Manufactured Boredom

[F]law School Episode 5: The Business of Boredom

Producing Boredom for Profit

Nelson Reed

October 26, 2024

Summary:

In this episode of [F]law School, hosts Jessenia Class and Thy Luong explore the corporate construction and manipulation of boredom with special guest Nelson Reed. They explore how companies have turned boredom into a profit center by pushing myths about why feeling bored is our fault and readily cured by purchasing their products. Get ready for a fascinating discussion about the business of boredom.

Guest Bio:

Nelson Reed is a student at Harvard Law School in the Class of 2025. He is also a graduate of Yale University. He is passively looking for bandmates.  

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Episode Transcript

 (This transcript was created by an automated process and contains errors.)

Jessenia Hey everyone. Welcome to Flaw School, a podcast that explores the flaws in our legal system. We’re today’s hosts to send your class and Thy Luong, and we’re so excited to be hosting today’s episode. 

Thy Every two weeks, we interview law students to uncover the role of corporate actors in producing many of our most urgent social problems and the troubling   tale of corporate actors slipping, bending, capturing, and breaking the law in their favor. In this episode, we’ll be discussing the corporate capture of boredom. 

Jessenia Today, we’re joined by Nelson Reid. Welcome to law school, Nelson. Class is in session. 

Nelson Thanks for having me. Really happy to be here. 

Jessenia And we’re happy to have you. So we’d love to start out by first asking you a bit about yourself and what inspired you to write about boredom. 

Nelson Sure. So, yeah, I’m a third year law student at Harvard Law School. I’m from Washington, D.C., originally. And I guess what inspired me originally to write about boredom was a Super Bowl commercial. I was watching the Super Bowl last year and there was a commercial about couch potatoes or it was, I think it a TV commercial or something, and it had couch potatoes as sort of the main device like human forms of couch potatoes. So kind of making fun of our own collective state of vegetation. And so that got me thinking where else do we see narratives of boredom in advertising? At the time, I was also starting to take a course at Harvard with Professor Hanson about corporations. And he was talking a lot about the difference between dispositionalism and situationalism, sort of stick versus ball imagery and sort of do you have a choice to do things or is your environment very much the reason you’re doing something? So I was trying to think about that with respect to boredom, are we are we choosing individually to be bored or are we bored because of the circumstances we find ourselves in? And that led to this sweeping kind of survey of of boredom. 

Jessenia Yeah. So in the article, your sweeping survey of boredom kind of breaks down to three different categories. So you say that boredom is often thought of as bad as individuals and as equally experience. And in saying that, you cite some philosophy bigwigs like Weber, Heidegger, Kierkegaard  to make those claims. But for those of us who didn’t major in philosophy in undergrad and that’s me. Could you give us an overview of what you mean when you frame boredom as belonging in these three buckets? 

Nelson Sure. And I also did not major in philosophy in college. So this is a layman’s sort of investigation into some of this philosophy. But the three buckets that I sort of identify are that boredom is bad. Boredom is individual or individualized. And boredom is equal or not equal, because I think these three buckets are actually narratives. They’re myths that are sort of pushed by different companies and different groups trying to sell boredom in different ways. But I can break it down. The first, so the idea that boredom is bad and we know this, you know, we feel this every day, maybe that boredom is not fun. It’s it’s distasteful. It’s makes us feel uneasy. And corporations do a really good job reminding us about how bad boredom is or how bad we should think it is. So they often pair this reminder of boredom being bad with some sort of product to sell. So in commercials, you know, they’ll tell us to buy shoes or a car or even Tic Tacs to eliminate the boredom that we’re feeling. So that’s boredom being bad. ]. 

