Alan Caruba thought boredom was very bad. He disliked it so much he got an entire month, July, to be designated “National Anti-Boredom Month.” But why does boredom get such a bad rap? 

Start with the Romans, says Peter Toohey. He’s a classics professor at the University of Calgary. 

“Seneca,” he says, “thought it was a disgusting emotion.” 

Toohey quotes the Roman statesman in the book, Boredom: A Lively History: “All things pass that they may return. I do nothing new, I see nothing new. Sometimes this makes me seasick/nauseous.” 

Early conceptions of boredom made it out to be physically repulsive. “You’ll do anything to get away from it,” Toohey says. 

Today the link between boredom and disgust runs strong in advertising. You can buy a Subaru to cure the boredom you caught after “binge-watching everything.” You can avoid the disgusting blobs at boring restaurants and head on over to Chuck E. Cheese’s. Or you can literally get rid of the bad taste of boredom with a few Tic-Tacs. 

Boredom got uglier after the Romans. Christian monks in the Egyptian desert started to experience “acedia,” a “lack of care” for God and the monastic calling. As Mariusz Finkielsztein, a sociology professor at Collegium Civitas in Warsaw, writes, “Those infected with acedia felt disgust for their chosen way of life in general and, most importantly, for all spiritual matters.”

A boredom infection was no laughing matter. One monk called it “the noonday demon.” 

First this demon makes the sun appear sluggish and immobile, just as if the length of the day were fifty hours. Then it causes the hermit to look continually at the windows and forces him to step out of his cell and to gaze at the sun… the demon makes him dislike his place, his life itself, and the work of his hands.

Modern ads stage this demon front and center. Boredom sits on a bus with us as we try Starbursts. It haunts our waiting rooms and airplanes, places that it makes us dislike (unless we drink Vitaminwater). The noonday demon even plagues our computer browsers until Eric André destroys and buries it with an ax (watch out, Chrome). 

“Boredom in the capitalist narrative is a villain,” Finkielsztein writes, “the main obstacle to human satisfaction and ultimate bliss.” 

Corporations fashion boredom just like the desert monks—a disgusting demon to be avoided or slain. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. 

But what makes us hate boredom? James Danckert, a psychology professor at the University of Waterloo, thinks it all has to do with agency. 

“Boredom is a motivational state, a desire to do something,” he says. “When you’re bored you want to be doing something, you need to be doing something, it’s just, the currently available options don’t appeal. They don’t seem like they’re going to be meaningful or purposeful to you.”

“You’re kind of stuck,” he explains. “You’ve got this desire, but you don’t know where to put it, you don’t know how to satisfy it.”

He calls it the “conundrum of boredom.”

“Boredom in the capitalist narrative is a villain, the main obstacle to human satisfaction and ultimate bliss.” 

Those same ads that portray boredom as evil also present solutions to the conundrum. Don’t know where to put your desire? Subaru knows (“the new, fast-acting Impreza”). 

They offer what boredom takes away, what Danckert calls “that desire to feel like you’re in control of your goals and how you go about pursuing those goals.” Through its car, Subaru claims to satisfy both desires: Drivers can fulfill one goal, singing karaoke with friends (a possible side effect of the boredom-curing Impreza), and enjoy power-steering control over the means to completing all their other goals, however many miles away. 

In other words, these companies have realized the marketing power of boredom. They’re not just selling cars and candy. They’re selling agency, the boredom slayer. 

They’re also giving consumers a target to channel boredom hatred. “Boredom may be particularly threatening,” Danckert and co-author John D. Eastwood write, “because it saps the capacity for self-determination without indicating a clear, oppressive force responsible for our plight. In this way of thinking boredom becomes ‘rage spread thin’.” We detest boredom in part because it appears faceless. No bag to punch. Companies are happy to give boredom a face. They identify its source (not having a fun drink, fresh breath, or fast browser) and concentrate our “rage spread thin,” kindly showing us how to expel it (see Eric André with ax). 

Finkielsztein identifies a few advertising tropes that companies deploy to push products through boredom. 

One is the “solution by novelty,” the idea that we can defeat boredom by buying new stuff. “Same is boring,” the shoe company Merrell tells us. If we simply try something new like trail running (and buy something new like Merrell’s trail-running shoes), our lives will cease to be boring. 

But boredom does more than just provide companies with marketing scripts. For some, it directly facilitates overconsumption. People who experience “trait boredom,” for example, have a “personality-based tendency to feel bored frequently and intensely.” They make ideal customers.

