You're Probably Bored, and It's Probably Making You Angry
There are at least two parts to boredom. Together, they reveal deep pain that make us aggressive.
There’s a popular image of boredom in our culture where the bored person is, basically, aimless and lazy. Their malaise is dreamy and gentle; they lounge, the “faff around” as the Brits put it, they scroll.
It’s an interesting image, because if studies on boredom are to be trusted, it’s wrong. Bored people are not inactive or lazy or demotivated, at least not in the long run. In fact, they’re seeking action and meaning and goals, and likely to become aggressive when they cannot access them.1
This should make at least a little sense upon second thought. After all, whether or not boredom leads to aggression, it often leads to activity of some kind. Doodling is a response to boredom, and fidgeting. Research also suggests that boredom is linked to creativity, especially the kind that happens in sudden bursts. And then there’s the less-good stuff: boredom appears to be closely linked to things like self-destructive drug use, compulsive gambling, even self-harm. This, too, should make some intuitive sense. In fact, reading through the psychology literature about all this brought up a memory for me: my dad’s friend once told him a story about how, at (remote) Dartmouth college in the winter months, students were so bored that they threw shaving cream cans in the fire just to watch them explode in the heat. (They’d have to duck behind the couch and wait for the explosion). The students apparently felt very badass until visiting Canadian students told them that in Canada people sometimes throw bullets in the fire for the same type of thrill.
I still wonder: were the Canadians trolling or telling the truth? Regardless, bored people do risky and dumb things, perhaps just to feel they are alive. And they also get very angry sometimes, more than the cultural imaginary might predict. But before we get to that, let’s consider what boredom actually is.
Too often cognitive science tends to dumb down the meaning of the words describing our emotional life, so as to make our emotions somehow measurable. (Indeed, it has more broadly been accused of being “reductionist,” reducing whatever it looks at to merely the cognitive elements involved). Under this sort of pressure, “depression” is compressed to a number on a numerical scale. Desire is reduced to one’s heart rate and the electrical conductivity of the skin.
Poets, despair. Contemplating psychological constructs like this can be almost painful: it’s the diminishing of the human experience, and yes, almost the precise opposite of the magical nuance and complexity of our minds.
But when it comes to boredom, oddly, the same field of cognitive science has arguably built something better than colloquial understanding. Something a little sharper, more complex, more interesting, more telling, than (say) someone simply not getting enough stimulus as they recline on the chaise lounge. As the researchers responsible for one especially new and helpful cognitive-scientific model of boredom put it:
Boredom acts as an online affective indicator of unsuccessful attentional engagement in a valued goal-congruent activity. Boredom tells us whether our current activity (internal or external) is something we are able to focus on and want to be engaged in). Boredom thus has both attention (i.e., able to) and meaning (i.e., want to) components) The experience of boredom motivates people to take steps towards restoring successful engagement in meaningful activity.
Okay, it’s not poetry. But it’s complex and interesting, and worth unpacking. To start with, this model suggests that there are probably at least two kinds of boredom:
Boredom from a lack of required attention/challenge: the task at hand isn’t using your attention fully (think: someone is repeating themselves in a conversation. It was interesting the first time, but it doesn’t take much attention now because you’ve heard this before. Boring!) Scientists call this the “attentional model”
Boredom from lack of meaning: the task at hand requires your full attention, but it lacks meaning (think: the work spreadsheet is requires your full attention, but you don’t really care about your job). A more basic way of thinking about this is this is the boredom we feel when we don’t really want to be doing the task. Scientists call this the “meaning-based model.”
To invert this logic, it’s also possible to consider the types of activities where one is strangely absorbed in one sense yet bored in another way:
Childcare, especially infant-care: if you really care about the baby, you can change a zillion diapers or at least sing the nursery rhyme a zillion times and it’s still important to you. It doesn’t take all of your brain, but it’s meaningful. If you’re bored, you’re bored only in one sense.
Video-game-play: lots of games are pretty meaningless, but they’re often consuming, especially if they are one degree harder each level...A video game takes up tons of your attention. Yet there is a strange kind of boredom that can attend this experience, even as it consumes you. You might feel, well, weird once you finally put the game away. That’s because there’s a deficit when it comes to meaning. Anyone who has played “Civilisation” knows this feeling well: no, you did not in fact just radically reshape world history. Instead you lost an almost comparable amount of hours not doing so.
