Boredom Philosophy Quotes

Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull's life is so short, and with those gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.

The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.

Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.

The life of an individual is a constant struggle, and not merely a metaphorical one against want or boredom, but also an actual struggle against other people. He discovers adversaries everywhere, lives in continual conflict and dies with sword in hand.

There is absolutely no worse death curse than the humdrum daily existence of the living dead.

Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia.

For Heidegger, boredom is a privileged fundamental mood because it leads us directly into the very problem complex of being and time.

Self-identity is inextricably bound up with the identity of the surroundings.

Traditions have been replaced by lifestyles.

A utopia cannot, by definition, include boredom, but the ‘utopia’ we are living in is boring.

Before you get bored of yourself try creativity in your life.

One mood can be replaced by another, but it is impossible to leave attunement altogether. However, profound boredom brings us as close to a state of un-attunement as we can come.

The rich fop Francis of Assisi was bored all his life―until he fell in love with Christ and gave all his stuff away and became the troubadour of Lady Poverty.

In order to live a meaningful life, humans need answers, i.e., a certain understanding of basic existential questions. These ‘answers’ do not have to be made completely explicit, as a lack of words does not necessarily indicate a lack of understanding, but one has to able to place oneself in the world and build a relatively stable identity. The founding of such an identity is only possible if one can tell a relatively coherent story about who one has been and who one intends to be.

Animals can be understimulated, but hardly bored.

Traditions brings continuity to one’s existence, but this sort of continuity is precisely what has been increasingly lost throughout modernity.

Anthropocentrism gave rise to boredom, and when anthropomorphism was replaced by technocentrism, boredom became even more profound.

I'M GLAD I'M NOT PERFECT—I'D BE BORED TO DEATH.

Up to a point, having fun is good for you. But it’s not an adequate substitute for serious, purposeful activity. For lack of this kind of activity people in our society get bored. They try to relieve their boredom by having fun. They seek new kicks, new thrills, new adventures. They masturbate their emotions by experimenting with new religions, new art-forms, travel, new cultures, new philosophies, new technologies. But still they are never satisfied, they always want more, because all of these activities are purposeless. People don’t realize that what they really lack is serious, practical, purposeful work—work that is under their own control and is directed to the satisfaction of their own most essential, practical needs.

Deceit dispels the boredom of the Absolute.

Be bold, don't be boring.

People fear nothing as much as boredom and they will do unimaginable things to make it go away.

Never believe a friend who offered you his friendship just because he was getting bored.

Representatives of truth. The champions of truth are hardest to find, not when it is dangerous to tell it, but rather when it is boring.

Heidegger’s concept for the kind of being we ourselves are is Dasein. Literally it means ‘being-there’.We are the sort of beings who are there, in the world. What characterizes Dasein is that its existence is a concern for it in its existence.

The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.

No more Guernicas, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin?

The benefits of a philosophy of neo-religious pessimism are nowhere more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society’s most grief-stricken arrangements, which has been rendered unnecessarily hellish by the astonishing secular supposition that it should be entered into principally for the sake of happiness. Christianity and Judaism present marriage not as a union inspired and governed by subjective enthusiasm but rather, and more modestly, as a mechanism by which individuals can assume an adult position in society and thence, with the help of a close friend, undertake to nurture and educate the next generation under divine guidance. These limited expectations tend to forestall the suspicion, so familiar to secular partners, that there might have been more intense, angelic or less fraught alternatives available elsewhere. Within the religious ideal, friction, disputes and boredom are signs not of error, but of life proceeding according to plan.

We spontaneously relate to ourselves and the world by means of the technical object.

If you want more to do,” said Kim, “then do more. That’s the rule of thumb in any workplace.

There are six canons of conservative thought: 1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality, what Coleridge called the Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs. "Every Tory is a realist," says Keith Feiling: "he knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man's philosophy cannot plumb or fathom." True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls. 2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems; conservatives resist what Robert Graves calls "Logicalism" in society. This prejudice has been called "the conservatism of enjoyment"--a sense that life is worth living, according to Walter Bagehot "the proper source of an animated Conservatism." 3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a "classless society." With reason, conservatives have been called "the party of order." If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum. Ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and equality before courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom. 4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Economic levelling, they maintain, is not economic progress. 5) Faith in prescription and distrust of "sophisters, calculators, and economists" who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man's anarchic impulse and upon the innovator's lust for power. 6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman's chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.