Nelson The second and I should say, I mean, you mentioned some of those philosophers and there’s some history I include in the piece. Boredom being bad has been with us forever. There are you know, there’s a philosopher from Ancient Times, Seneca, who described boredom as a form of nausea. So seasickness and boredom has been affecting monks in the wilderness and others ever since and in a decidedly negative way. Now, the second boredom is is individual. This is the second kind of category. So even if boredom is felt by everyone, boredom has largely been portrayed as an individual experience. And because boredom and being boring is seen as bad, it’s portrayed as an individual shortcoming. So if I’m bored or if even worse, I’m boring, something must be wrong with me. But this individualization of boredom, I think, and a few other philosophers and psychologists that I was able to interview, but that’s only because or in large part because of our relationship to other people, to society, to the collective. And this social component of boredom, this interaction is a model, is what it’s called, is often missing from the conversation. So we talk too much about boredom as a you problem, not a we problem. And actually, I think it’s missing by design. It’s very hard to resist the language that corporations dump on us about boredom being individual. And this sort of corporate spiel is deployed. It’s deploying some tricky sort of scale shifting. So there’s individual experience of boredom being sold through this veil of collective anti boredom identity. And I’m getting a little bit out of control here in my rambling, but that’s the second category. And then the third is that boredom is equal. So boredom is not just a narrative device for, you know, a shoe company. It’s also, I think, a byproduct and a fuel for free market capitalism. So we have neoliberal policies, deregulation that has led to widespread wealth disparities. And this leads to a big contrast between the promises of a free market state and the realities for many of economic instability. And that serves as a foundation for widespread boredom. And you see that in the form of bullshit jobs, B.S. jobs. So there’s Graeber  is this guy who’s written a lot about everyday workers having to go through boring tasks. And there’s just this flood of of meaningless, seemingly meaningless jobs. There’s other ways in which boredom is is used to control people socially. I talk a bit about banish rooms. We can talk more about that. Yeah. And so in a sense, the goal with my piece is to frame boredom as the center of an injustice story or many injustice stories. So those are the three categories. 

ThyI found your explanation of the history of boredom from Caruba to to religious development super fascinating. How has boredom developed historically? 

Nelson So I also came at this from a historical angle. I was able to meet with and interview, Peter Toohey, who is a classics professor and he has written a history on boredom. And in it he describes one of the earliest written iterations of boredom or something like boredom, which came from Seneca, who was a Roman statesman who wrote of boredom as this sort of seasickness or nausea. So we have very early on this very negative understanding of boredom and an individual understanding of boredom as well. So that’s one of the early iterations of boredom, and it’s obviously a bad thing. A bit later, there were these monks in Egypt in the desert who described the phenomenon of acedia, which is also a form of boredom or listlessness, where you’re feeling distant from your calling to God. And this is also seen as an individual shortcoming. So if you weren’t practicing your monastic calling in the best way, then you would experience acedia, you would be bored and that would be bad. So we get early on this kind of negative portrayal of boredom and this individual portrayal of boredom. And it continues, I mean, you know, into modernity. So you mentioned ennui, the French word that was describing a sort of draining listlessness and that was associated with a lot of other forms of deviancy. So drunkenness, masturbation, even novel reading, which, for a time, people thought as dangerous. This was all kind of maybe byproducts of being bored. So we have boredom as a negative experience and an individual experience later on. And obviously we think poorly about boredom. We’re not happy to be bored, and we’re still considering boredom as a very individualized experience. And that’s one that is sold to us in this corporate speak or this advertising language that I delve into. It’s your fault that you’re bored and it’s your prerogative to fix that situation by buying something. And just the final note on the history piece, I start the piece and end the piece with this Alan Caruba, who in the 80s, in 1984, founded the Boring Institute in response to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. And he was maybe the biggest hater on boredom  at the time. And he made a whole kind of cottage industry out of anti-boredom. He was selling books. He was getting July named the Anti-Boredom Month, which it still is, I guess, which is not fun for people born in July like myself. And he was just sort of hating on boredom and it was popular, a lot of people loved his lists of the most boring celebrities or politicians. And so he kind of hit he struck a chord with the public who was collectively very bored. And I, I still think a lot of people experienced boredom today. Some people think we’re more bored than ever. I don’t think that’s true. I think we talk about boredom maybe more than ever. But yeah, we can get into that.

Jessenia So it sounds like you did a deep dive in this article and that people have been boredom haters since the world has started. And you say that corporations have grabbed on to that kind of language. And all throughout your article you describe that they employed it in ads and marketing to try and increase profits by telling people, “Hey, buy our products. It will cure your boredom or will make you less boring!” 

Nelson Yeah. We are told that boredom is something that can be solved for through consumption. And I imagine this feels I hope this feels accurate with our listeners who have bought things or consumed content in order to cure a boring Sunday afternoon or whatever.

