Notes on Boredom 2

These are polished notes I had written after reading articles about boredom, capitalism, and how technology has impacted boredom.

Boredom – An Infinite Epilogue to the Modern Stranger

Boredom is an intrinsic force to modern humanity, where it is experienced in endless surplus when one exists in contemporary society. This feeling is pervasive through the abundance of transitional spaces, where people internalize this liminality as defining their life in a series of transitions. Profound boredom teeters into depression, where nothing in the world is interesting or holds meaning. Modern boredom is a kind of emptiness rooted in a lack of community, as writers believe that it is caused from the rise of secularization as people face existential dread, a loss of community, and a loss of identity.

Through the hole that religion used to exist in, modern life wears the person down and takes the space where religion has left. Modern society is attempting to find structure and order through psychology by focusing on internal narratives. Character driven media is a response to the issue of a nonsensical external world trying to find sense in the internal. As time passes with no action to address a chaotic outer world, people are compelled to connect with others in a state of anxiety and alienation, resulting in a culture where unacted intentions holds just as much weight as an acted action.

The author (Beghetto) states that ennui and boredom are distinct, but in the age of the internet, boredom and ennui have no difference. Ennui differs as it involves a sense of superiority towards one’s own surroundings but still is unable to connect and faces a greater misery. As the past is finished and the future is fixed, the present seems meaningless and unnecessary, a giant period of transition to a future that one lacks control over. Modern humanity feels incredibly disconnected, stemming from immense alienation and boredom, where the feeling is unwanted and seen as unnatural when a disconnect to the world is the norm. As modernity is characterized by its liminality, the transition to cyberspace was natural, as there is no real end goal on the internet, only a long history of transitions.

Boredom is hard to acknowledge as technology is effective at suppressing it but not eradicating it, if boredom is a state of desire for a more exciting future, where one can identify themselves and engage with their environment– that said future is already lost. In our culture, modernity has become so boring, people turn to nostalgic tradition for its novelty and supposed simplicity. This escapism is often seen as an immature reaction to being unable to cope with reality, if boredom is over-dwelling on reality, escapism is reality’s outright rejection. Escapism and boredom go hand in hand, as escapism is a direct result of unwanted boredom, 21st century escapism is on social media, as the combination of boredom and escapism is movement within a liminal space with the potential to create a realm of possibility.

Heidegger on Boredom and Technology

Postmodernity is defined by its immediate satisfaction and demand for technological innovation sustained by profound boredom. The issue with instant satisfaction is that the organic creativity generated to fight boredom is stifled, and stifles the opportunity for philosophical thought. Profound boredom– boredom against life itself is a reflection of power where those who experience it have disposable income, time, and can access instant gratification. Individuals who experience this deep boredom oscillate between high emotional intensity with the stress of its terror and its complete solitude. In these states of boredom, humans exert power and cruelty. Boredom can be used as a psychological padding where the individual experiencing it cannot face themself or their actions, and boredom is a tool to delay displeasure.

It is not the excess of leisure that makes boredom the defining emotion of everyday life, but through the loss of boredom killers such as scholarship, religion, media or technology consumption. As liberalists believe that technology would increase leisure and self-actualization, in the end technology has overemphasized leisure and attempts to automate self-actualization. Heidegger believes that killing boredom through technology and media has resulted in intensifications that make both more rapid, stimulating, and advanced as previously exposed stimuli become over-exposed and finds current exposures boring. Boredom is no longer an internal issue that the individual must fix but as an industrial failure.

Heidegger believes that moods are fundamental to give life meaning, shaping out experiences, making reality possible and digestible. We are the result of moods, not the inverse. Moods give us reason to exist in the world, as the universe naturally pushes us out from its meaninglessness and vastness. Through emotion, it gives us reason to engage with something so indifferent, helping us pad out the terror of existential reflection and making our lack of control bearable. Anxiety is when there is no ontological padding to make this terror bearable. To embrace nihilism is to reject an ontological enscoring, to reject the feeling of belonging or settling, to refuse the question the anxiety that arises when rejecting the enscoring. Nihilism in a way is a sense of deep boredom. As anxiety and boredom is confronted with the insignificance of a finite self, anxiety is in terror of this mystery while boredom turns away in avoidance.

Boredom needs to be confronted, not suppressed or ignored, as nihilism wins and boredom takes over. A person who embraces nihilism ceases to demand meaning, where the significance of significance itself evaporates. Heidegger believes about the dangers of not trying to find meaning in one’s life.