So there are multiple kinds of boredom. This has already helped me understand why some tasks just drive me nuts, and how people can be bored and frustrated even when they appear to be very active.
There’s something else here, too. Note how the researchers suggest that boredom is, well, serving a purpose. Boredom is the alarm that we’re unable, for whatever reason, to focus well on working towards a meaningful goal. The “meaning” based component tells us whether we have a task to hand that’s worth pursuing (whether we really want to be doing what we’re doing!) and the “attentional” component tells us whether we can properly focus on it and thus pursue it. Another interesting aspect of cognitive science research on boredom is that some of the research suggests people can be bored not only when they’re understimulated but also when they’re overstimulated. After all, in that case we can’t really focus then either! This has helped me understand the strange sort of agitated boredom that happens when I’ve scrolled social media for hours or am in a crowded shopping mall.
Altogether, it seems that humans need both the correct level of focus, cognitive challenge and meaning to thrive mentally. If we lack any of these, we’ll be bored.
If you don’t like cognitive science, there are other ways of observing some of the same ideas. In 99 Percent Invisible, a wonderful podcast usually focused on design, they briefly explored these breakthroughs in boredom studies. In that episode, Dr. Erin Westgate, a creator of this attention-and-meaning model, notes you don’t have to be in a lab to begin to notice how crucial these two versions of boredom are; you can just look at the way different cultures view boredom:
“[Westgate]: So, for instance, in French, the word for boredom [ennui] really alludes more to what we would think of as its “meaning components.” In German, the word for boredom [langweilig] emphasizes the sense that time is slowing down….Which is a classic symptom of attentional boredom. And in Japanese, there are in fact two different words for boredom that loosely map onto these two different meanings….
[The Interviewer]: And so is this one of those cases where the word actually affects the meaning? They become sort of self-fulfilling prophecies, where if you’re French, you only get bored in a meaningful way. If you’re German, you get bored in the sort of attentional way.”
Unfortunately, it’s not yet clear exactly how French French boredom is, or how German German boredom might be. But regardless, boredom seems to be there to help us continue to find and pursue worthy goals, even in the simple evolutionary sense: it’s probably a helpful mechanism for making sure thinking animals don’t just do the same familiar things over and over again, that they seek out novelty, and thus find new ways to eat, survive, thrive, bond, collaborate, fuck, etc. We get bored as a way of making sure we’re optimising our lives. And that is why we should care a great deal about our boredom: it tends to point to the places and moments that we are not, in some sense, being all we could be.
It’s perhaps no wonder, then, that bored people might turn aggressive: for in the long run, not being able to pursue meaningful goals, even develop, is really painful.
Study after study shows that bored people [especially bored teenagers, which will surprise no one who has ever been a teenager] often become aggressive, sometimes in shockingly sadistic ways. Bored people are more abusive to others. They drive more recklessly. They may be more likely to self-harm.2 They “seek novelty,” even in incredibly careless, dangerous or cruel ways. (One study tested whether bored people would be more likely to shred living worms in a coffee blender. The answer was yes. I was relieved to know the test involved deception, and there was a secret mechanism involved that saved the worms).
It’s not just correlation that explains the link between boredom and aggression. That is, it’s not merely that the same people that get bored also get aggressive, although that is also true. If you take “normal” people, e.g. people who are only the average amount of bored for the human population, and then make them (even) more bored, they will become more aggressive. And if you take people who already have sadistic tendencies and make them bored, you’re really in trouble.
Although this isn’t simply a case of correlation, it is true that easily-bored are more destructive and unstable in general. People who get bored easily do worse in a number of ways, snacking more often, engaging in impulsive and violent behaviour,and having less satisfying romantic relationships. They also find life less meaningful, overall. I frankly felt “called out” routinely while reading this research, at least when it came to the restless, angsty boredom, the snacking… well, all of it really. The easily-bored-people literature provides a good description of my 20s.
