I recently stumbled across a 2003 interview given to a German public television station by the late author of Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace. Though the entire interview is worth a watch, I found Wallace to be particularly insightful, as he lamented the inability of even the most intelligent of his friends to sit in silence and read a book. Even among my highly intelligent peers, it is becoming increasingly rarer to encounter students who spend their free time in silence, reading a book (can you blame them?). Many prefer to browse their TikTok feeds, scrolling through a sea of visual heroin (the Family Guy clips set alongside Subway Surfers gameplay immediately jumps to mind). I, however, am of the opinion that we should all aim to start experiencing the many joys, and benefits, of boredom.
Though the TikTok overstimulation phenomenon is a recent one, Wallace hinted at its cause two decades ago. According to the writer, “it has something to do with when you feel like the purpose of your life is to gratify yourself and get things for yourself and go all the time. There’s this other part of you that’s almost hungry for silence and quiet and thinking really hard about the same thing for maybe half an hour instead of 30 seconds that doesn’t get fed at all.”
Wallace’s explanation is reminiscent of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s treatment of boredom as one of the two poles of human life, with the other pole being desire. We feel that we lack something, we pursue it, and if we are lucky, we capture it. This capture does not satiate our desires, so we end up where we started and begin our pursuit of a new object.
So, does it really have to be like this? Am I stuck in a constant feedback loop of boredom, desire, and disappointment?
Fortunately, the way out of this predicament is rather simple: embrace being bored. I don’t mean to suggest that we all must turn to asceticism and disavow worldly delights. Instead, I would suggest that boredom is the necessary precursor to satisfying the other side of us that David Foster Wallace says we neglect to feed.
Boredom is a sign of an intelligent being. Perhaps the more intelligent one is, the more prone to boredom they are. It takes a very rich and engaging world to hold the attention of a genius.
If it is intelligence that makes us so prone to boredom, it follows that the way out of this boredom would come by way of a truly creative act that stimulates and sustains our intellectual capacities. The most extreme example of this comes from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Antichrist, where he muses that God was bored, so he invented man. The creative capacities of intelligent beings are unlocked when the intellect has an opportunity to rest. A mind bombarded by the overstimulation of TikTok Family Guy clips is far too active to engage in anything productive or creative.
So, the next time you feel the urge to start mindlessly scrolling, pick up that book you’ve been meaning to read but never got around to. Hopefully this article has bored you enough to do so.