SAVE THE DEEPEST BOREDOM

SUMMARY

The digital economy accelerates our lives, filling every moment with activity and leaving little room for the deep, reflective boredom that fosters creativity. By contrasting superficial boredom with deep, existential boredom, we explore how modern society’s constant pursuit of productivity and connection risks robbing us of the precious mental space needed for true innovation and personal insight.

The digital economy accelerates our days and deprives us of those precious moments of depth where we can make space for creativity and alternative thoughts. Is there a solution? To understand this, we need a trip to Italy and then to Germany.

It’s 1789, and we’re gazing into the Roman countryside under the shade of an elm tree. On the horizon, we see the ruins of the Empire, a flock of sheep, a column capital, and some colonnades worn down by time. Beside us, a 38-year-old German man stands, intently looking at the man in front of him, also German, dressed in creamy white with a wide-brimmed anthracite hat. He’s resting on a rock and directs his gaze to our right.

He is clearly immersed in boredom and trying to relax, likely during one of the many pauses in a long journey, similar to those taken by many intellectuals of the time on their Journey to Italy. The man standing is none other than Wilhelm Johann Heinrich Tischbein, a painter so important to Italy that, in the same year, he will be appointed by the King of Naples as the rector of the Academy of Fine Arts. He is painting a portrait that will become one of the most famous in Germany: it’s a portrait of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, sitting and bored, a traveler between one excursion and another. The painting is called Goethe in the Roman Countryside.

But let’s return to today. Let’s bring our Goethe back to the Roman countryside, perhaps near a rest stop on the Grande Raccordo Anulare around Rome. Most likely, we would find him handing his smartphone to an American tourist to have a picture taken. He wouldn’t need a painter and friend like Tischbein to represent his emotional state, and he certainly wouldn’t be experiencing that precious waste of time called boredom—an emotion rejected by artists and poets, yet incredibly fertile for their productivity.

The solitary mind is often the inventive, ingenious mind. If we are never alone, we might never create. If we are never left alone, we might lose our ability to think unaided. To dream. To fantasize. And thereby to create and invent.        

Donald A. Norman - Turn signals are the facial expressions of automobile        

Pauses to fill

So, today’s Goethe would likely have a smartphone or tablet in his hands. But why? Because today, every moment of pause, every gap between one thing and another, every tiny space between our daily activities must be hunted down, avoided, and, above all, filled. The idea of wasting time and the emptiness that arises when that happens is in stark contrast to today’s every-time, everything, everywhere. It clashes with the promise of an intense life delivered to us in a gift box by the technologies dedicated to information, along with the inevitable "full agenda" syndrome that has emerged from it.

Emptiness, therefore, scares our worldly life and must be filled in every way—preferably with the most famous products from today’s Silicon Valley: clicks, likes, shares, and video screens that now fill our day. It’s no coincidence that one of the many studies accumulated on this topic—perhaps the most interesting—categorizes it as one of the mundane emotions (Mundane emotions: losing yourself in boredom, time, and technology) and inevitably associates it with time and technology. An emptiness of thoughts and actions, of solitude and silence, of waiting but also of meandering, daydreams, and flights of imagination—things that not all scientific research unequivocally describes as useful for creativity.

Two types of boredom

So, is today’s escape from boredom really a harm and a loss of something precious for the intellect? To better understand this, let’s leave California’s algorithms and social networks behind and head back to Germany. It was the German philosopher Martin Heidegger who reflected on boredom, dividing it into two types.

He saw a superficial boredom and a deep boredom. We can borrow this distinction to understand what is happening today. We experience a superficial boredom in empty moments and brief, frequent pauses, the significance of which is amplified by our immediate desires and the constant pressure to be always connected (both technologically and socially) with the world and others.

Acceleration and tight schedules lead us to reject it, but the technological response we get is an illusion of filling up: after the supreme gesture of today’s boredom, the scroll, we return to reality, convincing ourselves that we’ve truly wasted time for nothing. However, there is also a deep boredom, like the one we probably saw in Tischbein’s painting or can find in any of the American painter Edward Hopper’s works, and it can take our thoughts elsewhere.

Perhaps some of us experienced this during the recent pandemic lock-downs. And we know well how it made us touch an existential bottom, which later proved to be so valuable for rediscovering meaning, re-establishing priorities, and better directing our ideas and energies.

Written for Changes Unipol Save the deepest boredom

#creativity #boredom #social #media

Save the deepest boredom