Tedium and boredom are related, but not identical. Tedium comes from a person lacking an ideology to live by; the dulling fear fomented in the soul after confronting the paucity of life.

To become mature is to accept that life cannot remain in the enchanted realm of childhood, that life to a certain extent is boring, but at the same time to realize that this does not make life unliveable.

These Diderots and d'Alemberts and Voltaires and Rousseaus or whatever names these scribblers have - there are even clerics among them and gentleman of noble birth! - they've finally managed to infect the whole society with their perfidious fidgets, with their sheer delight in discontent and their unwillingness to be satisfied with anything in this world, in short, with the boundless chaos that reigns inside their own heads!

Man is a world-forming being, a being that actively constitutes his own world, but when everything is always already fully coded, the active constituting of the world is made superfluous, and we lose friction in relation to the world.We Romantics need a meaning that we ourselves realize – and the person who is preoccupied with self-realization inevitably has a meaning problem. This is no one collective meaning in life any more, a meaning that it is up to the individual to participate in. Nor is it that easy to find an own meaning in life, either. The meaning that most people embrace is self-realization as such, but it is not obvious what type of self is to be realized, nor what should possibly result from it. The person who is certain as regards himself will not ask the question as to who he is. Only a problematic self feels the need for realization.

Philosophy is not an occupation of a popular nature, nor is it pursued for the sake of self-advertisement. Its concern is not with words, but with facts. It is not carried on with the object of passing the day in an entertaining sort of way and taking the boredom out of leisure. It moulds and builds the personality, orders one’s life, regulates one’s conduct, shows one what one should do and what one should leave undone, sits at the helm and keeps one on the correct course as one is tossed about in perilous seas. Without it no one can lead a life free of fear or worry. Every hour of the day countless situations arise that call for advice, and for that advice we have to look to philosophy.

All our troubles begin when we break life up into segments and see things fragmentarily. No, all places are alike. There is no such place in life where only happiness abides. And similarly there is no such place where you meet with suffering and only suffering. Therefore, our heaven and hell are just our imagination. Because we have gotten into the habit of looking at things fragmentarily, we have imagined one place with abounding happiness and another with unmitigated sorrow and suffering – and we call them heaven and hell. No, wherever life is there is happiness and suffering together. They go together. You have happy moments or relaxation in hell and painful spells of boredom in heaven.

How dreadful boredom is — how dreadfully boring; I know no stronger expression, no truer one, for like is recognized only by like… I lie prostrate, inert; the only thing I see is emptiness, the only thing I live on is emptiness, the only thing I move in is emptiness. I do not even suffer pain… Pain itself has lost its refreshment for me. If I were offered all the glories of the world or all the torments of the world, one would move me no more than the other; I would not turn over to the other side either to attain or to avoid. I am dying death. And what could divert me? Well, if I managed to see a faithfulness that withstood every ordeal, an enthusiasm that endured everything, a faith that moved mountains; if I were to become aware of an idea that joined the finite and the infinite.

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination. Artistic accounts include severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply 'journey through an afternoon'. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties resolves in our consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the seats opposite. We tap a finger on the window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might be. We look back at the field. It continues to rain. At last, the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops. A fly lands on the window And still we may have reached the end only of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence 'He journeyed through the afternoon'. A storyteller who provides us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearking us out with repetitions, misleading emphases[,] and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Burdak Electronics, the safety handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card[,] and a fly that lands first on the rim and then the centre of a laden ashtray. Which explains the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.

i get lost in my head sometimes tangled in my thoughts. it took me years to lose touch with reality to realize there is no reality. our thoughts rule our lives. we have become addicted to our thoughts. we feel the need to occupy ourselves and think of more thoughts to avoid the feeling of boredom; to avoid being alone with ourselves.

