boredom in the current psychological literature. This helps me to illustrate how popular literature has recently come to interpret its “motivational component.” After this, I turn to a discussion of this active component as an organizational phenomenon drawing on historical sources and show how this reconnects the current trend in the psychological literature to boredom’s moralistic roots. Finally, based on this, I call for more studies of boredom, not as a demotivated state, but as a moral injunction to distinguish between activity and productivity that in itself produces social reality.
The psychology of active boredom
In the psychology research on boredom dominating the field today, probably the most contentious feature is concerned with the question of arousal. Most research, as already briefly mentioned above, describes boredom as a state of low arousal (Vogel-Walcutt et al., 2012). However, there are similarly many definitions that render boredom a state of high arousal or argue that it is both (Elpidorou, 2018; Fisher, 2017). This tension in the research literature should be seen in the light of the basic distinction between trait boredom (i.e. boredom proneness) and state boredom (Farmer and Sundberg, 1986; Zuckerman, 1979). As a construct, boredom proneness is assessed using the kind of personality tests and self-report scales especially useful to measure the personality trait of boredom in employees, for example in HR departments. Developed in the late 1980s, the so-called Boredom Proneness Scale (Farmer and Sundberg, 1986) is extensively used to assess the tendency for people to experience boredom in a variety of situations. Boredom prone individuals are thought to often and easily find themselves to be bored, even in situations that other people might easily deal with or even find stimulating. The model thus lends itself to an understanding, which intuitively opposes the experience of boredom to that of active engagement. However, whether an individual is prone to boredom or not, says little about her actual experience of boredom and what form it takes. What is more, boredom proneness has been correlated with a plethora of negative corollaries, including bullying, counter-productive work behaviors, lower job performance, absence, and alcohol and drug misuse (Fisher, 2017; Loukidou et al., 2009), suggesting that boredom has a more active side. Most research in the field is concerned with trait boredom.
State boredom (i.e. the manifestation of boredom), on the other hand, does not necessarily imply boredom proneness. People naturally experience boredom without being especially prone to it (Elpidorou, 2014). State boredom is most often defined as an aversive, but transient (Fisher, 1993) affective state or experience (Eastwood et al., 2012; Fahlman et al., 2013). In this light, boredom can be viewed as self-effacing and the experience can be interpreted as a signal to remove us of an unsatisfactory situation, for example by promoting goal-directed activities (Elpidorou, 2018). Such a regulatory perspective on the state of boredom suggest that it is an unpleasant, but also highly volatile state. In one study, for example, participants were asked to sit alone in a room and told to do nothing (Wilson et al., 2014). The only possible distraction was a machine that allowed them to self-administer electrical shock. Faced with the tedium of only their own company for 15 minutes, a large group of the participants willingly gave themselves an electrical shock. One person reportedly shocked himself as much as 190 times. The level of agitation that this indicates is often used as an argument for interpreting boredom as a regulatory alarm that serves to keep us moving or to motivate us to escape the boring situation (Eastwood et al., 2012).
The tentative connection in studies of both trait and state boredom between the experience of boredom and some level of compensatory activity has recently inspired a body of literature directed at a more popular audience. Here, boredom is exploited for its motivational capacities. For example, in his recent book Propelled, Elpidorou (2020) makes the case that boredom, because of its regulatory capacities, is central to human flourishing. Similarly, in Out of my skull, Danckert and Eastwood (2020) argue that we ought to focus more on boredom as a motivator, and as a signal that we are failing to satisfy our basic psychological need to be engaged and effective. Comparing the feeling to the tip-of-the-tongue syndrome—the sensation that something is missing that we are looking for, though we cannot say precisely what—boredom, they argue, is concerned with the human need for self-determination and agency. This understanding resonates well with psychoanalyst Phillips’ (1993) succinct description of boredom as a precarious process in which we are “waiting for something and looking for something, in which hope is being secretly negotiated” (p. 69). Others take this logic a step further to give boredom an even more positive spin, arguing that it can be a key element, also for productivity (Zomorodi, 2017). What these books have in common—apart from often serving their message with a generous spoonful of self-help advice—is the view of boredom as very much a personal failing. The normative injunction presented here is directed toward the individual, who must pick herself up, for example to heed the signal to become more engaged (Danckert and Eastwood, 2020) or to realize the existential importance of negative emotions (Elpidorou, 2020). But they also highlight that boredom has an active and highly volatile component, which may have an important role to play in our mental economy. In the following, I will turn to look at this component as a social and organizational phenomenon.