Through busyness, it also avoids ontological boredom and its following anxiety by engaging in a constant stream of distraction. By being consumed by technology, the world is reduced to a meaningless, empty vessel, abundant with resources that should be consumed. Through technology we make ourselves into extensions of technological forces and processes, creating an attitude that frames anything and everything as material for exploitation. Heidegger believes that a healthy relationship with technology can occur, as long as it does not degrade one’s life and experiences that lets the user distract themselves from ontological terror. In daily consumption of technology, time is sped up, wasted, and accelerated, as humanity is reduced and technology is a tool that has taken the victory of your own time.

Technology has saved us more time with its efficiency, meaning more time to face boredom, meaning more technology is needed to save the individual from boredom, an endless cycle of hunger is created as no amount of technology can save the individual from existential hunger. The feeling of boredom is the symptom and contributing cause of our complacency in philosophical and ontological homelessness. One can beat boredom by accepting it, enduring it where one exposes their lack of belonging in the universe. Any hobbies that does not involve consumption and embraces time, also embraces boredom, as the feeling should not be evaded but faced.

The routine evasion and suppression of boredom in its superficial forms is now customary and institutionalized, where it is now used to prevent any meaningful change, opportunities for boredom are now suppressed. Technology is hailed for what it can become and its opportunities than what it can actually do for us.

The long and the short of it: boredom after the end of the great boredom

Curiosity is what kills boredom, as restoring a sense of ignorance gives people a reason to re-engage with their environment and identify themselves with their surroundings. Realizing that something can be gained destroys boredom. When the outside world becomes overstimulating, rapid, and expected, we escape to others, trying to learn the mind of another person as it feels like the only territory that is unfamiliar.

Through social media, boredom isn’t a prominent issue in people’s lives, but we lose the ability to acknowledge that this distraction is an escape from a fundamental confrontation. The great boredom is now suppressed by little boredom and its distractions. The author (Newman) believes that the ‘great boredom’ was during the period of analogue technology, as there was a clear beginning and end. Digital technology however doesn’t have a determinate length, always living and changing. Art made during the great boredom involves aspects of ‘living through’ the work and enduring its difficulty to make the viewing experience worthwhile. Digital media has become so rapid and eye-catching that appreciating the slower aspects of life is now a real task, its convenience shaping the surrounding culture.

Modern culture’s boredom suggests waiting for a great transformation, a mark that something is becoming. As art becomes a project instead of an object within the post-object experience economy in capitalism, it becomes another distraction where the very structure of its existence becomes problematic as it can imply that the future can be manipulated by a predictable present. Art of the great boredom has effectively disappeared and post-studio art is both a resistance and fetishization to the object and the artist, marking them as an isolated genius to give art a socio-political role. In conceptual art, the art is not found with the objects but instead of the phenomena in your head, as the act of processing the object in turn becomes the experience that you pay for.

Existential boredom has the opportunity to transform into something new, as Newman believes that the experience of individual boredom will become different in the 21st century, turning into something that might not be seen as boredom anymore. Time is now spent consuming, where the need to waste time has turned productive as everything needs to grab your attention and sell you a product. This creates a question of how an authentic identity can be gained in a world eager to profit off of one’s persona, as the self is always prone to becoming a consumable cog in our economy. How can boredom be regained without making it become marketable, as wasting time is now gaining value for other people.

The modern mood is an extreme form of not existing in oneself, as you must always embody a laborer, an advertisement, or a consumer. Through this commodification, sentimentality is lost as everything can be rendered boring and unimportant requiring intensification. Boredom is a response to the abstraction of money brought on by the acceleration of urban life under capitalism where the modern person accepts that the end can never be truly defined. Through boredom it is used as a coping mechanism to reject media and advertisements to garner internal control, guaranteeing that one is still present, content with doing nothing but existing with oneself without actually knowing what should be done.

This repeated exposure where things become meaningless, emptier, and have less meaning where consumption is supposed to be a distraction but becomes a kind of boredom through repetition. Boredom is when the new has always been familiar and expected, and the level of discontent has resulted in a complete withdrawal. As time has become commodified under capitalism, minor boredoms reject major boredoms. Newman has also considered that the expectation of waiting itself may be a part of the problem, as it opens the avenues where all lived time is transformed into abstract labor as the project of capital.

