Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1997

It's Boring: Notes on the Meanings ofBoredom in Everyday Life

Peter Conrad

PROLOGUE

Boredom has long interested me. Reflecting on boredom stirs up sev-eral clear memories. As I child I remember complaining to my grandmotherthat I was bored, and she'd always answer (in German): "Take two littlesticks and drum them on your belly." My parents often had friends overfor Sunday luncheon and then sat around the table talking after the mealwas done for what seemed like hours; why would anyone want to do sucha boring thing, when one could go out and play? As teenagers, we wouldhang out ruefully lamenting about the boredom of suburban life—therewas nothing to do. As I got older, perhaps I was bored less, but I stillthought about it.

In graduate school I read Colin Turnbull's (1961) enchanting bookabout the pygmies in the Ituri forest. These people lived, hunted, migratedand (especially the men) sat around in the forest; their lives seemed calmand almost serene, yet I wondered, didn't they ever get bored? After all,by my standards, there is little to do in the forest and their life was simpleyet repetitive. Was boredom part of their experience? I have taught in uni-versities for twenty-five years and have frequently heard students grumblethat a book, lecture, course, or professor was boring. What did studentsmean by saying something was boring? Or for that matter, what did myadolescent-aged children mean when we asked them to go hiking in theWhite Mountains and they responded, "We don't want to go hiking; it'stoo boring"?

Direct correspondence to Peter Conrad, Department of Sociology, Brandeis University,Waltham, MA 02254-9110.

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C 1997 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

What is this thing boredom? Being boring or bored? What might asociologist make out of all this? I want to take the opportunity here tobegin to explore the meaning of boredom in everyday life.

ON THE EMERGENCE OF BOREDOM

The idea of boredom emerged as a concept in the late 18th century.Surely people had experiences that are similar to what today we might callboredom, but the word first appeared in 1777 in the Dictionnaire of theFrench Academy (Peters 1975). While boredom may be related to olderconcepts for alienation like acedia or ennui, it appeared late in English,without a certain etymological ancestry, and never shared the kind of richspiritual or psychological connotations of ennui (Peters 1975).

In her magisterial study of boredom through literature, Patricia MeyerSpacks (1995) traces the evolution of boredom into the modern notion withwhich we are now familiar. She suggests several factors may explain theincreasing importance of boredom. In part, it is probably related to thedevelopment of the notion of leisure and the increase in what has beencalled leisure time; boredom is something more easily experienced whensomeone does not need to work all the time. Others have also recognizedthis connection to boredom.

The relative freedom from necessity, the growing reliance on consumer goods as away of energizing ourselves, and the sense of liberation and emancipation felt bymany Americans provide the conditions where boredom can so easily, andeffortlessly, be experienced. (Brissett and Snow, 1993, 244)

Prior to modern times, according to Brissett and Snow (1993, 245), "mun-dane life was hard but not boring."

Boredom arose with the increasing emphasis on the individual, par-ticularly the greater concentration on the self. This played itself out in sev-eral ways. "The intensification of concern with individual rights." includingthe right to happiness, led to more concern with boredom as an unpleasantstate. The growing emphasis upon the individual also encouraged payingmore attention to one's subjective life, a greater focus on inner experiences,invoking all sorts of "feelings" including boredom (Specks 1995). It seemslikely that prior to increased leisure and affluence, it didn't much matterwhether life was deemed interesting or boring. The importance of thesekinds of distinctions may be a peculiarity of modern times.

Some evidence suggests that boredom is becoming a more commonstate in the twentieth century, or at least more writers have taken to com-menting upon it Orrin Klapp (1986) argues that an increase in the use ofthe word boredom between 1931 and 1961 reflects an expansion of bore-

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dom in modern society. Other studies have suggested that a growing per-centage of the population finds boredom a "great problem" in filling leisuretime (Specks 1995, 3). Numerous commentators have suggested that insome quarters at least, boredom is a significant problem at work (Molstad1986; Fisher 1993).

WHAT IS BOREDOM?

We can think of numerous words that connote boredom: weariness,tedium, monotony, inattention, disinterest, dull, repetitive, and tiresome,to name just a few. Boredom can be defined more specifically as "an un-pleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasivelack of interest in and difficulty concentrating on the current activity"(Fisher 1993,396). Boredom is deemed a fundamentally negative subjectivestate where the individual experiences little interest in what is currentlyhappening.