Beasts, bananas, and “busy idleness”: The active dimension of boredom in an organizational context
In Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith famously tells the anecdote of a boy working one of the first steam engines. These machines were slow-working beasts and needed constant oversight. To complete their, by all comparable standards, excruciatingly long cycles, a human hand had to open and close valves for cold water and steam. Although he does not use that exact term, Smith recognized the exceedingly boring nature of this monotonous task: turn valve A . . . wait for it to complete its cycle . . . turn valve B . . . then wait again. People who have visited such workshops, he observes, will have noticed the spontaneous energy invested by workers in escaping the dreary situation. In this particular case, the boy hooked up a system of strings and latches that made the machine itself do his work for him before running off to “divert himself with his playfellows” (Smith, 2007: 6). I have always been particularly fond of this example, because it illustrates how Smith thought of the division of labor not only as saving time, but also as giving it. It is also a reminder of an age, not all that long ago, where such time saved was not required to immediately be put to use elsewhere. But Smith’s observation is also interesting, because it illustrates the motivational capacity of boredom in an organizational context.
A similar logic can be observed in Donald Roy’s classic study of “Banana Time” (1959). Based on Roy’s 2 month stint as a drill press operator in a machine shop outside Chicago, “Banana Time” focuses on a group of factory workers and their attempt to make their extra-long working days bearable through various kinds of social interaction. Like Smith’s workshop, the backdrop of Roy’s study is quite bleak. A Taylor-like Scientific-Management factory setting in an isolated and sealed of area with no sound traveling from other work areas of the plant. Closed doors and no contact with other employees, except perhaps for an evidently overloaded superintendent dropping by to pay his respect every week or two. No sign of union reps—or any other kind of employee committee for that matter. Simply the incessant grind of repetitive tasks, the monotony of extra-long working days and the tedious, mechanical rhythm of the clicking machines having at it: “click, ----- move die, ----- click, ----- move die” (Roy, 1959: 160). Before the weary close of the first day, Roy is already speculating that his clicking career may be over before it has really begun, all that he can see is the hardship of the boring work and the “grim process of fighting the clock.” But then he discovers an emerging pattern in the social interactions going on around him. He begins to realize that what he had previously taken to be just the childish jibber-jabber of his co-workers is really a sordid and structured system of communication full of “‘times’ and ‘themes’ and roles to serve their enaction” (p. 161). The discovery begins his description of how the factory workers battle the Scylla and Charybdis of their work place, triumphing over the “beast of monotony” and the “beast of boredom” and gentling them “to the harmlessness of a kitten” (p. 164). The interactions “not only marked off the time; they gave it content and hurried it along” (p. 162). With this, “the disconnected became connected, the nonsense made sense, the obscure became clear, and the silly actually funny” (Roy, 1959: 161).
In spite of the fact that there are a couple of centuries and an industrial revolution between them, the situations described by Smith and Roy have several things worth noticing in common. First, the experience of boredom particular to them is not a state of equilibrium. If anything, it is informative, revealing just how aversive and unstimulating the working situation they find themselves in is. It could also tentatively be described as a motivating force, prompting the workers to find, as Roy phrases it, “a solution to the elemental problem of ‘psychological survival’” (p. 158). The same is reflected in the reception of Roy’s study in the research literature. Here, “banana time” refers for example to “the need for a group to create some regularly scheduled diversions to break up the monotony of the day, week or year” (Ancona et al., 2001: 521). It provides “oral stimulation, a break from the current task, the opportunity to move around, and possibly a chance to interact with others” (Fisher, 2017: 87). Often it is interpreted normatively as an example of the “integrative potential of expressive action in a work place” (Handelman, 1971) and of how, by regaining agency “workers continued to assert control over temporal dimensions of industrial production” (Flaherty, 2011: 118). In this manner, banana time is a positive example of the kind of strategies that people will come up with to “preserve autonomy in the face of excessive or inappropriate demands” (May, 1999: 769) and to escape the oppressive situation that such encroachment might induce.