“People who are highly boredom-prone are prone to consumerist tendencies,” Danckert says. “So there’s data out there, the Moynihan work, showing that you’ll consume more foods, and you’ll consume more sugary, sweet foods than you will good foods. There’s work out there about online shopping and boredom, so people who are more bored will tend to shop more.” 

They “click the boredom away.” 

But even if you’re not boredom-prone, Danckert says, you are not safe from boredom-spurred consumption. Simply walk into an airport: 

“So, Heidegger, an existential philosopher, talks about three different types of boredom, and one of them is a boredom that really emphasizes time, that you’re in a train station waiting for a train to come, and you’ve got nothing to do, and that’s boring.”

The German would have had a field day at LAX. 

“They’ve filled that boredom time with basically a shopping mall,” Danckert says. 

“People who are highly boredom-prone are prone to consumerist tendencies. So there’s data out there . . . showing that you’ll consume more foods, and you’ll consume more sugary, sweet foods than you will good foods. There’s work out there about online shopping and boredom, so people who are more bored will tend to shop more.” 

“You get into the waiting area, the lounge area, and you either sit in a really bland chair at the gate waiting to get onto your plane, or you wander up and down with all sorts of restaurants and shops and things… Who plans that trip and thinks, ‘I’ve got some stuff I’m gonna buy at the airport?’ I mean, it’s ridiculous, right?”

“In those kinds of senses,” Danckert says, “capitalism can profit from boredom because people will unthinkingly buy things to satisfy that down time, that waiting time.”

So, to recap, boredom is bad. It feels bad psychologically, and it’s painted as a bad thing to experience. It may as well be a crime.

Companies recognize and promote boredom’s negative reputation while profiting off our efforts to solve it. 

“The capitalist system,” Finkielsztein writes, “produces boredom in industrial amounts as its basic fuel and driving force. This constitutes the basic paradox of consumer capitalism—it gets power from the very thing it vilifies.”

The Boring Institute’s most popular work was its annual “Most Boring Celebrities” list. Winners included Michael Jackson (1984), Joan Rivers (1986), and Bill Cosby (1988). Caruba soon began including politicians in the contest as well. In 1993, Jerry Brown took home the bronze following his failed presidential bid, Woody Allen took silver, and the British Royal Family took gold. 

The success of Caruba’s lists reveals the extent to which being “boring” is seen as a sticky personal trait. But boredom has always been made out to be an individual sport. 

Acedia reflected a personal failure to maintain one’s devotion to God. Boredom was a sin to be avoided. Been seeing the noonday demon around your monastic cell? Slay it with repentance. 

As they moved beyond the monastery over the next millennium, boredom-esque expressions retained such individuated negativity. By the 17th century, people were using the French, “ennui,” to describe a “draining listlessness.” Ennui drew associations with deviant behavior, like drunkenness and masturbation. A 19th-century article in a Mississippi newspaper argued that it led to “indiscriminate novel-reading, flirtation, and scandal.”

Boredom was shameful and risky, a precursor to all the ills Caruba would decry centuries later. 

The philosopher Blaise Pascal saw ennui as a human being’s baseline disposition. People sought diversions and distractions to counteract such natural boredom, but that emptiness, he believed, could only be filled sustainably by God. Ennui, like acedia, was a personal affliction that could be remedied through the individual action of prayer. 

For Protestants, at least according to Max Weber, individual hard work was another remedy. Weber argued that their interest in predestination-proving productivity contributed to the rise of industrial capitalism. The founders of American capitalism, he believed, felt a divine calling to eschew idle hands (the devil’s playthings!) and stamp their ticket to heaven through tireless entrepreneurialism. Here was a call to action, to work. 

Boredom played a role too. Weber wrote that “people filled with the spirit of capitalism” had grown increasingly “indifferent, if not hostile, to the Church” because it was a snoozefest compared to the business world. “The thought of the pious boredom of paradise has little attraction for their active natures,” he wrote of capitalists. “Religion appears to them as a means of drawing people away from labour in this world.”

In his understanding of humanity’s attempts to solve for boredom, Weber had turned Pascal on his head (and over in his grave): God was the boring distraction; work was the solution. 

Whichever direction the arrow flew, boredom maintained an individualist gloss. If you felt boredom, it reflected on your shortcomings, your inability to kneel in church or work the field.  