In our culture there are recognizable signs indicative of boredom, suchas yawning or twiddling one's thumbs, along with more ambiguous signs,like day dreaming or turning one's attention to other tasks (e.g., doodling).These signs serve to signify one's boredom and relay the message to others.

There has been some sociological interest in the meaning of boredom,perhaps most notably in a recent thoughtful article by Brissett and Snow(1993). They conceptualize boredom as an interactional phenomenon di-rectly connected to social rhythms:

Boredom, in its most basic sense, is an experience of the absence of momentumor flow in a person's life. What is going on, and what the person is doing, seemsto have lost impetus and life stands still. (Brissett and Snow 1993, 238)

They see boredom related to a disconnection from the future. Boredomthus occurs

...when what is going on has no, or too few. personally viable implications for thefuture of the bored person. Literally, boredom is the experience of "dead ending,"of being someplace with nowhere to go, of being disengaged from the ebb and flowof human interaction. (Brissett and Snow 1993, 240-1)

While Brissett and Snow's examination of boredom rightly contextualizesboredom in everyday life, it is not obvious that most people experienceboredom as the absence of flow. Indeed, I wonder if many people actuallyexperience momentum or flow as a regular feature of their life experience.Moreover, it is not clear to what degree forms of garden variety boredomare related to "where the future isn't." If the meaning here is the immediatefuture, when this "boring" event or activity will pass, then Brissett and Snow

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are surely correct. But it may not be necessary to connect boredom to un-certain futures to understand its meaning.

Boredom is in part a function of social expectations. Spacks (1995,11)suggests that

...the category of boredom implies a set of expectations of the external world thatapparently did not affect our remote predecessors. The detail of life in the distantpast may sound boring to us; indeed, some may have imagined Eden as boring.Adam and Eve, before the Fall, found little occupation and no excitement.

It would be difficult to experience boredom unless we anticipated the pos-sibility of something else. Psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel suggested boredomoccurs when something expected doesn't occur and that "we have the rightto expect" helpful stimulation from the social world (cited in Spacks 1995,6-7). When this is not coming, in his view, we are "justifiably bored." WhileFenichel sees this as resulting from an inherent "need for intense mentalactivity," it seems to me that boredom may be more situationally and cul-turally variable than Finichel suggests. Boredom stems not from expecta-tions rooted in our nature, but from failing to meet socially derivedexpectations.

Boredom is a social construction—an interpretive category that hascommon uses in everyday life. It is a term we use to describe a certainfeeling of disinterest or our experience of a situation that is tedious. Thusat the very least, it is a label we use to depict a feeling or situation thatwe find unpleasant or unrewarding. In our society to call something boringattributes certain characteristics to it, at the same time discounting it or atleast presenting it in a negative light. Boredom is as an inclusive explana-tory notion; boring has become an all purpose term of disapproval, espe-cially among the young. This is exemplified in the teenage appellation"bore-r-ring." Indeed, boring can be used as a powerful epithet. Who wantsto meet a boring person, take a boring course or read a boring book? Inaddition, boredom can be invoked as a vocabulary of motive, as in "I'mbored so I'm leaving" or "that was just too boring for me to do" (cf. Brissettand Snow 1993). Whatever boredom is in our society, it has largely a nega-tive designation.1

But boredom is also in the eye of the beholder. What may be boringto one person may be fascinating to another. Boredom is not a charac-teristic of an object, event or person, but exists in the relationship betweenindividuals and their interpretation of their experience. A baseball gamemay be an object of great interest to one, while being deadly boring toanother. A chemistry course may be the epitome of boredom for somestudents, and a never-ending font of fascination for others. While theremay be some activities that are nearly universally experienced as boring,

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this does not negate the insight that boredom is a relationship and is notintrinsic to any event or object.

Thus I believe that often when boredom is invoked as an explanation,it is a gloss. It describes only the endpoint, the interpretation of the situ-ation. It is an indication that something is happening (or not happening)but says little of what that is. It doesn't tell us much about the event orobject, or even what the person's evaluation of it might be. When someonedeclares, "it's boring" or "I'm bored" it may be useful to probe further. Atthe very least we can ask, what are you bored of or what is it that is boring?Or we might ask, what is really going on here; what is the term boringemblematic of in this situation? Simply depicting something as boringdoesn't say very much.

