from Chia-Hung Max Lin: Heidegger on Boredom

Chia-Hung Max Lin, one of my best friends and comrades in the “academic detention,” quoted Martin Heidegger (yes, we all hate the way Heidegger looks!) as he responded to my mentioning of boredom:

"Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals beings as a whole"--What is Metaphysics? (1929)

If boredom can be defined as a state of wandering attention, lack of intention, and failure of arousal, one can detect without efforts that boredom too is an emotion. We all know what Plato would say (or attributing his words to Socrates and says) about emotions--irrational, irresponsible, harmful...

Thanks to Heidegger, we are given two works in length on the subject of boredom/die Langeweile (früher lange Weile): The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics & What is Metaphysics? The book on literary studies, Boredom, (which is my first purchase of its kind for my personal library and is somehow never read through...sigh!) inevitably deals with the Heideggerian notion of boredom.

Here are some of the typical takes on boredom, and please excuse me for adding a few tongue-in-cheek ones:

• Psychoanalytically speaking: Boredom is a state of malaise, close to anxiety, characterized by a feeling of emptiness. (Sigmund Freud says that it is not a symptom; Sándor Ferenczi sees that it may lead to the development of anxiety.)
• Psychologically speaking: Boredom is "an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest in and difficulty concentrating on the current activity" (C. D. Fisher).*
• Philosophically speaking: Boredom is a rupture discerned between the malaise-inflicting milieu and the decreptic or numbed self, wherefrom inherent anxiety along with existentialist thoughts loom large (Blaise Pascal, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, and Martin Heidegger).
• Sociologically speaking: Boredom is when you have too much free time and too few friends.
• Financially speaking: Boredom is when you have too many days off and too little money for a trip.
• Gastronomically speaking: Boredom is the combination of a craving and an empty snack drawer.
• Scatologically speaking: Boredom is when you finish everything you can read while forcing your bowel movement and yet end up sitting on the toilet bowl without anything else to read.

*Psychology defines three types of boredom (The first is when we are prevented from engaging in something, the second is when we are forced to engage in an unwanted activity and the third is when we are for no known reason unable to engage in an activity. ), while Joseph Brodsky in his work, In Praise of Boredom, speaks of four (Occasional Boredom: bored at something in particular; Wearisome Boredom: bored of too much of the same thing/ boredom of satiety; Existential Boredom: bored of boredom; Creative Boredom - emotio-intellectualrecuperation).