Today, boredom continues to be framed as an individual problem. Even if many have questioned the validity of Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis, most would agree that we now live in a work-obsessed society. That obsession makes boredom a you problem rather than an us problem. 

“There is this idea,” says Andreas Elpidorou, a philosophy professor at the University of Louisville, “that we ought to be productive. Productivity is a sign of being a good agent… If you’re bored it means you’re not engaged. So there is this moral connotation as well.”

Bored? Simply engage more. Produce more. 

But the phenomenon’s ugly cloak of individuality runs thicker than productivity. 

“It’s often easy to slip from the experience of boredom to a character fault,” Elpidorou explains. “If the other people aren’t bored, and if I’m bored, is it something with me? Am I deficient in some way?” Boredom gains social currency from individualization and comparison. 

There is perhaps no greater insult than to be called “boring,” and corporations love to play into our corresponding fear. 

“Trail race runners aren’t boring,” the Merrell ad narrator reminds us amid a montage of fit frolicking athletes. If you buy some new shoes, you won’t be boring either. 

And here we see what Finkielsztein calls the “solution by positional goods/social status.” People who experience boredom, the story goes, are themselves boring. Nobody wants to be boring, and the way to avoid such a label is to buy, buy, buy. 

“Ads offer luxury goods,” he writes, “which are to provide one with the mark of exceptionality and interestingness that would melt boredom out of one’s life altogether.” 

So, after getting dumped by his girlfriend for being “a little boring,” Jack goes online to the Citi Private Pass page, which gives him VIP access to art galleries (Marilyn!), cooking classes (Giada!), and concerts (Alicia!). He snaps a pic with Alicia Keys, looking very cool in a leather jacket. 

“Who’s boring now?” Jack ends the commercial with gusto. 

Our competition to be the least boring carries on, financed by Citibank. 

In helping us “melt boredom” out of our lives, corporations cultivate a shared identity of adventure-seeking, anti-boredom consumers. They tell each one of us that we can experience less boredom and be less boring by doing (buying) less boring things. 

“Factors such as grueling and meaningless labor, exploitation, under- or un-employment, political disenfranchisement, endless bureaucratic tasks, austerity policies, and societal stagnation . . . can all fuel or intensify feelings of boredom precisely because they contribute to a felt divergence between cognitive expectations and reality.”

But the individualization of boredom, Finkielsztein argues, is a trick. Boredom is experienced by the individual, sure, but that experience is a direct consequence of the individual’s relationships to the world around them. 

“Boredom,” he writes, “is strictly relational and is constructed in the process of interaction between social actors.” Finkielsztein believes this social dimension is missing from current conversations on boredom, especially those in the field of psychology. 

“This is dangerous,” he says, “because we focus on the individual and we neglect the fact that maybe there are some problems with the systems.” 

It’s not just that companies are capitalizing off their portrayal of boredom as an individual problem. It’s also that we may be facilitating that result by studying and talking about boredom as an individual problem. 

We must consider, Finkielsztein says, that the way we experience boredom today “is not natural.”

“This is not perfect. If we are so self-focused like in psychology… we can miss the point that maybe we should work on the system as well.” 

The conundrum of boredom, he suggests, is not only a personal conundrum; it’s a systemic conundrum. 

When Jack or his ex-girlfriend experience boredom, we shouldn’t just look at Jack. We should look at the social and economic systems around Jack. We should look at the powerful groups that maintain a status quo of boredom. 

We should look at Citibank. 

Or PNC Bank. In March 2024, PNC launched its “Brilliantly Boring” marketing campaign. The first TV spot opens with a guy walking through perhaps the most boring place on Earth, the DMV. 

“You know what’s brilliant?” he says. “Boring.” 

“Think about it. Boring is the unsung catalyst for bold. What straps bold to a rocket and hurtles it into space? Boring does.” 

From a beach, he continues: “Boring makes vacations happen, early retirements possible, and startups start up because it’s smart, dependable, and steady, all words you want from your bank.” 

If the ad is funny, it’s because we hate boredom. PNC is making fun of itself for being boring and simultaneously appropriating boredom as a positive force responsible for its financial success. 

“For nearly 160 years,” the ad concludes, “PNC Bank has had one goal, to be brilliantly boring with your money so you can be happily fulfilled with your life, which is pretty un-boring, if you think about it. Thank you, boring.” 