To explore this notion of boredom further, I want to begin to unpackwhat is meant when boredom is invoked. I will use illustrations from myown experience and from 35 students who were asked to write about arecent boring experience and describe what was boring about it. As anyonewho works in a university knows, students have well-developed "boredomdetectors." While they sometimes may appear a bit cavalier in their desig-nations, they often experience boredom as part of their college experience.As I caveat, I must say this is a most preliminary exploration of the mean-ings boredom and as such presents only a sketch of the meaning of bore-dom in everyday life.

MEANINGS OF BOREDOM

If boredom is a gloss for what is going on, we need to look moreclosely at how people talk about boredom. Since I am relying largely onstudent responses for my investigation, the examples relate mostly to thestudents' immediate experience, including college courses and professors.While these surely do not exhaust boring situations, they allow us a certainwindow into boredom.

As a first cut, we can identity two meanings of boredom as experiencedby students. Undoubtedly there are other meanings, but by focusing onthese two we can begin to have some insight in what boring means in every-day life.

Boredom as Understimulation

When asked why they were bored, students' common response wasthere was "nothing to do."

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Saturday afternoon when there is nothing on TV and I have no car to go anywherewith, I feel bored. I felt like I had nothing to do and no way to find something todo. (M, 19)

Of course, the claims of "nothing to do" didn't literally mean there wasnothing one could do, only that there was nothing they wanted to do orthat aroused their interest.

One Friday night. There I was, I had my license, a car to drive, friends I couldhang out with, yet there I was—Bored. There was nothing peaking my interest onTV—I didn't feel like staying in either...simply had no interest in doing anything,but didn't want to sit there and do nothing. (F, 18).

On occasions, it seemed like they had done all they could in the situationand had nothing left to do, at least in terms of the tasks at hand.

I was at the restaurant where I work late one afternoon waitressing and there wasno one there. It was a rainy day and it appeared no one wanted to venture out. Ihad done all the prep work for the night shift and other little jobs—so there wasnothing left to do. (F, 20)

Or that they had exhausted all their resources, and were left, again, withnothing to do.

On an airplane [coming] home from Israel.... There was nothing to do after a movie,reading for hours and listening to music. It was a really long plane ride (14 hours)and one will run out of things to do, eventually. (F, 19)

When people find themselves with "nothing to do" in a situation wherethey wish they had something to do—if only to occupy them enough sothe time would seem to pass more quickly—the experience of boredom islikely. The absence of external stimulation when it is desired seems to en-gender boredom.

Sometimes, however, people can actually be involved in an activity andstill feel bored. In this excerpt, a young man describes his boredom at thegym, a place he goes regularly.

Sitting on the exercise bike yesterday, I felt like the 10 minutes that I was on itwere actually 100; tune just dripped by. The boredom I felt was immense, it mademe feel edgy and gave me the urge to just go up off the bike and start my weightsworkout[I think I was bored because] the gym was empty. There was no visual ormental stimulus besides the role activity of biking, I felt no stimulation.... (M, 20)

Here it seems the immediate lack of stimulation, perhaps particularly in-teraction with others, led to his feeling bored. But lack of stimulation neednot only be immediate, it can occur over long periods of time. Then theexperience of boredom can become a regular feature of life.

My second semester of freshman year in college, I was extremely bored. For somereason, my course load just turned out to be too light. Even if I read every singlearticle on reserve and took a whole week to write a paper, I never had enough todo...all of my friends had immense amounts of work and couldn't spend inordinate

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amounts of time with me. So besides boredom, I felt guilt that I wasn't doing workwhen they were. (F, 20)

The boredom attributed to too little to do made this young woman un-happy, so she remedied this with a more challenging workload the nextsemester.

The boredom described here is one of understimulation. For whateverreason, students experienced little stimulation from their social environs.This is clearly related to what they define as to "do", implicitly meaningwhat they would like to do.

As Fenichel noted, we come to expect stimulation from life. In par-ticular, this takes the form of external stimulation, for it seems likely thatinternal stimulation (e.g., thoughts, imagination, fantasy) could be availableto all. One could blame the students for their own boredom; after all, theremust be something that would stimulate them, or couldn't they be moreimaginative, or why not go read a good book. Does the world really owepeople stimulation? But this misses the point; understimulation is a situ-ation that people frequently call boredom.

Boredom as Disconnection

As we encounter the everyday world, we continually engage and dis-engage in social interactions. When we are engaged, we feel interested andconnected to the world around us. Sometimes disengagement is pleasant,as when we rest, relax or just "chill out." But if the disengagement is adisconnection to what is going on, if the activity continues without our mak-ing a connection with it, we can feel bored.