Thy But what are the mechanics of how corporations actually do this? You have a great line in your piece that gets at this a bit, you say. “In other words, these companies have realized the marketing power of boredom. They’re not just selling cars or candy. They’re selling agencey, the boredom, slayer.” Can you say more here? What are some techniques that companies use to convince us that boredom is bad? 

Nelson Yeah. So I think the boredom slayer is a good image to frame this. There’s a psychologist who I was able to speak with,James Danckert from the University of Waterloo, and he talks about boredom as an agency problem. So basically, when we’re bored, we want to do something or we even need to do something. But the current options don’t appeal. So we have, in a sense, lost our agency or we feel we have lost our agency. We have this desire, but we don’t know where to put it. So companies know exactly where you should put that desire. You should put that desire into their products, cars, shoes, whatever. They’re giving us something to channel our agency into. They’re giving us a sort of sword that we can use to kill boredom, but they’re also giving us a target itself. They’re telling us that the reason we are feeling this unease is the boredom we’re feeling as a result of the lack of their product. Now, for a little while, but it’s not going to solve deeper feelings of boredom or unease. So in other words, the sword they’re offering is not very strong. But also, I think they’ve given us the wrong target sometimes. So I might not be feeling unease because I don’t have new running shoes. I might be feeling unease because I’m disconnected from my community or I’m tired of reading about contracts or whatever. So companies try to sell us agency, they try to sell us control and independence. They do this in ways that are removed from boredom as well. Boredom is not unique in the corporate attempt to sell agency. But I’m not convinced that agency can be bought or sold. 

Jessenia You know, that resonates with me. But some other people might read this article and think, Wait, I do think boredom is bad and boredom does show off my inherent flaws. Maybe I am boring. Maybe people feel that way. Why is it a problem for corporations to zoom in on this feeling and sell me or others who might feel that way a product to make it go away? 

Nelson So I would be less critical if corporations make commercials saying, “Hey, you shouldn’t be bored, go interact with your community or follow your passions” or something that didn’t involve selling me something. So in other words, I think it is good. It can be good to focus on boredom and on what is making us bored. But the problem is that many companies are being two faced. Right. They’re telling us boredom is bad and then claiming to sell us something that will make that boredom go away. But what they’re selling typically does not make boredom go away, or at least not sustainably. So most of the products being pushed will soon become boring again. So we’ll want to buy the new shoes or the new car because we’ve been tricked into thinking what we bought a year ago is now somehow boring and therefore bad. So this boredom narrative reinforces the corporate capture of our lives. I really think that boredom and boredom narratives bind us to the companies that are spewing them. So to avoid becoming boring or bored, we feel that we need to pay for all these things and experiences as if we ourselves don’t decide what constitutes boring or boredom. But the companies do. So I think what is dangerous is ceding control over our understandings of boredom and boring to companies. We might feel bored simply because the company has either told us explicitly that we are bored or because we’re consuming a product that the company has made to become boring by design soon after purchase. And I think you know it might be more complicated than that. Like our boredom might just have deeper roots in other things that we should focus on. So my my one of my points is that companies divert our anti-boredom energy away from more root causes, capitalist systems among them, towards superficial solutions like buying Tic Tacs or something. And that frustrates me and that honestly angers me. I think it’s a deceit and I think it comes at a big cost to us and frankly, makes us more bored in the long run. 

Thy I love that idea of boredom narratives, and especially as somebody who just graduated from high school, especially the student living and working in a generation where I feel guilty when I am unproductive. I feel like I actively work against being bored. You know, I hate it. Even though consistent research shows that it’s idle time where creativity and innovation really drives. So I want to hear your thoughts on this. Do you think boredom is inherently valuable? 

