Exciting Developments in Boredom

Over the past year or so there have been some items in the news on boredom (NYT, Boston Globe). And just the other day John Holbo put up a lengthy post on boredom and idleness at Crooked Timber.

I’ve been thinking about boredom and children recently. Boredom is unpleasant, and it is its unpleasantness that people tend to pay the most attention to. If we focus on its unpleasantness, it is normal to immediately think about its alleviation. Since we empathize with our children, when they tell us they are bored, we tend to do two things: (1) think to ourselves, “ah, what I wouldn’t do to have time to be bored, you little…” and (2) try to get the kid unbored. We also try to prevent boredom before it strikes. Witness the popularity of DVD players in minivans.

I think this approach to boredom misses a few things. First, while it’s true that boredom is unpleasant, lots of other things are unpleasant, and we don’t always take something’s propensity for causing unpleasantness as reason to avoid it (think of the pain associated with lots of exercise; or drinking, for that matter). One of the researchers mentioned in the NYT article says that boredom has “the power to exert pressure on individuals to stretch their inventive capacity.” Boredom may get your mind to wander in directions it wouldn’t have the opportunity to if it were distracted with activity or entertainment. You might end up thinking about new things, or old things in new ways, or to have what is sometimes unclearly referred to as a “moment of clarity.” Call these the “goods of boredom.”

Second, though there are goods of boredom, we should be interested in our children’s ability to escape boredom once it is contracted. One thing that makes a person interesting is his ability to see the world as interesting, and this ability is a key to escaping boredom. So, to regularly alleviate a child’s boredom through distraction or entertainment is to deprive the child of the practice of finding something interesting. This means not only that the child will continue to torment you with wails of “I’m bored,” with the expectation of you solving his "problem"; it means that you will be depriving your child of one of the ways by which to become an interesting person (and the goods that come along with that).

Third, if a child is pretty good at escaping boredom once it is contracted, then she may be less susceptible to boredom in the first place. This child might experience less frequently the goods of boredom, but that’s only because she is, or is on her way to becoming, an interesting person.

I wonder if these thoughts could lead to a plausible virtue-theoretic account of boredom. Boredom is an emotion, like fear. Just as courage is the appropriate state to be in regarding fear (the mean between recklessness and cowardice), we can ask what the appropriate state to be in regarding boredom is. It may be easier to do the kid version of this first. If a kid has a deficiency in the value he is able to experience in being bored, he is an annoying, pestering, whiny, drain on one’s patience. On the other hand, if the kid has an excess of enthusiasm for boredom—“What do you want to do today, kiddo?” “Nothing.” “Aren’t you going to be bored?” “Yeah. That’s why I want to do nothing.” “But that’s what you did yesterday”—then we start to question our worries about overmedicating our children. So what are the names for these states, and for the state that the virtuous child displays in regard to boredom?

P.S. I am happy to report that my kids are pretty good at finding the world interesting. One of the favorite activities of kids #1 and 2 is taking all sorts of household objects (including dozens of old computer cables sent to them by their grandfather) and creating myriad inventions and devices with them. They are constantly solving “problems” with these inventions. It is very MacGyver of them. And by the way, have you seen MacGyver’s less virtuous counterpart, MacGruber?