For students, some course-related experiences are the quintessentialboring situation. Some students said simply when they were not interestedin a subject or because something was a "waste of time" they were bored.But "lack of interest" tells us little about the nature of boredom; it is un-clear whether "lack of interest" or "waste of time" are causes or effects offeeling bored. There are of course things that are more or less interestingto different people, but the "intrinsic" interest of the subject does not byitself determine whether it will be deemed boring.

We can examine what the students say to identify some characteristicsof situations that lead to feeling bored. Students reported boredom occur-ring while sitting in class and a professor was talking on a topic "that Ihave no knowledge about", "that had no point" "repeated what I alreadyknew" or was "over my head." Too much or too little familiarity seem tomake it difficult for students to connect to the interaction. This was am-

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plified by some structural factors: large lecture classes, classes with no par-ticipation, required courses. As one student noted:

I get extremely bored when I am in a class lecture, which is either repetitive orover my head...because I [cannot] connect with what is being discussed. (M, 20)

Numerous students mentioned repetition as an aspect of boredom. Whatappears to students to be unnecessary repetition can lead to spacing outor disconnecting from the interaction. This listener feels they have already"got" it, so why stay engaged.

Disconnection can occur out of class as well. This student was in thelibrary reading an assigned article for a class.

The article discussed art forms and how they relate to optics. The feeling ofboredom came after reading half-way through the article...I can remember a feelingof frustration because I didn't feel confident that I was understanding the material.This feeling of not understanding the article made the boredom worse because itseemed such a waste of time... (F, 21)

The difficulty this young woman was having comprehending the article lefther unconnected to her reading.

Students frequently blame teachers for "boring" classes. The one over-whelming characteristic they associate with boredom is the delivery of alecture in a monotone voice. The lack of action makes it difficult for stu-dents to engage.

The professor never moved from his seat, spoke in a monotone voice, and seemedunaware (or uncaring) of this student's presence.... (F, 22)

Perhaps this is where disconnection and understimulation meet to createa particularly powerful sense of boredom. The lack of action is also re-flected in students attributing boredom due to an absence of interactionor participation in classes.

Disconnection can of course occur in other situations. A student wroteabout his experience of boredom at a family gathering.

At my mother's engagement party in a fairly fancy restaurant... We all sat in twotables and were there for at least 4-5 hours. It was boring because the conversationwas repetitive and generally stupid-consisting primarily of where do you go tocollege, do you like it, and what is your major. It seemed endless, and at the endI felt I was replying [with] the same cliche answers. (M, 19)

We have all had such experiences, and worse, social occasions when theinteraction seemed banal or repetitive or where we didn't know anyoneand couldn't make interactive contact There was just "nothing we couldrelate to;" or rather, a disconnection that we cannot name, and hence callboredom.

Several other sources of disconnection come to mind. One results froma "bad fit" between the individual and situation. A rock-only music lover

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at the opera or a nonsports fan at a baseball game might well experienceboredom through an inability to connect. A second might be a lack of con-text; it takes a certain amount of knowledge and context to appreciate clas-sical ballet or a game of cricket. Without these, engagement is difficult andboredom is likely. I experienced an extreme of this when at a professionalmeeting I attended a lecture that was entirely in French (which I don'tunderstand), in a room I was unable to leave. There was no hope for con-nection in that situation, so for the hour I felt very bored,

CONCLUDING REMARKS

We have briefly examined some meanings of boredom, at least as ar-ticulated by students. What is clear is that "boringness" is not intrinsic tothe object or event, but how it is experienced and attributed. Understimu-lation and disconnection can be pleasant if one wants to rest or meditate,but when not desired, they can be interpreted as boredom. There are fac-tors that contribute to the likelihood of occasions being depicted as boring,such as repetition, lack of interaction, and minimal variation, but it seemsthat something else is a key trigger to becoming bored. These can be social,individual or cultural.