Second, both Smith and Roy’s examples demonstrate the difficulty with determining the value of performance in an organizational context. Boredom may (and is most often thought to) compromise performance, for example by causing people to procrastinate as Roy’s workers arguably do, but it may also be good for performance as in Smith’s case, where it is associated with the spontaneous energy invested in improving the machinery. The moral implications of this dilemma is nicely illustrated in a short instructive novel aptly titled Harry’s Holiday, or the Doings of One Who Had Nothing to Do (1818). Here, a bored boy sets out to copy by hand a map of the world. As his father instructs him, in doing so, he is guilty of several grave errors: first, willfulness—he has no real reason to want to do so; then impatience—he never takes the time to do this delicate task properly; lack of perseverance—as soon as he gets frustrated with the task, he gives up; and finally—in choosing to copy the elaborate map by hand, he misconstrues the value of labor in an economy of mechanical reproduction. What is at stake here, and what Harry’s Holiday labors to illustrate, is that activity and productivity are not the same; and that the improperly directed activity caused by their confusion is a moral problem of some magnitude (Rosenberg, 2008). Well before boredom even emerged as a word, there was a specific term for this: busy idleness—the tendency to engage in trivial matters disguised as busyness.
Let us look at these two themes separately, to see what can be gained by understanding boredom as an organizational problem, rather than an (exclusively) psychological problem. First, the assumption that boredom has motivational qualities that will propel you toward more meaningful and productive activities, if you just let them, sits oddly with the fact that in both of the cases described above, the experience arises from an oppressive situation created by totalizing and alienating circumstances. Both Smith’s boy and Roy’s factory workers find themselves trapped in cruel conditions, for which they are not responsible and which they are unlikely to escape. What is more, while the activities they engage in may alleviate their immediate experience of boredom, engaging in them also means contributing to the reification of the self-same alienating structures that created the boring situation in it in the first place. As Orlikowski and Yates (2002: 689) succinctly put it, even as Roy’s workers “constructed local social times, they were also objectifying the nine to five temporal structure of the work day in their machine shop and, more broadly, in society.” In this light, the suggestion that because boredom can result from a lack of control, finding even small ways to assert agency can move you toward meaningful engagement and accomplishment (Danckert and Eastwood, 2020) sounds much like Kierkegaard’s melancholic esthete, who’s only way out of the paralyzing feelings of boredom is to become psychologically autarchic by seeking relief in self-manipulation (McDonald, 2009: 62). Per analogy, from an organizational perspective, this is comparable to the kind of curious and dramatic escape attempts that occur in prison close to an inmate’s date of release. Such escape attempts—absurdly enough more likely the closer the date gets—disrupt the deadening predictability of prison life and the frustrated feeling of boredom, but they also prolong the oppressive situation (Meisenhelder, 1985: 48). What is clear from this is that boredom from a social and organizational perspective is a central experiential component of alienated labor (Blauner, 1973; Seeman, 1961). It highlights that the active component of boredom from such a perspective is not likely a “motivated choice,” but a form of resistance protocoling what people do, when their circumstances are shaped by structural conditions outside their immediate control. What is helpful, though, about the recent interest in psychology literature in boredom’s motivational capacity is that it may help us to broaden this horizon and bring it up to date. It has long been acceptable to speak about boredom in contexts with extremely repetitive work tasks like Smith’s and Roy’s. It is less often that dedicated people in enriched jobs give voice to their feelings of boredom, particularly when these feelings are in conflict with the professional narratives in play in and around their organizations (Costas and Kärreman, 2016; Fisher, 2017). The point here is not only that boredom, as a component of alienated labor, is very much alive, also today. It is also that as a totalizing concept, the notion of alienation focuses on structural determinants of meaninglessness and underplays the role of boredom in reactive formations of meaning (Barbalet, 1999). Looking at boredom and its motivational capacities may help account for the mechanisms by which social sources of meaning come into play and the dynamics of such meaning formation. From this perspective, the value of exploring boredom as a social and organizational phenomenon is that it encourages the view, obscured in much of the contemporary psychology literature on the subject, that boredom is implicated in countervailing strategies beyond the simple expression of the inherent playfulness of human nature (Handelman, 1971). Instead, the active component of boredom may be viewed as a variation of what Berlant (2011) has called “cruel optimism” (p. 1), making people potentially desire something that actually impedes or is an obstacle to their flourishing.
