all boredom is not created the same

from your favorite gen z philosopher <3

last winter i spent three hours in an airport terminal watching a delayed flight status toggle between "on time" and "delayed" with algorithmic indecision. around me, hundreds of travelers maintained the distinct thousand-yard stare of people trapped between destinations. some scrolled mindlessly through phones, others stared at $17 airport beers, all of us suspended in the peculiar purgatory that air travel has perfected. it struck me then how boredom has become our shared condition; yet how differently we each experience its weight.

the boredom of the business traveler with lounge access — nursing a complimentary scotch while answering emails on leather seats — bears only a superficial resemblance to the boredom of the budget flyer hunched on a molded plastic chair, watching the minutes crawl by beneath fluorescent lights. the boredom of the well-paid consultant, temporarily inconvenienced between meaningful projects and substantial paychecks, exists in a different universe from the boredom of the underpaid gate agent repeating the same announcements for the fourth double shift this week, bodies blurring into an endless procession of demands. the boredom of those who can purchase distraction; premium streaming subscriptions, airport bookstore hardcovers, overpriced comfort food; differs fundamentally from the boredom of those who must endure emptiness, counting quarters for vending machines, rationing phone battery, calculating whether today's delay will mean tomorrow's financial penalty. like healthcare, housing, and hope itself, boredom in America has become stratified, distributed along precise gradients of class, power, and privilege — not simply a universal emotion but another arena where inequality manifests in lived experience. even in shared spaces of waiting, we wait differently, our patience and discomfort determined by the invisible infrastructure of advantage that shapes every aspect of American existence.

we've come to experience boredom as personal failure rather than social symptom. we interpret it as deficient imagination, insufficient gratitude, faulty character; rather than recognizing it as a perfectly rational response to systems that increasingly extract meaning while selling it back to us as content. what if our collective boredom isn't a problem we're failing to solve but a message we're refusing to decode?

perhaps the message is this: boredom in contemporary society isn't simply a universal emotion but a stratified experience shaped by privilege, weaponized by capitalism, and potentially revolutionary when reclaimed on our own terms. our varying relationship to emptiness may be the most honest reflection of how power operates in the 21st century — and how we might resist it.

this understanding challenges popular narratives about boredom's supposed benefits. despite instagram infographics celebrating boredom as creativity's fertile ground, research reveals a more nuanced reality. pure boredom rarely generates brilliant insights. rather, it's moderately engaging activities; showering, walking, gardening; that create optimal conditions for creative connections. these tasks occupy just enough cognitive bandwidth to quiet the inner critic without fully emptying the mind. the privilege to access such "productive boredom" itself reflects the stratification of empty time — who can afford the luxury of a meandering shower or contemplative walk versus who must maximize every moment for survival.

and while dismantling cultural myths around boredom, we should acknowledge its potential darkness. chronic boredom correlates with self-destructive behaviors, substance abuse, and depression. in prisons, where time stretches endlessly without purpose, boredom becomes psychological torture. in standardized classrooms where curriculum has been drained of discovery, boredom manifests as disengagement. in offices filled with meaningless busywork, it transforms into alienation and burnout.

our economic system ingeniously creates the very problem it promises to solve. it generates meaningless jobs and activities that bore us, then sells endless products to alleviate the boredom it engineered. we find ourselves caught in byung-chul han's "burnout society" — simultaneously understimulated and overwhelmed, bored and anxious, empty and overloaded.

boredom is both common and strange, a peculiarly modern affliction that emerged alongside industrial timekeeping. before mechanical clocks carved our days into measurable segments, before factory whistles and time cards made those segments commodifiable, the concept of "boredom" barely existed. medieval texts contain countless references to suffering, to hunger, to plague. but virtually none to the existential emptiness we now call boredom. the word itself only gained prominence in english during the 1850s, coinciding suspiciously with industrialization and the birth of a middle class suddenly confronted with leisure they hadn't been prepared to fill.

as neuroscientist James Danckert observes, boredom functions as an internal alarm system without specific instructions — it signals dissatisfaction but offers no roadmap toward meaning. this ambiguity makes boredom both uncomfortable and potentially valuable. yet even this alarm rings differently across social strata. for those with resources, boredom often triggers productive curiosity… the corporate executive's restlessness becomes the seed of innovation, the affluent student's ennui transforms into a gap year of "finding oneself." meanwhile, for the economically marginalized, this same internal alarm frequently sounds against a backdrop of structural limitations: the single parent working multiple jobs experiences boredom not as a call to self-actualization but as yet another form of exhaustion to be endured, another reminder of foreclosed possibilities. the question becomes not simply how to respond to boredom's signal, but who possesses the privilege to meaningfully act upon it.

Jacqueline Harpman's haunting novel "I Who Have Never Known Men" offers perhaps the most extreme literary exploration of boredom as both torture and possibility! the unnamed narrator, imprisoned with thirty-nine other women in an underground bunker without explanation or apparent purpose, confronts the ultimate void of meaning. when a mysterious catastrophe allows their escape, they emerge into an emptied world devoid of other humans, civilization's ruins, or even basic context for their imprisonment. yet within this radical absence — no capitalism, no productivity imperative, no entertainment infrastructure — the protagonist undertakes the most elemental form of meaning-making. she teaches herself to read and write, counts her heartbeats to measure time, and contemplates her existence not because these activities hold external value or promise future reward, but precisely because they don't. her relationship with boredom becomes almost mystical; she inhabits it fully rather than fleeing from it. she discovers what those trapped in cycles of survival labor or algorithmic doom-scrolling cannot: that boredom, when neither escaped nor commodified but deeply inhabited, becomes a portal to self-authorship! she creates meaning not because external systems reward her, but because meaning-making itself emerges as the essential human response to consciousness.