Nelson So yes and no. Boredom and free time are different, right? They often come together. I think it’s fair to think of boredom as a tool that signals to us when we need to find something more meaningful. So the combination of free time and boredom can lead to meaningful creation. We have free time. We feel boredom. We find something meaningful to conquer that boredom and fill the free time. So in that sense, boredom has some inherent value as both an individual and perhaps societal alarm clock of sorts. And I have to give credit to Andreas Elpidorou from University of Louisville for that metaphor. That’s his metaphor at this alarm clock. I think it’s really helpful. But beyond this sort of alarm clock value, I think it can get kind of tricky. I was able to interview Mariusz Finkielsztein, who’s a sociologist from the University of Warsaw, who writes and thinks a lot about boredom. And  he mentioned getting a lot of interviews at the beginning of the pandemic where people would ask him, you know, isn’t boredom super important? Isn’t the pandemic actually good in a way because we have this break to be bored and be creative? And his response was like, “No, we don’t need boredom. We need rest.” And those are two different things, right? And I think the idea that people at that time were trying to find a silver lining in a global pandemic, killing thousands of people, and they’re saying, well, yeah, but isn’t there something good about being bored? Actually, I think it speaks to how far we’ve come, how desperate we are for rest. You know, that we need rest more than anything. So talking about boredom and something that is good, I actually think it can be dangerous. I think talking about boredom as something good can be hijacked into convincing people that their boredom is this acceptable state. That’s not true. Boredom is awful. Boredom sucks. Having rest time and free time to create is. It’s good. That’s something else. And being bored is likely or maybe part of the creative process at some point. Yeah, I don’t in my article, spend a ton of time laying out these definitional distinctions, but I think they’re very important because there’s slippage that can lead to people being content with boredom or boring jobs and and that I reject. 

Thy You think my mental health needed to hear that? You also write a lot about how the irony of work exists in this space. In a work is often boring, but we’re excited to find meaning and fulfillment in it. It makes me think about how capitalism and boredom are related. So can you expand upon the relationship between capitalism and boredom? 

Nelson Yeah, I’ll do it my best. This is a it’s a big topic. I think boredom can be seen as a fuel of free market capitalism. So its fuel in the form of bullshit jobs. And so I’ve mentioned. But there’s this Graeber piece on B.S. Jobs where millions of people are working in these positions, where they’re not feeling fulfilled and they are laboring to sustain, to fuel the capitalist system. And that’s a form of social control that deploys boredom. And that’s very dangerous. And, you know, we are told all the time to find meaning in our work. And yet many people are forced into meaningless jobs. And that leads to intense psychological harm. Now, there are other ways that boredom is a byproduct as well as fuel of free market capitalism. So in the late 20th century, I think there are a lot of promises of prosperity and just hopeful futures that came out of this. These narratives surrounding deregulation and neoliberalism and free market capitalism. And while that was met, those promises were met for a few people. For many, their reality was something completely different. You know, they lost their jobs or they, you know, suffered economic instability in some way or got evicted. Like there’s just a big gap between the promises of free market capitalism and the realities on the ground for lots of people. And that has been shown to be a sort of foundation for boredom everywhere, not just in the states, across the world there are studies, you know, about people in Ethiopian cities who are suffering from boredom as a result of this discrepancy between what they expect or what they think they can accomplish or what they they can obtain in the system and what the, you know, the hard barriers that they face. So that’s where boredom is a sort of byproduct of our system. There are also more explicit ways in which boredom becomes a form of social control, a sort of tool to maintain the status quo. You get it. You know, if there’s there’s bullshit jobs and there are also bullshit positions within jobs where you are literally banished to banishment rooms. I think Sony calls them career design centers or something. And you’re put in this room kind of out to pasture and you are forced to do meaningless jobs, meaningless tasks, and then basically trying to force you to quit so they don’t have to pay, you know, your benefits or severance. So there is quite literally a boredom kind of tool for companies and corporate overlords to deploy. There’s also other things I mentioned briefly in the article about detention centers and how there’s this strategic boredom that is used to keep certain groups of people from, you know, moving up in the world or experiencing a base level of happiness. There are homeless communities who are unhoused communities who are removed from or barred entry to malls. You know, there’s lots of ways in which you can see people being denied their right to conquer boredom. And I do mentioned briefly in my piece how there’s theoretical work about how boredom itself manifests differently, perhaps among different socioeconomic groups. So there’s one philosopher, this Andreas Elpidorou, who I interviewed, who has theoretical work, where he talks about how people who are experiencing poverty might have it worse when they’re also feeling bored because they don’t have the leisure time that we have to handle the boredom. You know, they don’t have the money to buy things or buy experiences that might help them cope with extreme boredom that they face in their bullshit jobs. You know, they might not have the time to listen to a podcast or to make a podcast about boredom. And that limits their ability to cope with the widespread boredom that they face. 