The ad fails to thank some of the less boring money management practices PNC bank has participated in. Securities fraud? Pretty un-boring. Mountaintop removal mining? Talk about an unsung catalyst for bold.

The ad contains an even darker irony, though. That “brilliant” boredom underlying PNC’s success has likely created more boredom than it has eliminated. 

There is a link, Elpidorou contends, between our contemporary experiences of boredom and our free market systems. 

He applies the work of Jens Beckert, who has chronicled the rise and fall of neoliberalism’s “promissory legitimacy.” In the West, neoliberalism gained credibility by promising “increased autonomy and freedom of choice.” Under a system of free enterprise, a modernized welfare state would “lead to a more inclusive and equitable society and labor market.” Neoliberalism promised good times to come. 

For many, those times never came. Instead, they got more unemployment, wealth disparity, and instability. They got financial crises and environmental catastrophes. They got laid off and evicted. 

The contrast between expectations and results has produced, among other things, a strong foundation for boredom. Whether felt in an Ethiopian city or the New Mexican countryside, boredom can be tied to a painful mismatch between desires for neoliberalism’s promised prosperity and limited economic opportunities on the ground. 

“Factors such as grueling and meaningless labor, exploitation, under- or un-employment, political disenfranchisement, endless bureaucratic tasks, austerity policies, and societal stagnation,” Elpidorou writes, “can all fuel or intensify feelings of boredom precisely because they contribute to a felt divergence between cognitive expectations and reality.”

Those vacations, retirements, and startups that PNC Bank presents as standard fare are not a reality for the groups who have suffered because of deregulation and privatization. 

Their reality? For one thing, boring jobs. David Graeber’s 2013 essay on “Bullshit Jobs” presented a thesis that so many workers already knew. They had been put into meaningless jobs as receptionists, telemarketers, or middle managers, and yet also told by society to derive meaning from that labor. Graeber writes that this impossible bind incites “profound psychological violence.”

Finkielsztein sees the proliferation of bullshit jobs as evidence of modern boredom’s underlying power dynamics. Employers seek to project power by forcing employees to perform meaningless tasks like going to Starbucks. 

“This is the meaning of being an employer,” he says. “So you can avoid boring stuff.”

Inundating workers with boredom keeps them busy and makes them tired, reducing their ability to imagine alternate labor arrangements. After a long day, the limited bandwidth they have leftover gets sucked up into anti-boredom products. They open their phones, Finkielsztein writes, to block out “the oppressive reality of their lives, the oppression of boredom included.”

“Boredom becomes the new opiate of the people,” he continues, “whose listless part makes itself apparent in passivity and whose restless part is directed towards new entertainments and consumer goals in order to leave no mental room for reflection over the social organization of the capitalist system.”

As they infuse work time with boredom tasks and leisure time with anti-boredom salves, corporations leave people with no space to rest and reflect.  

“Boredom becomes the new opiate of the people whose listless part makes itself apparent in passivity and whose restless part is directed towards new entertainments and consumer goals in order to leave no mental room for reflection over the social organization of the capitalist system.”

Boredom can play an even more explicit role in employer-employee power relations. In Japan, for example, some companies create so-called “banishment rooms.” Employers exile workers to these rooms (think Milton in “Office Space”) and bombard them with boring tasks until they quit, thereby losing the benefits they would have kept if fired.

Sony calls them “Career Design Rooms.” 

“I don’t want to do something openly because there are some laws,” Finkielsztein says, “so I do it through boredom. I bore you to death.”

Boredom has become an end-run around the law, a mechanism through which companies can do more than sell stuff. They can delegate boredom to wield social control. 

The social weaponization of boredom manifests beyond cubicle walls. Homeless people in Bucharest are denied access to shopping malls and fast-food chains. Refugees are confined to detention centers where their agency is replaced by boredom, a process Finkielsztein and co-author Izabela Wagner call “strategic boredom.” In these cases, the distribution of boredom is patently unequal, typically following lines of socio-economic status. 

But the experience of boredom itself may also be unequal. “One of the refrains you often encounter in boredom literature,” Elpidorou says, “is this idea that boredom is a luxury.” 

Many have seen boredom as something for the elites. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that “while the lower classes are engaged in a ceaseless struggle with need, in other words with pain, the upper carry on a constant and often desperate battle with boredom.” Søren Kierkegaard was more direct: “Those who bore others are the plebians… those who bore themselves are the chosen ones, the nobility.”

