Boredom
Description
'Expressive Egg':
"Boredom is solipsism, an inability to participate in meaningful experience. Consciousness becomes severed from the quality of the moment, making it impossible to feelingly respond to, meaningfully think about or act upon the world as it is, rather than how it merely appears to be on the screen of the personal mind and in the cauldron of personal emotions. The subjective I becomes trapped, here, witnessing an objective world, there. The self, turned upon itself, becomes confused, frantically anxious and, sooner or later, numb, passionless, the world it drifts through drained of reality, vitality, even of colour and taste, like a television screen sinking into a pond.
We can trace the catastrophic rupture between the conscious I and the quality of the moment back to the dawn of civilisation, around ten thousand years ago, when self first radically split subjective experience from objective nature1 and began informing itself and commanding others, creating a world which simultaneously protected self from a now threatening world, while at the same time frustrating and disheartening the same self, which no longer felt at home in that world. The consequences of this radical subject-object schism were dire — alienation, contention, corruption, sadness, existential fear and… boredom.
And so tedium did not begin, as the pseudonymous author of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or cynically claims, with the spiritual fatigue of wanton gods, but with the self-domestication of man (who then, from his confinement, projected a boring God as the ultimate cause of it all). Just as only domesticated animals exhibit signs of boredom, so only domesticated people do. "
(https://expressiveegg.substack.com/p/on-boredom-1)
History
"We can chart the progress of tedium from Rome to the present day through the development of the technology which spread and sustained it. Far and away the most significant invention in the early story of boredom was literacy, which enabled man to magnify his influence on the objective world, but at a catastrophic cost to his subjectivity, which became conditioned by literacy6 into a learning, owning, remembering and calculating thing among other things, knowledge objects which one could now grasp in a manner that had been, in pre-civilised societies, impossible, unthinkable. Knowledge and power no longer existed in society at all, certainly not in people, but in abstract codices, or books, which had to be learnt or mastered; a boring experience, or at least far more boring than the inspiration, conversation and action that orality privileged.7
Boredom re-appeared in the historical record a few centuries later as the spiritual affliction of acedia that haunted early Christian monks confined in monastic institutions. This boredom was ‘a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind’ that caused anchorites to ‘look anxiously this way and that, sigh that none of [their] brethren come to seem [them]… and frequently gaze up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting.’8 It is not that these desert mystics simply had nothing useful to do, but that, as with Roman elites and Greek intellectuals, they had, through institutional confinement, severed their connection with culture and nature (including their own bodies, which had become a source of shame) opening up a meaningless void that the ‘noonday devil’ could slip into.
Notwithstanding the increasingly prison-like confinement of monastic life and the repressive power of the Church, the fall of Rome radically loosened the grip that highly-literate institutionalised technique, and its alienating effect on human consciousness, had on Europe, allowing for a far less boring existence than what had passed and what was to come. The filthy, riotous, honest, uncertain and terrifying middle-ages had dawned. "