Boredom, also called ennui (pronounced /ɑ̃nɥi/; a French word from the Old French enui, root
of the English word 'annoy') is a reactive state to wearingly dull, repetitive, or tedious stimuli:
suffering from a lack of interesting things to see, hear, etc., or do (physically or intellectually),
while not in the mood of "doing nothing". Those afflicted by temporary boredom may regard the
affliction as a waste of time, but usually characterise boredom worse than just that. Alternatively
one may have the feeling that having too much spare time causes boredom. Indeed, time often
appears to move more slowly to someone suffering from boredom. This results from the way in which the human mind measures the passage of time, by the frequency of notable events, the absence of which may cause the feeling of boredom. Boredom can also occur as a symptom of clinical depression.

Boredom may also lead to impulsive (and sometimes excessive) actions, that serve no purpose and may damage one's self-interest. For example, studies in behavioral finance have shown that stock traders can enter into "overtrading" (buying or selling even without any objective reason to do so) simply because they feel bored when they have nothing worth doing.

The word boredom first appeared in the English language in the Charles Dickens novel Bleak House, published in 1852, where Dickens wrote of Lady Dedlock's "chronic malady of boredom". Bore, bored, and boring, in the sense used here, all appear somewhat earlier:

* bore first appears as a generic noun, meaning the malady or experience of boredom, in a letter of the Earl of March in 1766 (the same year also in a letter of G.J. Williams meaning one who suffers from boredom, specifically referring to the individual as "a French bore", indicating the derivation from ennui; the modern sense of a thing which bores appears twelve years later)
* bored as a verb-derived adjective appears in a letter of the Earl of Carlisle in 1768 — again in reference to the French: the Earl speaks of his English friends "who are to be bored by these Frenchmen"
* "boring" dates to at least Theodore Hook's Fitzherbert of 1840, where Hook writes of Emily's endurance of "Miss Mathews's boring vanities".

Lars Fredrik Svendsen in his book A Philosophy of Boredom (ISBN 1861892179) suggests that boredom as a concept emerged (along with the concept "interesting") in the 1760s. Note too that the earliest noted use of the word ennui in the English language (in 1667) occurs in John Evelyn's Memoirs in the phrase: "We have hardly any words that do ... fully express the French ... ennui ...".


Literature

Philosophers find boredom a perennially amusing topic. Those who have written about it include Søren Kierkegaard in The Sickness Unto Death, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death.

"Against boredom, the gods themselves struggle in vain." — Nietzsche in a parody of a quotation from Schiller.

"One receives as reward for much ennui, despondency, boredom --such as a solitude without friends, books, duties, passions must bring with it --those quarter-hours of profoundest contemplation within oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the strongest refreshing draught from his own innermost fountain." — -- again, Nietzsche.

"Boredom is the root of all evil — the despairing refusal to be one's self." — Kierkegaard

(Note: Kierkegaard, under one of his many pseudonymns, theorised that boredom also populated the earth... God was bored and created Adam, God and Adam were bored and along came Eve, etc.)

"[Time] ceases to persecute only he who he transferred over to boredom." — Schopenhauer

Boredom -- specifically ennui -- was especially important to the 19th century Decadent literary movement. Joris-Karl Huysmans' novel Against_Nature is a narrative by an anemic French nobleman afflicted by terminal ennui, and describes his bizarre experiences as he attempts to escape its grasp. It is considered a fundamental work of the fin de siècle Decadent movement.

Ennui also figures highly in the works of many poets of the movement, such as Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Symons.

The arts

The punk singer Iggy Pop had a minor hit with his song "I'm Bored" during which he would strip his clothes off while delivering a monotonous rendition of the lyric: "I'm bored, I'm the chairman of the bored".

Douglas Adams depicted a robot named Marvin whose boredom led to a deep comical depression which appeared to be the defining trait of his personality, and indeed, existence, in his series of novels that began with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

One of the first recorded songs of punk band Buzzcocks was entitled "Boredom", and was released on the Spiral Scratch EP. It features a minimalist guitar solo of two repeated notes.


Quotes regarding Boredom.

* "A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

* "Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it." ~ Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

* "Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

* "Boredom: the desire for desires." ~ Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

* "Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face." ~ Jean Baudrillard

* "Boredom is not an end product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges." ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

* "Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic." ~ Virginia Woolf

* "Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself." ~ Soren Kierkegaard

* "It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom." ~ Wallace Stevens

* "Man is the only animal that can be bored." ~ Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955)

* "Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore." ~ Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton

* "The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom." ~ Cyril Parkinson

* "The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." ~ Ellen Parr

* "The life of the creative man is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes." ~ Susan Sontag

* "The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

* "We often forgive those who bore us, but never those whom we bore." ~ François Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

* "Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure." ~ Aldous Huxley

http://tribes.tribe.net/boredandproud