I connect boredom to the messages we hear in society about productivity, work and how we use our time. If anything connects to how we use our time, I automatically start thinking about...
Capitalism and the social discourse around it.
As a narrative therapy practitioner, asking questions is my thing. So, when I decided to do a little more research around boredom, some questions that guided my search included:
What have we been taught about boredom and is it accurate?
What’s staying hidden behind the discourse that we’ve taken to believe as fact?
What else could be true at the same time?
You see, many neurodivergent describe boredom as being so incredibly painful and although there have been times when I can get bored, I’ve really struggled to find a time in my life lately where I’ve truly felt that way. But thinking from when I was a kid to now, there’s a big difference in the amount of boredom I felt. As a kid, I felt boredom regularly. It tended to come up over things I’d really like to do but I wasn’t allowed to do or had to do but I had no say in the matter. Sometimes boredom came up in situations like different school projects that I never really understood why I was made to do them in the first place.
[ID: Cat with a white belly and spots of orange and black is straddled over a cement post looking to its left and slightly unamused. Graphic reads: “Whatever. Didn’t want to play anyway,” which reminds me of being bored as a kid and wanting to do something, but not knowing if I’ve forgotten something. Then after getting in trouble and left trying to figure out what I should’ve been doing, I do nothing because I don’t want to get it wrong anymore. Still bored. End ID]
As I grew older, boredom comes up in specific instances. It normally appears when I feel like a task or project is something I’d rather not do, but I don’t feel like I have a choice. I’d get bored with some graduate school papers or readings, or tasks at work because I didn’t know how I could get away without doing them. Sometimes I felt like things could be done better than I was made to do them or I couldn’t see the importance of the task and I knew there were other things I felt were necessary to do. But now, with so much I do have a choice over (including how I work), boredom doesn’t really factor into my life as often.
As I looked into the definition of boredom a little more deeply, it made sense to read about it being much more about a loss of autonomy than anything else. Anderson’s paper, Affect and critique: A politics of boredom (2021), writes about boredom below:
“What is missing when boredom is present is the ‘experience of anticipation…’ (p. 72), or the presence of a possible future event that may be felt through a range of anticipatory effects from dread to hope, from fear to excitement. Boredom settles when events are absent. Boredom signals, then, that something has led to a suspension of anticipation and that some form of detachment and exit is happening.”
When thinking of what’s now or not now (what feels like our natural way of understanding time as neurodivergent people), then it makes even more sense that we’d experience boredom as something very distressing. We’re waiting for something to happen, yet we can’t make it happen at a level that takes away the lack of anticipation. We also feel as if we don't have the autonomy to make the changes that we see need to happen either. We're stuck in trying to find ways to do things as they've always been done, even if we know of a better way, need a better way, or wish to do something different altogether. This society takes away our autonomy in many ways, leaving us seeing that changes could be made, but not giving us the time, the space, and/or the ability to create the events that we need to make them happen. We’re left with a sense of detachment from ourselves, feeling powerless to create the kinds of changes we foresee as necessary for us to thrive.
[ID: An orange tabby cat is lying with its head on the curb, eyes looking downward at its ball that it’s expected to play with. Graphics say in bold letters, "I'm more bored than this cat." I know many neurodivergent people feel this deep in their souls... sending hugs (if you accept them!) End ID]
We get very clear messages about boredom. They leave us with the belief that we should know what to do, be able to do it as expected and if we can’t then we must be incapable and wrong. As kids, we were told that there should be no reason for us to be bored. We just needed to find something creative to do! As teens, we were thought to get into more trouble if we got bored, so we should be told what to do and left with less free time to decide how we should spend it. If we couldn’t find anything to do within the acceptable choices to relieve our boredom, then we were at fault too. To say we were bored was to admit that we weren’t trying hard enough to do what was expected.
We grew up feeling trapped, anxious or even in despair as we see (or feel) what we’d like to do differently, but know we’re not allowed to. We wanted to have the autonomy to make our own choices, but schools were quick to show us that things didn’t need to change and there was a right way to do things. We should automatically know what those right ways are and be intrinsically motivated to do them. But then we’d be blamed, shamed or made to feel guilty for not being productive enough if we couldn’t follow what was expected. So, it’s not surprising that we feel a suspension of anticipation in so many areas of our lives.
We’ve been bombarded with expectations about who we’re supposed to be and how we’re supposed to do things. When we’ve been told what is important all our lives, encouraged to betray ourselves in order to adhere to said importance in hopes of belonging or keeping us safe, we quickly learn that what we value or need or how we wish to spend our doesn’t matter. We’re not encouraged to dream, imagine or take risks to do differently because we’ve had experiences of rejection, humiliation and frustration or anger from others when we did. Depending on how marginalised we’re seen as being in society, it feels as if we have even less autonomy. Our very survival feels connected to how well we’re able to conform to societal expectations. We’re told there’s too much at stake if we listen to our needs and do things our way. It’s no wonder that we feel helpless over making any significant changes in our lives.
Patricia Meyer Spack writes in Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind, “Boredom, which presents itself as “a trivial emotion that can trivialize the world.” An emotion that speaks to “a state of affairs in which the individual is assigned ever more importance and ever less power.”
How can boredom feel any other way when we’re told of all these tasks that are important to everyone else but us!? We have no say in determining if they are actually important to us or what we need at that moment. Then added to it, we've learned that our worth is tied to us doing these arbitrary boring tasks, exactly as expected. So now, not only do we feel as if have no control over how we complete the task but also, how we choose to spend our time and what we should think of ourselves if we can or can’t choose to do something worthy of being called productive and complete it in the expected way.
But perhaps boredom isn’t our fault as we've been taught to believe. Maybe, like any other sensation in our bodies, boredom has a message it’s trying to tell us too. What happening around us that we’re left anticipating changes that aren’t happening? Where do we feel like our autonomy has been stolen in place of some arbitrary task of importance? An arbitrary task that we’ve not been able to name it as such, but it’s been named important for us? What changes are we being kept from making to feel like there’s something we could anticipate that might leave us feeling hopeful, excited or joyful again?
Maybe it’s about time we learned to pause and lean into the discomfort so we can listen to what the boredom is telling us about what we need in order to start taking back some of our power again.