The Noonday Devil

My mother, back in a less gentle era of parenting, had a characteristic reply to the complaints of bored children, often uttered just before she smacked you: If you’re bored, you’re boring . She wasn’t describing the child’s effect on others, but an inherent quality: A person doesn’t get bored if he has interests, motivation, and a lively brain. This conviction spawned fantasies in me as a small child of just how well I would survive extremely boring environments, such as prison, life in a space capsule, or being the last person alive on earth. I would be fine . No matter how isolated, I would still be able to think and tell myself stories. If you locked me up forever in a library, I’d probably even be happy.

Or so I thought—and I may have been right, but The Disease of Boredom: From Ancient Philosophy to Modern Psychology by Josefa Ros Velasco complicates the picture dramatically. Ros Velasco is a postdoctoral researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid and founder of the world’s first Institute of Boredom Studies. In this book, she performs the dual task of surveying the cultural history of “boredom,” which has been named and understood differently over time, and drawing modern science-based conclusions about it. Boredom isn’t merely the result of a boring external environment, as a schoolchild might think, or inadequate mental resources, as my mother suggested. It is either a mysterious nexus of dysfunction or a healthy adaptive function (it’s complicated) that afflicts both individuals and societies at large.

This everyday phenomenon is so complex, in fact, that Ros Velasco employs a chart and four levels of classification to grapple with it. She starts with “situation-dependent and transient boredom,” found, she says, in the case when a situation is extrinsically boring. This is the garden-variety kind of boredom, and it ends when the situation is over. The next level, “individual-dependent and chronic boredom,” is closer to my mother’s definition, and it stems from character and temperament. An example is that some people find school boring and others don’t. Individual-dependent and chronic boredom, along with the last two classifications, “situation-dependent and chronic boredom” and “profound boredom,” can all be dysfunctional and dangerous.Situation-dependent and chronic boredom happens when individuals are trapped in extrinsically boring circumstances and, over time, develop some of the personal tendencies associated with individual-dependent boredom—which can include hyperactivity, depression, lack of interest and motivation, narcissism, delinquency, and addiction, to name a few. “Profound boredom” occurs when either of the middle types of boredom become chronic and “any semblance of agency has been subsumed into despair.” Any of the dysfunctional forms of boredom, if extreme, can be a cause of suicide.

Contemporary psychological language calls boredom either healthy or diseased, adaptive or maladaptive. Boredom, when experienced functionally, or healthily, can lead individuals to meaningful change. When experienced dysfunctionally, without the opportunity for change, the problem can become acute and destructive. A main feature of boredom is that a surfeit of meaningless pleasure can lead to it—and then to an increasingly frantic, over-stimulated, and futile search for distraction and escape.

But what do other sources of wisdom have to say on the matter? Ros Velasco answers this question by taking us on a wonderful tour of philosophy, religion, and the arts, all the while sifting through the historical record for evidence of her classifications of boredom. Are the warriors in the Iliad experiencing situational-transient boredom? Was the medieval idea of excess spleen just a way of speaking about individual-dependent and chronic boredom? Were the melancholic sufferers of the Sturm und Drang movement in eighteenth-century Germany feeling individual-dependent chronic boredom—or, worse, situation-dependent and chronic boredom—spawned by the lack of meaning in an increasingly secular society? Ros Velasco notes that understandings of boredom have evolved. Boredom was viewed at times as a moral or social issue and at others as merely a medical one.

The ancients rarely referred to boredom in their writings, though references to “saturation,” “weariness,” “inactivity,” and “somnolence” seem to suggest they felt it. In Ancient Greece, “boredom . . . represented something bordering on a social vice,” Ros Velasco theorizes. Life was devoted to virtuous service to the polis , and leisure was to be spent in contemplation and the exercise of reason. If anyone felt unmotivated, he would have been ashamed to admit it. Only with the Roman Empire did leisure become designated for “entertainment.” Boredom ( taedium ) arose when the Romans discovered leisure time and began promoting the pursuit of pleasure as a method of controlling the masses.The spectrum of negative conditions associated with boredom that Ros Velasco identifies in her book then became visible in the Roman world. Seneca writes of ennui that leads to suicide and even mentions “existential nausea”—“a disgust” that springs from doing and seeing “nothing new.”

Christianity provides an intriguing synthesis of these views. In the Middle Ages, boredom went by the name acedia , denoting an “apathy towards virtue,” and was considered to be a spiritual affliction of monks. Acedia , “the noonday demon,” was not boredom as we understand it, but a restless desire to turn toward pleasure and distraction, away from virtue and God. Ros Velasco, informed by secularism, considers this condition to be situation-dependent, due to monastic circumstances—thinking about God is obviously very boring! “Men of faith were trapped in a monotonous, repetitive context that often led to boredom,” she writes. “Pray and study, study and pray. . . . How could the monks not succumb to boredom?”

By the later Middle Ages, the concept had morphed, again, into boredom as a kind of illness—this time, a physical one brought on by an excess of spleen. The understanding of boredom as a disease persisted through the German Romantics and French Decadents, though they also identified spiritual and material causes for it—such as the conditions of modern life—to the existentialists, who rediscovered Seneca’s “nausea.” Today, boredom continues to be considered a disease and has become a matter of psychiatric study—not to mention an opportunity for prescribing medication. (What is ADHD if not boredom?)

Ros Velasco’s final analysis is that boredom “is a state of discomfort that arises when the environment we inhabit, or the activity we try to engage in, fails to stimulate us adequately or align with our expectations, resulting in the painful experience of meaninglessness.” Ros Velasco posits that smartphones and our “consumer and entertainment society” are boring us to death, and our attempts so far to evade them have been “ultimately frustrated.” She imagines that the solution to this modern dilemma may be some eruptive form of change.

In The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times (2015), Dom Jean-Charles Nault, the abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Wandrille in France, writes that the contemporary search for distraction is “the manifestation of a radical instability of the human being.” We succumb to boredom and chase easy pleasure, and the result is “the disappearance of major life projects and commitments that require self-giving and even self-sacrifice.” The only cure for boredom, according to Nault and the medieval Desert Fathers whose wisdom he offers in the book, is fighting it—persevere and develop the ability to dwell alone with oneself, which is to say, the ability to dwell alone with God.

Valerie Stivers is a senior editor at UnHerd US.

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