Activity and the moral dimension of boredom
This brings us to the second theme that I raised above: the roots of boredom in moralistic discourse, and more specifically, the problem from a social and organizational perspective of distinguishing between activity and productivity in boredom. The point has been raised that morality receives remarkably little attention in boredom research. This is all the more surprising, given that the history of boredom is really the history of a moral construct (Elpidorou, 2018). However, the recent psychological interest in boredom’s motivational capacities could be seen, not as a novel intervention, but rather as continuing a long tradition in cultural history of associating boredom with moral injunction. More than a universal emotion, boredom as an organizational phenomenon emerges out of a religious context, specifically as part of the Church’s moral register of sins and virtues. As a website dedicated to women’s bible studies recently put it: “God is very serious about work” (wellwateredwomen.com, 2019). There is general agreement that one of the first historical articulations of boredom was the notion of acedia (Goodstein, 2005; Johnsen, 2016). As an antecedent of the modern experience, the term acedia (from the Greek, a-kedeia, literally “without care”) in the early middle ages designated a constellation of feelings and behaviors associated with the struggles of anchorite monks against the hazards of their self-induced isolation (Jackson, 1981). Also known as “the noonday demon,” acedia would cause the monks to complain about or lose interest in their calling. Reminiscent of Roy’s description of the “beast of boredom,” monks tormented by this spirit would actively seek to escape their duties, determined to find consolation elsewhere or in other activities. This active component made it a mortal evil, a flight and a withdrawal before God and “the Good Work.” The Church Fathers viewed acedia as “the most oppressive of all demons” and “a mother of all sins” (Evagrius, 2003: 99) because of the terrifying effect it had. Its “daughters” included not only malitia (malice, ill will), rancor (resentment), and desperatio (presumptuous certainty that nothing—not even God—could provide salvation), but also a list of minor sins more concerned with the immediate need to escape the situation, like verbositas (garrulity), curiositas (nosiness) and lack of concentration (Sultana, 2019). The moral implications of this would even extend to after the demon left and the monks rushed into action—for example by helping the poor—in effect, doing the right thing, but for the wrong reasons (Daly, 2007). During the late Middle Ages, the logic was gradually dissociated from monastic practice, but its typical expressions were still taken to include restlessness, verbosity, and unregulated curiosity (Rosenberg, 2008). From around the 17th century, it even had a name: busy idleness—the tendency of people to engage in trivial matters disguised as busyness. In a footnote to his treatment of boredom in Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant (1996) demonstrates this misconstruction by referring to the appetite for ephemeral literature that he finds among his contemporaries. Such reading, he claims, “is done not for the sake of self-cultivation, but rather for enjoyment; so that readers’ heads always stay empty, and there is no fear of overeating, because they give to their busy idleness the aspect of work, and pretend to themselves a meritorious use of time.” Kant even goes so far as to suggest that acting on this impulse, rather than engage in meaningful activities, may lead to suicide, like it is the case with the “English [who] hang themselves in order to while their time away” (p. 134). With the rise of unproductiveness as a high vice of the 18th century, the problem of improperly directed activity became a moral issue to be reckoned with, not because the activities were intrinsically useless, but because they came to signify the misapplication of human energy (Rabinbach, 1992). Interestingly, a similar logic is at play in the culture critical treatments of boredom in the early 20th century (Kendall, 2018). However, here it emerges in an obverse manner, now highlighting (a specific kind of) boredom as occupying the moral high ground. Although its focus is on authenticity, rather than productivity, this discourse, and the