In fact, I felt “called out” in multiple ways, because a lot of research on boredom examines people with ADHD in particular. I was given this diagnosis at age eight, and have done a lot of reading in the meantime to understand what it might mean. I’ve always been struck by how there’s a veritable mountain of writing on ADHD as a form of emotional impulsivity, but little on the relationship between this impulsivity and attentional difficulty/boredom.3 It seemed like a weird, and massive, conceptual oversight. (It is probably instead a symptom of how psychology researchers generally refuse to speculate on so very much of what they study, as they are instead mostly rewarded for finding statistically significant results).
Yet if this research on boredom is to be trusted and even mildly expanded on, people with ADHD are probably impulsive and even aggressive at times in part because they’re bored, and being bored is frustrating and difficult and painful. After all, people with trouble focusing can essentially experience all aspects of boredom at the same time, being both under and over stimulated in different ways, and unable to engage in meaningful activity or cognition as a result. In the wrong classroom setting, for example, it’s too distracting and noisy (overstimulation), but also one can’t follow the story being told, so one has nothing to focus on (understimulation) and one ultimately can’t derive meaning from the lesson. 4 The same frustrating experience can happen to anyone whose flow of concentration (while watching a movie or reading a book, say) is regularly disrupted. Only when it comes to those with attentional issues, it happens every day, all the time, in ways that result in regular “discipline” from others.5 I can promise, from experience: it’s exhausting and humiliating.
Why does all this cognitive science about boredom matter, outside of concern for those who especially struggle with it? Why does it matter for us all?
Well for one thing, understanding the multiple aspects of boredom is rather useful for psychology-related design problems, like the creation of games, educational experiences, user experiences, and so on. I still sometimes design courses and workshops for a living, as I did over the last decade for my main form of work. I use this sort of thinking regularly. I ask: is the material just stimulating enough? And: Is it about things the audience would actually care about, even if they were not required to be sitting here doing this for their credits or boss? Both are required if one is to learn. I also apply the same sort of questions to my very own life, when I’m trying to understand why a person or a relationship or an activity or an experience or even just a book manages to keep a hold on my attention or not.
But the meaning-and-attention based model of boredom is also interesting, important, even, because once you see it one place, the boredom-aggression link, it’s everywhere: in the way people often behave with sudden aggression when they’re stuck in traffic or standing in line. It helps explain why we can get overstimulated by the news cycle such that we get bored and tune out, and why people with very fractured attention online might get more aggressive with one another. It helps explain the aggression of incels and other online cultures, and so much about depression and self-harm. It helps me see why childhood neglect does so much harm. It helps me understand why airlines keep everyone glued to movies (especially as airline passengers have become increasingly violent in recent years). The meaning-based aspects of boredom also help me think about why being bored feels so, well, “soul-crushing” and existential. Indeed, alongside boredom often comes, at least in my experience, a form of implicit indignation. It feels diminishing that I have to do mindless or seemingly pointless tasks at all. I find myself thinking that this is a waste of the very few hours of my life, of my precious creative brain, one surely destined for greater things. Surely someone else could do this, I think, or a robot.6 Indignation leads to anger, too.
And all of this points to boredom as a societal phenomenon. Indeed, Boredom studies as a field developed, at least in some ways, as the study of a public health problem. During the pandemic, part of the question researchers wanted to answer was what would happen if people were chronically, structurally bored. Would they lash out at others? Get depressed? Become entrepreneurs? (Yes to all, basically.) Boredom is a public health problem, at minimum, because it is linked to risky behaviour and violence. It’s a bit like the related field of research that shows that hotter temperatures make people more violent, to the point that gang violence, domestic violence, and more increase in the summer months. The problem in both cases is that the environment we’ve built for humans is insufficient for the challenge of their psychology.
After all, one study suggested that Brits spend five years of their lives bored. One-third of the same Brits said they were more likely to be bored at home than at work, which suggests much of our personal life is also, in some way, not as meaningful as we might like. “47 per cent admitted they often feel they have wasted their weekends - having done nothing noteworthy.”7 About half of Americans say they are bored at work. (I’m surprised it’s not more). Another study, once again in America, suggests Americans think about a third of the days of their adult lives are boring, with many feeling nostalgic for younger days, which is interesting given that teenagers, at least, appear to frequently be bored compared to some other demographics. All this self-reporting should mean we hold the research lightly. But it is still suggestive.
There’s an image of leftists (and indeed, liberals too) as big softies, bleeding hearts, upset with the order of the world because it involves oppression and harm. This is true in many cases, but while I care about oppression and harm a lot, if I had to be entirely honest, this isn’t the primary reason that I continue to have the politics I have.
