You know the feeling. You play with your hands or tap your foot. Maybe you get up from your seat and start pacing. You feel uncomfortable from nothing.
I am referring to the feeling of boredom. It is an important emotion as it is one that stems from the lack of anything, and learning to embrace boredom can tell us about how humans interact with one another and connect as a species.
Boredom needs to be considered more often because it is affects our behaviors on a daily basis, usually to mitigate that boredom. Consideration of the history of boredom and how it evolved can give a fuller understanding of why it feels as it does, and how it can lead people to reduce reliance on actions or devices that mitigate boredom. It has connections to depression and creativity, making it an extremely interesting and complex feeling.
There are many historical references to boredom and examples of coping with it. I would like to begin this essay with boredom as a feeling that resulted from leisure and lack of anything to do. There are very early accounts of boredom going back to ancient Rome.
There is also a religious association of the feeling of boredom with a demon of laziness and lack of action in the Renaissance, and a want to fill it.
Another shift was in 1852 with the actual creation of the word by Charles Dickens, and not long after many studies started to come out that attempted to define boredom. In 1930, there was physiological study on why factory workers become bored at work, and this is another be a shift in its understanding. With this came the idea of temporary boredom through scheduling, and people finding ways to fill that time.
Along with several shifts in the professional field, there were shifts to view boredom as a timed state, associated with tasks such as a shift at work or a chore at home, a shift in how boredom was seen by the masses.
Finally and most notably is increase in boredom-killing options that exist today, lowering attention spans in people and damaging creativity.
Main question. How has boredom evolved to become more common with the advent of the internet?
Subsidiary questions would be as follows:
What was the source of boredom and how was it perceived by the ancient world?
Why has boredom become better understood and explained in recent years?
What are the health risks and benefits of allowing or not allowing boredom to occur?
I am interested in this topic as I see boredom in good light, and I feel it has been misunderstood and needs to be embraced as a legitimate and powerful tool.
Links:
The History of Boredom | Science | Smithsonian Magazine
I have seen paradigm shifts studied through concrete subject matters rather than an emotion as abstract as boredom, which I think makes your subject particularly interesting. The state of boredom is something that people now experience often, but we do not always acknowledge that people centuries before experienced the same feeling, and your study of these shifts will really shed light on that fact. I look forward to hearing your speech!
Just wanted to jump on here and quickly comment on your topic. I absolutely love the focus you’ve chosen and have been thinking about it since Thursday. I also had the thought that there are really two different types of boredom. There’s productive/creative boredom and there’s stagnant boredom. The differences between those two could be really interesting to explore. Anyway, well done here and I can’t wait to see this project progress!
I love how you chose such an abstract topic! I especially like how you discussed the different interpretations of boredom over the centuries. I feel you could also maybe discuss more about how boredom is different nowadays due to technology. Technology has really created this need to be constantly stimulated, causing people to experience boredom more easily. Thus, we often refer to it as negatively. Maybe you could also include techniques and suggestions on how to curb this mindset. Great work overall! Very engaging!