Ironically, to “inspire” means to breathe, to infuse life by breathing. As with a lot of things that have the capacity to inspire, it takes some time to get past the apparent boredom and find the hidden secrets. I figure if I keep harping on it, maybe someone will eventually explore the possibility long enough to realize just how breathtaking it is.

Moderation is the key to old age and the doorway to boredom

your life’s most important lesson … that you are completely insignificant.

And Pascal underlined that it is not a good thing to have all one’s needs satisfied.

the ‘strange melancholy which often haunts the inhabitants of democratic countries in the midst of their abundance.

Only those who can truly give themselves a burden are free.

Live a lie, dance forever.

Boredom always contains a critical element, because it expresses the idea that either a given situation or existence as a whole is deeply unsatisfying.

the person who advocates work as a cure for boredom is confusing a temporary removal of the symptoms with curing a disease.

Diversion might seem to be preferable to the misery of life, because it can create an illusion of happiness – at least for a while.

In searching for the causes of war, don’t overlook boredom.

Next to want, boredom has become the worst scourge in our lives.

Poverty doesn't scare me, ignorance does. Work doesn't scare me, laziness does. Pleasure doesn't scare me, pain does. Charity doesn't scare me, weakness does. Chastisement doesn't scare me, flattery does. Friendship doesn't scare me, betrayal does. Enmity doesn't scare me, anger does. Marriage doesn't scare me, divorce does. Love doesn't scare me, heartache does. Sex doesn't scare me, parenting does. Ambition doesn't scare me, envy does. Adversity doesn't scare me, boredom does. Risk doesn't scare me, cowardice does. Competition doesn't scare me, mediocrity does. Defeat doesn't scare me, weakness does. Misfortune doesn't scare me, bitterness does. Maturing doesn't scare me, infirmity does. Life doesn't scare me, regret does. Aging doesn't scare me, death does. Existence doesn't scare me, oblivion does. War doesn't scare me, bloodshed does. Government doesn't scare me, corruption does. Politics doesn't scare me, manipulation does. Revolution doesn't scare me, tyranny does. Rebellion doesn't scare me, slavery does. Ideology doesn't scare me, fanaticism does. Religion doesn't scare me, immorality does. Faith doesn't scare me, hopelessness does. Morality doesn't scare me, evil does. God doesn't scare me, extremism does.

Samo odstupanje postalo je deo ujednačenosti. Svi danas moraju biti "nešto posebno", a da se ne ističu na bilo koji način. Odstupanje je dosadno. Kada je individualizam lagodnost, i konformizam postaje individualističan.

Eventually... for me by the time you're 25 or so, you just start running out of shit to do. Books to read... people to meet. I was too chicken to be an "entrepreneur" in college and I wish that back then someone told me... stressed to me, that if you score above a certain percentile on the SAT.... you just won't be running into too many people... who have the credibility to tell you what to do. And they say I can't Drink anymore, either. So now... what?

The more you love laughter the more you must bear with boredom. The more you love excitement the more you must bear with monotomy. The more you love company the more you must bear with loneliness. The more you love loyalty the more you must bear with distrust. The more you love pleasure the more you must bear with pain. The more you love silence the more you must bear with speech. The more you love solitude the more you must bear with noise. The more you love knowledge the more you must bear with curiosity. The more you love truth the more you must bear with conscience. The more you love vice the more you must bear with guilt. The more you love virtue the more you must bear with temptation. The more you love morality the more you must bear with shame. The more you love freedom the more you must bear with responsibility. The more you love power the more you must bear with restraint. The more you love wisdom the more you must bear with learning. The more you love wealth the more you must bear with risk. The more you love fame the more you must bear with apathy. The more you love achievement the more you must bear with fear. The more you love success the more you must bear with challenges.

[Humans] suffer, during their working hours, from the chronic boredom and frustration imposed by the sort of jobs that have to be done in order to satisfy the artificially stimulated demand for the fruits of fully mechanized mass-production.