What makes me most passionate about a better world is that I think this one is boring, catastrophically boring, in this deeper sense of the word, for most people most of the time. It does not provide them with the opportunity to focus deeply in the pursuit of goals that are truly meaningful to them. Sure, there’s lots of stimulus in our world, but that is, frankly, irrelevant compared to the loss of a meaningful life with the possibility of agency. (I often think of the Stephen Jay Gould quote: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.")
Of course, although I’ve placed oppression and boredom here as though they were opposing, separate things, they are deeply intertwined. After all, under the lens of cognitive science boredom is about a lack of meaning and the inability for people to engage all of their minds, find challenge, even reach their potential. And isn’t that one of the most striking features of oppression? Forms of oppression like capitalism and patriarchy are remarkable not just in that some people have more material goods than others or more power, but in that both are systems that underdevelop some of us to enrich not just the pockets, but also the minds, of others.
Most writing on exploitation and oppression focuses on money. But I am at least as interested in the type that involves injustices in the economy of time. And not just any time, but the particular kind we need for certain kinds of learning, for our ability to steer ourselves towards the kinds of people we would like to be. This is why I often write about the world of work, where phenomena like “quiet quitting” or the phrase “this could have been an email” show just how often people are frustrated about being forced to use up their time for others, how they resent the way it leaves them unable to develop other capacities.
This is, I think, something that both critical theorists and cognitive scientists alike have perhaps not quite articulated about boredom: it not only is about being oppressed in the moment but in being deformed and impaired by one’s oppression, having one’s long-term potential foreclosed. For if the meaning and attention model is even somewhat accurate, what bores us most is what uses the least of our brain and involves nothing of our long term hopes and goals. For the critical theorists I was trained to read, boredom was a function of capitalism itself (“Boredom is a function of life which is lived under the compulsion to work, and under the strict division of labour.”- Theodor Adorno). The same theme returns in writings by David Graeber and “bullshit jobs” (“huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.”) Erin Westgate, the author of the aforementioned cognitive science boredom model, has, perhaps surprisingly, provided her own rough social theory about boredom. In the same interview I cite above, she notes that she’s not personally convinced boredom existed in the same way before modernity, or at least perhaps it wasn’t as frequent. Perhaps, for example, the activities we took on were more inherently meaningful if related to our survival, or perhaps life was inherently more challenging. All these thinkers recognise that there’s something about modernity that makes it exceptionally boring, or at least boring in an exceptional way.
But the exceptional nature of modern boredom, I’d like to suggest, isn’t just about its frequency, or the routine nature of industrialisation, or our “disenchantment” with older systems of meaning. I suspect it also has to do with our understanding of our own potential capacities and the ways that modern work and life inhibit them. I am sure that peasants and cave-people alike had some aspects of the boredom cognitive science can describe. They probably found infant-care boring in one sense but meaningful in another; they probably got immersed in a small strangely addictive task and later wondered what the point had been. They probably did have days where they wished it was a festival day and not a gather-wood day, maybe they even snapped at their fellow man over this. But it is less clear whether, with their relatively fixed class positions, material scarcity, religion to structure meaning, and so on, they they would have had the same kind of existential boredom as that of someone who has the a world of information accessible in their pocket and two master’s degrees but is now being paid to sweep floors or keep spreadsheets. The unique curse of modernity is a boredom, and an angry boredom, about the often-high expectations our world builds for us about the possibilities of pursuing our own meaningful goals. And the raw disappointment and frustration that follow as we hit the limits (mental, economic, and social) of our boring, infuriating world.
One of my friends told me that this week he had to be on a particularly boring and pointless call for work. Often, he quietly reads research papers in the background, but for whatever reason, that multitasking became unbearable this time (overstimulation-boredom…) He already struggles to feel the job is bearable, as he’s been put in a department he doesn’t like with a manager who doesn’t listen. On this day, he fidgeted, and when that wasn’t enough, he kicked the wall in a fit of frustration. Finally, he turned off the camera and took a walk. He worries that his years are wasted there, and indeed at work in general. I did too, in previous jobs. It’s extremely common for most people, in fact. It’s a profound threat, that brings a profound anger.