Jessenia That was quite meta of you. And for those of us who want to be our own slayers, like I want to have the agency to satiate my own boredom. But I also don’t want to be putty in the hands of corporate actors. What do you recommend people do in that situation? How do we become less susceptible to marketing or employment situations that’s aimed at manipulating our boredom for profit? 

Nelson Yeah. So, I mean, maybe the easiest way is to become a Buddhist monk or something, honestly.  I think it’s really hard. And I struggled with this myself. I still do. I so I’m not claiming to have any answers, you know, that are going to change your life. I do think and this is probably the biggest point of the piece, we can focus on boredom a bit more. So will easy example. But will buying another pair of shoes or this, you know, concert ticket solve that boredom and maybe it will for a bit, but maybe, you know, it’ll just lead you to come back and get more things. And I understand that this comes off as a bit preachy, and that’s not my, Well, that’s part of my intention, maybe. But I do hope that people just think more about why they’re bored and and that might help them actually be less bored overall. Or I think perhaps one way to think about it is it is worth building up a resistance to the corporate speak or the corporate capture that is deployed through boredom. And that comes from knowing yourself, right? Knowing what makes you bored and how you effectively work through boredom. 

Thy Yeah. to sort of wrap things up. This article, reading this article initially really made me think about our collective phone addiction and how we prefer to mindlessly scroll in social media over being bored, which I believe you mentioned before too. So even if we’re cognizant of these habits, at the end of the day, I think it can really feel impossible as youth, as people of any age, really, to tangibly separate ourselves from these consumerist mindsets. What do you say to this? 

Nelson I say yes. Like, correct. No, I think this is really hard and a really good question, particularly for young people. But honestly, everyone’s on social media. My mom, you know, struggles with that, too. So I think everyone can think about this a bit more. And. I do have to give the caveat that I am not so present on social media, right? So I made the choice a few years ago to kind of remove myself a bit. I still have Facebook, cause Facebook marketplace, but in general I am less experienced perhaps in social media. And so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. But what I would say is that there has been a lot of coverage about how social media companies designed systems to capture and direct our attention. That is necessary coverage. I think there’s a lot of harm, especially to young people, especially to young women, about how social media can really hurt our self-esteem and our connections to others. So that is good research that should be spread and continued. And it relates to boredom. But I think it relates in the following way. So social media maximizes the negative elements of boredom while minimizing the positive elements. So, you scroll through, let’s say Twitter. And you’re looking for new content. You find new content. That content might even be quality content — might be good content, but it is immediately made boring by all the other content. So here Twitter says, Just keep scrolling for new content. So you are constantly feeling a low level dose of boredom. But you don’t get the positive aspect of boredom, which is that warning signal to look for something more meaningful. Now, if you are not being flooded with more content, I think you might be able to think to yourself, “Hey, maybe the next thing I’m scrolling to isn’t that thing that will have meaning and cure the boredom.” But the flood, the scrolling continues so we don’t have the chance to take advantage of Boredom’s warning. So I think social media companies are actually not that different from shoe companies or car companies and how they use boredom. They pretend to offer you boredom curating content, right? They pretend to give you something that will quench your thirst for meaning. In reality, they’re just giving you sugar water, right? They’re just giving you content that they know will make you more thirsty. And on this, I do want to recommend Mariusz Finkielsztein’s article on boredom as the subliminal mood of consumer capitalism. It was very important for me in my research, and he does a better job than I can do in sort of framing our consumer tendencies through boredom and this kind of endless cycle where we just want more content. 

Thy Yeah. And I think that’s a great place to end. That’s all we have time for today. Nelson, thank you so much for joining us on the floor. School We are happy to talk about boring things with you any day.  

Nelson Thank you so much. Thank you both for having me. I hope this hasn’t been too boring. 

Jessenia It was perfectly boring enough. I echo everything Thy said. 

Thy And thank you Jessenia for being a great co-host. 

Jessenia Right back at you. And if you’re interested in reading Nelson’s full article or learning more about the flaws in our legal system, check out The Flaw magazine at theflaw.org. 

Thy And if this episode didn’t bore you, make sure to check out the show notes, which is all the links we talked about. Subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also check out flawschool.org for more content. Thank you all for listening and looking forward to talking to you in the future. Class is dismissed.

Nelson Reed

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