normative injunction that it represents, is not far removed from the suggestion in the recent psychology literature of boredom as a beneficial psychological impulse (Danckert and Eastwood, 2020), laudable for its motivational capacities (Elpidorou, 2020) and for its capacity to make us more creative, innovative and productive (Zomorodi, 2017). For example, Siegfried Kracauer separates the shallow experiences of “vulgar” boredom, priming “little shopgirls” (p. 331) to seek out new forms of leisure activities, from a kind of “extraordinary, radical boredom” which might interrupt this perpetual feedback loop. Heidegger (1995) distinguishes between several levels separating the vulgar boredom of the masses from a deeper version—what he termed “profound boredom”—meant to qualify as an authentic source of self-reflection to . . . well, Schwabian philosophers. Most recently, Fisher’s (2014) statement that even though “the boring is ubiquitous . . . no one is bored” is a contemporary variation of the same logic: in an age of compulsive communication, where the “intensive, 24-7 environment of capitalist cyberspace” has replaced classical boredom “with a seamless flow of low-level stimulus,” the hyperactive, but shallow boredom of digital networks has eclipsed the possibility of any profound phenomenological experience associated with boredom (Kendall, 2018). The boring is everywhere, yet with all the improperly directed activity, no one ever has time to be really bored.
Reconnecting the current trend in psychology literature on boredom with its cultural historical roots has a number of interesting implications, also for the direction that we might see studies of boredom as a social and organizational phenomenon take. First, although the notion of boredom as such emerges out of a religious context, the moral character that it has transcends religion. The injunction, reflected in the contemporary popular literature on the subject, to make the most of boredom and not squander the opportunity it represents, is connected to a long tradition of theorizing how boredom affects moral conduct. In other words, we may take boredom to signal a character failure, or understand it as an exhortation for reflective consciousness to seek or create more meaningful circumstances for itself. Ultimately however, as a social and organizational phenomenon, it is connected with the meaningfulness of self-constitution from the perspective of what Korsgaard (1996) has called our “practical identity”: “a description under which you value yourself, a description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking” (p. 100). Rather than simply as a state of mind, we should study boredom also in terms of how it binds people in social contexts, including the grounds of authority from which it emerges and the psychological mechanisms that it enforces. This question is an historical one, since it reveals the different organizational circumstances under which boredom emerges as a moral construct.
However, second, it is also very much a contemporary question, because as we have seen, the moralistic mechanisms of boredom, and the way they are released, include meanings which owe more to their contribution to the avoidance of boredom, than they do to the quality of social interaction. In other words, to complement the psychological study of what boredom is as an emotional construct, or how people are more or less prone to it, we need more studies of the social reality that boredom produces and the kind of activities this entails. This goes for exploring the distinction between activity and productivity produced by the moral injunction in boredom, to better understand the structures that it produces or reproduces in social and organizational contexts. But it also goes for understanding better the virulent, affective force of boredom and how it contributes to contemporary social pathology—like why fake news and conspiracy theories during the pandemic have become “more psychologically pleasing and convenient [than reality]” (Ferreira, 2020) or why boredom during the pandemic should be viewed as a potential threat to the efficacy of pandemic containment measures (Boylan et al., 2021; Martarelli and Wolff, 2020). In lieu of the boredom pandemic, Donald Roy may have been wrong. Boredom was never gentled to the harmlessness of a kitten; it is more similar to an infectious virus than we like to think.