Of course, despite my politics, I have my pessimism about human potential too. Some of our supposed potential, might be an illusion; and boredom might be part of necessary trade-offs in our lives. We won’t all write novels if we’re given more time. Someone has to sweep the floors (until we get robots) and watch the babies. But I respect our collective angry-boredom, too, because it asks: don’t we deserve to find out what’s possible for ourselves?
Anger is an activity-inducing emotion; that is its danger and its virtue. Directed wisely, it can be channeled into job searches and hobbies, unions and UBI experiments, communal working and living projects. Indeed, boredom points to types of grievances and indeed life that we might not yet have managed to articulate on the left, and which could help mobilise people towards a better politics of work and free time. I hope we all find an outlet for our angry-boredom that lets us explore our potential a little more. But there is one more thing about anger that is worth pondering in this context. Anger is sometimes called a masking emotion. Behind anger there is almost always another emotion, and most often, what that emotion is is sadness, fear, even grief. This is a major reason why anger is a part of grieving, whether it’s in the context of death, the end of relationships, big social changes, or anything else. It is the feeling we feel so we can try to act, before we feel the deeper feeling about a possible loss. When it comes to boredom, anger provides the sense (sometimes correct, sometimes illusory) that one can threaten or bargain or even use force to change the course of things. But sometimes we cannot; sometimes we are simply faced with an unshakeable loss, including and perhaps especially that of our own imagined potential. So I suspect that in many cases, once the the underappreciated anger of boredom passes, something else will generally emerge, just as difficult and perhaps more profound: grief for our many possible, usually-stillborn selves.
When I was a child, and even when I was an adult, I would complain of my boredom. And in response, good people would tell me “only boring people are bored!” Their implication was that I should just get a little more creative, read a book, take myself on a walk. It’s alright, as self-help goes, but of course it misses a wider point, which is that we mostly do not and cannot access meaning and potential on our own. We need other people and organisations and institutions. Perhaps this is why children are so often bored: they often have very little control over these other people and institutions, indeed over their lives. Then again, adults rarely have much better. And so our boredom is often a sign of a failing in our social world, one that leaves us all individually lacking.
All that might sounds bleak, but boredom gives me hope. For as long as humans are easily bored, we are also the kinds of creatures who seek meaningful tasks and want challenges and opportunities to learn. And that means that while we might be bored, we haven’t let the world make us boring.
I, for one, cynically wonder if this false image of boredom is a piece of cultural misdirection, as if acknowledging this truth might encourage it.
There was, until recently, a credible-because-well-replicating study that suggested people would rather shock themselves with electricity than sit with their own thoughts. As it turns out, it does replicate, but it also replicates when the alternative activities are more varied, which suggests that (basically) it’s not just that boredom is painful but possible that giving oneself electrical shocks is, actually, a little bit fun--something that won’t surprise anyone into martial arts or wrestling. Adrenaline is something humans enjoy. But the wider point remains: when people are bored, they seek novelty, and sometimes they also become frustrated in a way that leads to anger.
What ADHD really “is” is a blogpost for another day, or possibly another lifetime. But in any case, as someone with that diagnosis since childhood, I’m always curious about how the attentional aspects are so rarely connected in a logical way to the emotional ones.
Also, if you struggle with following narratives anyway, say, because you have an attention deficit, you might miss the meaning in a given presentation and then tune out even further. There are vicious cycles, in short.
In fact, more generally (that is, even if one doesn’t have an officially sanctioned learning disability) I suspect all school experiences involve a bit of this: quite simply, a lot of what we learn in formal education is either too stimulating or not enough, or doesn’t have enough immediate significance to keep the attention of the listener. Much of it is divorced from anything people of that age might care about. The whole educational system is a little broken in this way wherever you look, and so, for that matter, is much of our working life. And the way we can tell, in short, is that people are frequently bored.
Could this desire to hand off tasks to a robot before we die of boredom explain some of the recent obsession with AI? (Yes).
The study, interestingly, was funded by the British Heart Foundation, and used to encourage volunteering. This makes it a little suspect, but I also very clever.
Very, very interesting. Might I understand it as boredom being an evolutionary signal that something(s) specific need to be changed and that specific something(s) change is as an individual/small group matter to start? Hard for people to do alone, especially for children?