Boredom has a temporal dimension and may be in part contingent onthe social organization of time. Boredom may be more likely to occur inspaces where large blocks of tune need to be filled. One is not often boredin five minutes, especially when one knows that something more stimulatingor engaging will follow.3 The experience of the slow passage of time, whileperhaps also reflecting understimulation or disconnection, may result fromthe temporal structure of a situation. Situations that are particularly regularor stable—one's with little variety in action—can lack temporal oscillationand thus are more likely to be felt to be boring (Fine, 1990). Fine (1990)notes that an absence of temporal autonomy—a lack of control of temporaldecision-making or how to use time—in these situations can create a struc-ture that amplifies the experience of boredom. Thus boredom can be a func-tion of the way time is socially organized and one's relation to it.

It is likely that individual characteristics such as mood, tiredness, pre-vious experiences, personal interests, and the like also influence whethersomeone becomes bored in a particular situation. But even given these, itis the interpretation of situations that creates boredom. Sometimes a claimof boredom may serve to justify one's own withdrawal of attention andinteraction. Other situational factors that we did not explore here, such asthe inability to leave or ignore a situation, a kind of "entrapment", maywell exacerbate feelings of boredom.

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Boredom is sure to vary by cultural expectations. "Waiting" is oftenan occasion of potential boredom. By definition, waiting is referenced tothe future until what one is waiting for arrives or one's turn comes. Inwaiting, there may seem to be "nothing going on" except the waiting, surelya recipe for boredom. But is this inherent to the situation? When I livedin Indonesia, people often had to wait for long stretches in the bank or ina government office; Americans would get bored and impatient with thewaiting, while Indonesians would see it as something to be expected or asan opportunity to socialize.

One of the fundamental attributes of boredom may be misaligned ex-pectations. It is possible that we would not be bored if we did not expectmore from situations. In our society we expect stimulation and connectionsfrom certain situations and events and may feel bored when social occasionsfall short of our expectations. These may be general expectations aboutsocial interactions, as well as specific expectations of college courses orforms of entertainment. Boredom is a failure of expectation. To reduceboredom, theoretically at least, one could just as well change one's expec-tations or interpretations of the situation or one's relationship to it. "Bor-ingness" isn't out there; it is between there and us.

Fortunately humans are not always stymied by boredom. We may com-plain about it, but many have learned ways of dealing with it. AdoptingHirschman's (1970) terms, we can choose exit or voice. By exit, we maylearn how to deal with boredom by spacing out, engaging in other activities(from fantasy to doodling), moving into what Goffman called "aways," cre-ating games to occupy oneself, leaving the situation, or any number of otherways of psychically or bodily leaving boredom behind. By voice, we chal-lenge the sources of boredom individually or collectively, identify andgrouse about it, or confront it directly. With boredom, exit seems the mostcommon response. While it is always possible that some people relish theexperience of boredom, most want to leave or change it.

Boredom may be a malaise of modernity, but in the pantheon of hu-man problems it is a relatively minor irritation. It has become an "all-pur-pose index of dissatisfaction" (Specks 1993, 249), a vocabulary ofdiscontent, indicating a sort of alienation from the moment. It reminds usthat the best we can do is endeavor to make our lives interesting.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to the students for sharing their boring experiences withme and to Phil Brown and Gary Alan Fine for comments on an earlierdraft of this paper.

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ENDNOTES

1. While many have lamented boredom as a negative experience, the anthropologist RalphLinton contended that "the human capacity for being bored, rather than man's socialand natural needs, lies at the root of man's cultural advance" (quoted in Sparks 1995,2).

2. Students and others often lay blame on the object (e.g., teacher, book, movie, class, etc.)for boredom, but as I have tried to show the source of boredom is more complex. Thereis no guarantee that a more dynamic or less repetitive presentation would by itselfeliminate boredom.

3. I am grateful to Gary Alan Fine for pointing out that boredom has temporal dimensions.

REFERENCES

Brissett, D., and Snow, R. P. (1993). Boredom: Where the future isn't. Symbolic Interaction,16, 237-56.

Fine, G. A. (1990). Organizational time: Temporal demands and the experience of work inrestaurant kitchens. Social Forces, 69, 95-114.

Fisher, C. D. (1993). Boredom at work: A neglect concept. Human Relations, 46, 395-417.Hirschman, H. (1970). Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Finns, Organizations,

and States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Klapp, O. (1986). Overload and Boredom. New York: Greenwood Press.Molstad, C. (1986). Choosing and coping with boring work. Urban Life, 15, 215-36.Peters, E. (1975). Notes toward an archaeology of boredom. Social Research, 42, 493-511.Spacks, P. M. (1995). Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press.Turnbull, C. (1961). The Forest People. New York: Simon and Schuster.

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