Abstract labor is defined as a set of actions outside of typical labor that gains capital for someone else, like how your actions are tracked on social media, as it is sold off to advertisers, watching videos online to generate an income from someone else while the ‘laborer’ is never able to financially benefit. It is required by capitalism that time is abstracted further, and it is the commodification of self and one’s skills (to generate labor) that also increase boredom. Despite boredom itself leading to skills and non-boring experiences, as after the mid century ‘great boredom’ all boredom has become financialized.

Newman identifies different kinds of boredom types, outside the mid-century final ‘great boredom’ there is the boredom of necessary work, the urban-overstimulated withdrawal as a way to maintain internal control, the banality of suburban idealism, and the tedious yet necessary civic virtues. All of these boredoms need to be dissected and given meaning to, but as the standard of boredom has changed under social media, it now needs to be suppressed and capitalized upon. This new boredom is stemmed from exhaustion and a lack of significance, where the private life has now been colonized, distraction is now being desensitized, and existential boredom is suppressed by minor boredoms.

The totalisation of capital was never through the object but its potential, never ending in this pursuit because there was nothing that could ever mark its beginning, labor is now so broad, the act of living is now a kind of labor to generate capital. The abstraction of capital has manipulated societal concepts like definitions to become meaningless and convoluted, hiding under the guise of its agreed upon definition. It becomes a mental labor devoid of intentionality but still appearing as intentional on the surface, in reality it is the opposite of creative and personalized, weaponizing subjectivity as a distraction from the reality of no individual choice in a system. It is through subjectivity that engaging in labor is now a personal choice rather than a necessity to live.

As technology has advanced and one can be accessed outside of work, work life and private life collapse in its distinctions as private life and relationships become a kind of labor. Is boredom still able to be seen as a refusal or withdrawal? Is it still a way of waiting to find desire when the act of desiring becomes a form of abstract labor? As consumption used to be private, through boredom it has been reduced to insignificance as a response to media and technology intensifying to hyper-exposed stimuli.

In the 21st century, we have enabled systems where behavior no longer becomes a question of intentionality or perception and boredom becomes an issue that can be solved through surveillance and consumption– the future is now easily predictable within an order of probability that cannot be picked up on in our consciousness. The laborer has now become data to plan for contingencies. The future is now in the modality of possibility, where determining the future enables its adoption, as the abstraction and financialization of labor for capital is now always anticipated. Boredom itself is now incorporated as a micro-temporality for computation, fordist laborer boredom outside the factory needed to be endured privately. But in surveillance capitalism, there is no more ‘outside’ of labor, those who can experience the ‘outside’ of labor are those with financial privilege.

If profound boredom is the withdrawal of potential, surveillance capitalism makes sure all potentials are reduced to possibilities that can be financialized through data and machine learning. Now, passing through boredom ceases to be a way to hold off depression, but instead indistinguishable from it. There is no transformation that occurs but exhaustion and collapse. There is no great boredom. The individual experiences stuplimity, where the experience of being aesthetically overwhelmed but does not involve terror or pain, it supersedes tranquility that is closer to fatigue. The great boredom served as the last hope that art can change us through idle exhaustion. In the intensive neverending environment of a capitalist cyberspace, the brain is no longer allowed to be idle and is now constantly fed low-level stimuli.

Surveillance capitalism aims to transform all of life to a source of surplus value. The status of boredom oscillates between withdrawal into potential and the hesitation before possibilities that will be determined through actualization. Chance is a way to maintain contingency, an alternative solution to the loss of potential in the predictability of possibilities. Boredom is now a reflection of wanting to no longer be capitalized on or overwhelmed. Desire is now a threat to the integrity of the subject in terms of judgement. Boredom, which could have been a form of resistance is now seen as the cycle of repetition, exploited and appropriated alongside personal time.

Everything is both attention grabbing and boring, with no great sense of unfolding but with a low-level fatigue. The abstraction of experience is now turned into data and corporate profit pre-empting the conversion of potential into the counter-possibility of a transformation that would interrupt the machine.

The appropriation of boredom has clear and disastrous consequences where time is now capitalized upon through abstract labor with complete self-indulgence and no goal. Boredom always involves a problem with desire and the future and now it encounters surveillance capitalism through its monetization of anticipated behaviors and decisions, killing off potential chances of individual freedoms for the future.