contemporary capitalism has masterfully weaponized this existential restlessness, transforming our discomfort with emptiness into its most profitable market opportunity — unfilled attention ripe for harvesting, unoccupied moments begging for colonization. the algorithm learns precisely when our focus wavers, when boredom's first tendrils begin curling around our consciousness. streaming platforms engineered for autoplay, social media interfaces designed for infinite scrolling, endlessly refreshing content feeds: all promise relief from the void while ensuring we remain perpetually unfulfilled consumers, always sensing something more compelling might appear with just one more swipe. dating apps gamify intimacy; productivity software quantifies creativity; meditation apps commodify presence itself. each digital solution presents itself as rescue from tedium while carefully calibrating just enough dissatisfaction to ensure continued engagement. the attention economy thrives on this exquisite paradox: it sells increasingly sophisticated solutions to a problem it actively manufactures, hooks us on cures that exacerbate the disease, leaving us more restless, more easily bored, more desperate for the next hit of novelty! we become willing participants in our own diminishment, surrendering our capacity for sustained attention to corporations that profit from its fragmentation.

the experience of boredom emerges from the intersection of attention and meaning. as psychologist Erin Westgate's research reveals, we feel bored when we either cannot engage with our current activity (too simple or too complex for our cognitive resources) or when the activity lacks personal significance. this framework illuminates the cruel irony of our economic system: those forced to perform the most repetitive, attention-draining labor for survival are simultaneously denied access to the resources that might infuse that labor with self-determined meaning. the factory worker assembling the same component for eight hours straight experiences attentional fatigue without compensatory purpose, while the consultant crafting PowerPoint slides finds meaning in the status and financial security such work provides. boredom thus becomes both universal yet intensely individualized… a shared human condition that nevertheless manifests as yet another theater where privilege determines experience, where some can transform emptiness into opportunity while others remain trapped in meaningless routine!

this explains why some find solitude unbearable while others desperately seek it. wallace captured this perfectly when exploring how some people possess "the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the meaningless, the repetitive... to be, in a word, unborable." these rare individuals can transform emptiness into contemplation, repetition into meditation.

contrary to widespread belief, boredom isn't about having nothing to do! it's about doing nothing that matters. a gig worker juggling three precarious jobs might have zero free time yet experience profound boredom, while someone sitting quietly by a window might feel completely engaged. when executives claim to "wish for boredom" during 80-hour workweeks, they're actually expressing desire for unstructured time without anxiety — a luxury increasingly reserved for the privileged few.

class stratifies our relationship with boredom in particularly revealing ways. wealth purchases variety, stimulation, novelty; the antidotes to monotony; while economic precarity often means enduring repetitive labor without alternative. the suburban homeowner complaining of ennui can book an impulsive vacation; the warehouse employee scanning packages for ten consecutive hours remains trapped in industrial repetition, their boredom a form of confinement.

when we instinctively mask our boredom through consumption — another episode, another scroll, another purchase — we interrupt an important internal signal. as Westgate suggests, this constant self-distraction prevents us from recognizing when our lives have drifted from what we genuinely value. our avoidance of momentary discomfort becomes avoidance of deeper self-knowledge.

your psychological relationship with boredom shapes how often you experience it. those who view boredom as personal failure in a culture that fetishizes perpetual productivity tend to feel it more acutely and frequently. meanwhile, those who accept boredom as an inevitable aspect of human experience, like hunger or fatigue, cope with it more effectively.

how might we navigate this paradox? how can we interpret boredom's signals without surrendering to either anxiety or algorithmic capture?

when boredom emerges, experts suggest using it as orientation toward meaning rather than distraction. this manifests differently across contexts: perhaps transforming laundry folding with a podcast on byzantine architecture, or breaking from spreadsheets to bake bread, engaging senses in tangible creation. what matters isn't the specific activity but your relationship to it, whether you deem it worthwhile on your own terms rather than society's metrics of productivity.

for inescapable situations — standardized testing, mandatory meetings, family obligations — meaning-making becomes more valuable than escape. reframing the experience through examining its deeper purpose doesn't eliminate boredom but transforms it from pointless suffering into something intentional.

what about jobs that crush the spirit through repetition? while "pursue your passion" makes for inspirational commencement rhetoric, it exists disconnected from economic reality for most workers. remembering that work enables life rather than constituting it offers some psychological relief, though it sidesteps the structural critique that capitalism increasingly colonizes hours we might otherwise fill with self-directed meaning.

for momentary boredom: coffee lines, waiting rooms, etc — research now confirms what many intuitively suspect: algorithmic scrolling through short-form content paradoxically increases boredom rather than relieving it! each dopamine hit from a fifteen-second video makes analog reality seem increasingly dull by comparison. attention becomes fractured, incapable of sustaining focus on the unenhanced world. this isn't accidental but by design. platforms engineer dependency cycles that hollow out our capacity for presence. we become less able to notice the quiet beauty of ordinary existence: the light filtering through leaves, the expressions crossing a stranger's face, the emotional texture of our own interior lives. our perceptual field narrows to what can be packaged and commodified, while the sublime complexity of unmediated reality recedes from our grasp.

our relationship with boredom ultimately mirrors our relationship with existence itself. life isn't meant to be constantly exhilarating, nor should it be relentlessly monotonous. perhaps boredom serves an evolutionary purpose: pushing us toward experience, connection, and meaning-making in a universe offering no inherent purpose.

the most radical act in an economy built on capturing attention might be reclaiming our right to occasionally, deliberately, let it wander.

<3,

your favorite gen z philosopher

maalvika