LIE: We overcome boredom with entertainment

Lie:      We overcome boredom with entertainment.

Truth: Entertainment increases boredom.

In his book Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment, Richard Winter defines two kinds of boredom:

1  a temporary boredom provoked by a repetitive job

2  a longer-term and more permanent boredom in which there is nothing to do that one likes.[1]

This article is only about number two.

What boredom really is

We’ve all experienced it — that vague feeling of aimlessness, restlessness, perhaps in the late afternoon; in a word, the doldrums. We experience it as background noise, but don’t really know what it is. It’s an unpleasant feeling that we seek to either eliminate or mask with external stimuli. And the stimulus could be anything as long as it’s colorful, animated, rhythmic, funny or engrossing: TV, YouTube, mischief, porn, movies, games, books, food or all of the above. We’ll do anything to get rid of it.

The word boredom came into being only two or three hundred years ago and has only increased in use since. Surely boredom existed before, but why such an increase, and where does it come from?

First though, let’s make sure to define what we’re not talking about. Boredom is not:

• depression, though boredom can lead to it.
• grief — the feeling of loss of a loved one

Although boredom shares some of their characteristics, depression and grief require their own special attention and should not be confused with boredom. See also the article, Lie: Christians shouldn’t be discouraged.

To understand boredom we have to trace its roots. It may sound strange to our ears, but in the Middle Ages, when God and the spiritual world were widely accepted and all of life related to God and spirituality, in that day, they spoke of acedia, taken from:

a – the absence of
kedos – care

That is, the lack or absence of care — in a word: indifference.

The author, Richard Winter reminds us that boredom (acedia) is a deep and foundational sin:

Included in the list of the church fathers’ seven deadly sins is acedia. Some believed it to be the most deadly sin of all. Because it represented intellectual and spiritual indifference and lethargy . . . and the condition persists because the individual does nothing about it . . . Acedia was regarded by many of the hermits as the chief of all vices, from which many other sins would flow. He who suffered from it was overcome with weariness, dejection, dislike of everything and everybody around him, laziness and a sense of time passing very slowly; as a result, he usually made various attempts to distract himself or escape into sleep. Feeling indifferent to God, people and the world around him, he found little point to life.[2]

Boredom on steroids

Though boredom’s bane has plagued us for a very long time, the experience and its effects have only compounded in our day. We now live in a world of non-stop stimulations. People now constantly walk about with their phones in front of them: speaking, surfing, gaming, texting or reading. Many cannot bring themselves to look up and sometimes even injure themselves by their distractions.[3]

A study done in 2012 of 1000 mobile phone users found that 66% feared losing or being without their mobile phone. A new phobia has been born: nomophobia, the fear of losing or being without one’s phone.[4]

And so we are awash in non-stop advertising. Gleaning from Winter’s book again:

It is estimated that by the age of twenty many young people have seen well over one million commercials.[5]

Many don’t seem to realize it, but once it’s brought out into the open, it becomes quite self-evident – advertising is designed to create dissatisfaction and discontent. We become dissatisfied and discontent with our cars, our clothes, our house and our body as we compare them to what’s glamorized on the screen. Decades of psychological research poured into what has become our modern-day PR (public relations) and advertising industries. Now billions of dollars of ad placements compete for your attention, each one designed to create an ‘itch’ that suddenly materializes in you. These itches are designed to conjure ideas that appear to originate from within you – and this so that you will not reject them (since we are less likely to reject our own thoughts).

Given enough stimulus, all the foreign thoughts/ideas/itches/desires form a massive mind tangle that creates an insurmountable inertia: acedia. In this state, we finally give up trying to find any meaning in all of the chaos and confusion. All of this non-stop stimulation and dissatisfaction produces a profound emptiness and deadness of soul; it’s a state in which we find ourselves unable to enjoy the good from the hand of God.

The Cure for Boredom

Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher and polymath of the seventeenth century, explains it well:

For me, the cure for boredom happened when I reclaimed the ability to sit alone and be quiet. The paradox is that this ‘activity’ (solitude and silence), that you would think would cause even more boredom, turns out to be the beginning of its cure. That’s because, in the silences we simply rediscover the nearness of God.

What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words, by God himself.[6]

See also: Lie: Rest must be earned.
See also the introduction to this section: Lies attacking the good life.

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[1] Winter, Richard, Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL 2002, pg 27

[2] Ibid pg 72, 74.

[3] See part 1, part 2 and part 3 of Lie: Passive use of the Internet is harmless.

[4] https://www.securenvoy.com/blog/2012/02/16/66-of-the-population-suffer-from-nomophobia-the-fear-of-being-without-their-phone/

[5] ibid, pg 49.

[6] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A.J. Kralsheimer (Baltimore: Penguin, 1966), pg 75.