Elpidorou has questioned that idea of boredom-as-luxury. In a survey of existing empirical research, he proposes three ways in which poverty and boredom may interact. 

First, being poor may make it more likely someone will experience boredom. Poverty may incite boredom by placing constraints on freedom, by overburdening attention and cognitive capacities, or by excluding people from meaningful work or social activity. 

“We’re all affected by boredom. but we’re not all affected equally by boredom.”

Second, Elpidorou predicts that boredom itself will be a worse experience for members of low-SES groups. Their more frequent states of boredom will trigger other negative feelings, like stress, a lack of control, or perceived meaninglessness, that are exacerbated by their material conditions.

Third, limited resources may make it more difficult to cope with boredom. Those with fewer “opportunities for alternative engagement” will have a harder time dealing with it. Someone’s capacity to get rid of boredom will reflect how much money and time they have for hobbies and travel, the gym and the zoo.

“There is this double penalty, if you may, that one may be asked to pay,” Elpidorou says. “Not just the frequency or intensity but also the inability to deal with boredom effectively.”

He emphasizes the need for more psychological and sociological studies to back up these hypothesized connections. Such work will confirm, he believes, that social class and power have significant implications for both the distribution and experience of boredom. 

“We’re all affected by boredom,” Elpidorou concludes, “but we’re not all affected equally by boredom.”

Whereas in Kierkegaard’s time boredom was thought to be something reserved for the elites, now the elites reserve the ability to push boredom onto lower classes while constraining their capacity to relieve it. 

Boredom stories are injustice stories.  

While he was a one-man show in many regards, Alan Caruba was not the only person to think we had reached unprecedented levels of boredom. 

These days, Finkielsztein agrees, although unlike Caruba he’s not trying to sell you a book on how to spot boredom. 

He points to the internet and social media as one source of boredom’s growth. We’re more connected than ever, yes, but we face “over-choice,” too much information, stimulation, and repetition—a bunch of noise. “Anything and everything, all of the time.”

This constant overload hamstrings our ability to concentrate, making us simultaneously hungrier for content and less capable of digesting it meaningfully. 

Caruba was right: Boredom may very well be one of the country’s most prevalent maladies. 

Peter Toohey, however, pushes back on the idea of a “boredom epidemic.” “It’s pretty arrogant,” he says, “to say we’re so special that boredom characterizes our age.” And this is coming from a man who does have a boredom book to sell! 

Toohey concedes that it might be true we live in an age particularly interested in the experience of boredom, whether or not it is in fact felt more frequently than when Seneca got seasick. 

Caruba was wrong: Boredom is actually one of the country’s least ignored maladies. 

Epidemic or not, one thing is clear: Boredom is useful. 

It is useful for corporations. They use boredom as bait to catch consumers who will do anything to avoid it. They use boredom as a sword to keep employees in their place or kick them out. They use boredom as a veil to hide the consumer models, financial systems, and labor arrangements that maximize profits.

The status quo, in other words, is boring by design. Boredom does not just maintain the status quo. It is the status quo. 

But boredom may also be useful for those interested in change. 

Toohey believes boredom is a “good Darwinian habit.” “It pushes them away from the rut,” he says, “and it becomes a very useful thing that drives you on to do other things.” Perhaps something other than buying a Subaru. 

The status quo, in other words, is boring by design. Boredom does not just maintain the status quo. It is the status quo. 

Elpidorou has used the image of a “quiet alarm” to describe boredom’s positive value. Boredom can signal that what we are doing at that moment is not meaningful. It motivates us to engage in meaning creation. 

Boredom doesn’t have to be an opiate. It can be a smelling salt.

And for all his persuasive pessimism on the role boredom plays in facilitating consumer capitalism, even Finkielsztein sees boredom as part of the escape route. 

“I believe [boredom] is more revolutionary than counterrevolutionary,” he says. Unlike apathy, it contains a sense of restlessness that might move people to act against the system. 

“Consumers bored with yet another satisfied desire,” he writes, “can question the entire idea of desire under capitalism and the imperative of its fulfillment and decide to cease the constant transition between the wish and its satisfaction.”

So, when you get bored, check TikTok, and see footage of this year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, don’t start an institute. Don’t make lists of boring celebrities. Find your inner buddha and extinguish your “desire for desires.”

Or, if that sounds like too much work, Toohey’s advice is lighter: Consider the boredom. 

“That’s my takeaway,” he says. “Listen to the boredom seriously!”