At the start of a recent semester, I showed a YouTube video to my students that lauded the perks of ditching social media. I thought it was a clever accompaniment to the assigned reading from Pascal’s “Pensées,” where Pascal argues that we seek distraction to avoid living with purpose before God.
The video recommended that if you quit social media you’ll be bored, and that’s good because boredom might prompt fruitful self-reflection and spur creativity. With so many potent and addictive distractions around us all the time, it’s easier to drown out boredom than to pass through it to the benefits on the far side.
Stuck on a Charlotte tarmac
Nobody likes to be bored. Stuck on a tarmac for almost three hours a while back, I remembered how awful it can be. My daughter and I were on our way home to Maine after visiting family in Tennessee when our plane got slammed by a thunderstorm in Charlotte as we landed. Delays and cancellations grounded everything and left our plane without a gate to let us out. The air had been turned off, and an incessant high-pitched noise rang from either the brakes or the engine. It was maddening.
Trapped in that hot, tubular prison, I felt what Mary Mann, author of “Yawn: Adventures in Boredom,” describes as boredom’s “restless irritation.” My daughter somehow slept, while the heat and noise and my anxious thoughts about missing our connection hindered me from doing anything fruitful like reading.
I was bored beyond any state of boredom I could remember.
Being bored doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something wrong with us. It was hard not to be bored on that Charlotte tarmac (and some students might say the same about my classes). But as Mann explains, boredom might signal “that the train of life has stopped on its tracks, that the narrative is going nowhere.” The late philosopher Harry
Frankfurt writes that our aversion to boredom is not “merely a casual resistance to more or less innocuous discomfort.” It is a vigorous resistance to the possibility that there might be something about our interior lives akin to death.
Boredom pushes us to confront ourselves. But usually it’s easier to change the channel.
The REAL source of unhappiness
“I have often said,” Pascal writes in fragment 168 of “Pensées,” “that all human unhappiness comes from one thing alone, the inability to remain quietly in a room.” This is why we “so love hustle bustle” and why “finding pleasure in solitude is so incomprehensible.”
Without some kind of diversion to pass the time, boredom might take hold. It might direct us to pay more serious attention to ourselves, and this is something we do not like to do. We chase this or that goal and don’t quite realize that what pleases us is the hullabaloo of the chase itself. Because when we catch what we’ve been after and come to a modicum of rest, we don’t know what to do with ourselves. A quiet boredom creeps up, and we might find ourselves questioning from somewhere deep inside: Who are you, where did you come from, where are you going?
For Pascal, these questions reflect more than a vague anxiety about the quality of our lives. There’s a “secret instinct” within us, he writes, “a vestige of the greatness of our original nature,” that knows we are made for something more (168). It knows that we are made for God, that God claims us for rest and beatitude. So, if we let the buzz of distractions fade and if we’re willing to sustain the silence, we can find God in the stillness. But those are big “ifs.”
The true place of rest
Pascal reminds us of God’s “love and consolation” and “infinite mercy” (690). So if boredom is a restless irritation that stems from a secret anxiety that our lives have no meaning – or perhaps a meaning from God that we’ve squandered – it’s good to remember that, by the grace of God, our lives’ meaning is not ultimately up to us.
Our rest “is neither outside nor within ourselves” but in both, because it is in God.
And so the good news is that if our modern gizmos have allowed us to lose sight of our highest end, we don’t have far to go to find it. At the precipice of his conversion, Augustine realized that turning to God didn’t require “ships or chariots or feet,” but simply “the will to go” because God is always already more present to us than we are to ourselves (Confessions 8.8.19).
It’s in that same spirit that Pascal tells us we can find our true happiness quietly in our room. It’s just that our rooms come with much more techno-glitzy noise than they did in 17th-century France. Our unique challenge is to discern how to fight these distractions – to switch them off, turn them down and learn again how to be still, even if at first it might feel a little boring.
Jeff Morgan is an associate professor of theology at St. Joseph’s College of Maine and writes twice a month on his Substack, “Classics and Crumbs.” This is condensed from an article published at www.wordonfire.org.