Things are as they are, and no amount of self-deception makes them otherwise. The friend who is incapable of depression depresses us as surely as the friend who is incapable of boredom bores us. Somewhere in our hearts is a strong, though dimly understood, desire to face realities, and to measure consequences, to have done with the fatigue of pretending. It is not optimism to enjoy the view when one is treed by a bull; it is philosophy. The optimist would say that being treed was a valuable experience. The disciple of gladness would say it was a pleasurable sensation. The Christian Scientist would say there was no bull, though remaining–if he were wise–on the tree-top. The philosopher would make the best of a bad job, and seek what compensation he could find.

Wallace’s philosophy in The Pale King (TPK 546) is that we can ride out waves of boredom and oblivion into bliss and conscious (re)discovery, like another pioneer. With respect to Wallace’s fiction, as Don DeLillo said, “There is always another reader to regenerate these words” (DeLillo, Legacy 24).

Socrates tried to soothe us, true enough. He said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born. This is not absolutely comforting either. Anyway it was natural that theology and philosophy should take the deepest interest in this. They owe it to us not to be boring themselves. On this obligation they don’t always make good. However, Kierkegaard was not a bore. I planned to examine his contribution in my master essay. In his view the primacy of the ethical over the esthetic mode was necessary to restore the balance. But enough of that. In myself I could observe the following sources of tedium: 1) The lack of a personal connection with the external world. Earlier I noted that when I was riding through France in a train last spring I looked out of the window and thought that the veil of Maya was wearing thin. And why was this? I wasn’t seeing what was there but only what everyone sees under a common directive. By this is implied that our worldview has used up nature. The rule of this view is that I, a subject, see the phenomena, the world of objects. They, however, are not necessarily in themselves objects as modern rationality defines objects. For in spirit, says Steiner, a man can step out of himself and let things speak to him about themselves, to speak about what has meaning not for him alone but also for them. Thus the sun the moon the stars will speak to nonastronomers in spite of their ignorance of science. In fact it’s high time that this happened. Ignorance of science should not keep one imprisoned in the lowest and weariest sector of being, prohibited from entering into independent relations with the creation as a whole. The educated speak of the disenchanted (a boring) world. But it is not the world, it is my own head that is disenchanted. The world cannot be disenchanted. 2) For me the self-conscious ego is the seat of boredom. This increasing, swelling, domineering, painful self-consciousness is the only rival of the political and social powers that run my life (business, technological-bureaucratic powers, the state). You have a great organized movement of life, and you have the single self, independently conscious, proud of its detachment and its absolute immunity, its stability and its power to remain unaffected by anything whatsoever — by the sufferings of others or by society or by politics or by external chaos. In a way it doesn’t give a damn. It is asked to give a damn, and we often urge it to give a damn but the curse of noncaring lies upon this painfully free consciousness. It is free from attachment to beliefs and to other souls. Cosmologies, ethical systems? It can run through them by the dozens. For to be fully conscious of oneself as an individual is also to be separated from all else. This is Hamlet’s kingdom of infinite space in a nutshell, of “words, words, words,” of “Denmark’s a prison.

An alternative — and better — definition of reality can be found by naming some of its components: air, sunlight, wind, water, the motion of waves, the patterns of clouds before a coming storm. These elements, unlike 20th-century office routines, have been here since before life appeared on this planet, and they will continue long after office routines are gone. They are understood by everyone, not just a small segment of a highly advanced society. When considered on purely logical grounds, they are more real than the extremely transitory lifestyles of the modern civilization the depressed ones want to return to.If this is so, then it follows that those who see sailing as an escape from reality have their understanding of sailing and reality backward. Sailing is not an escape, but a return to and a confrontation of a reality from which modern civilization is itself an escape. For centuries, man suffered from the reality of an Earth that was too dark or too hot or too cold for his comfort, and to escape this he invented complex systems of lighting, heating and air conditioning.Sailing rejects these and returns to the old realities of dark and heat and cold. Modern civilization has found radio, television, movies, nightclubs and a huge variety of mechanized entertainment to titillate our senses and help us escape from the apparent boredom of the Earth and the Sun, the wind and the stars. Sailing returns to these ancient realities.

Factory farm animals cannot walk, run, stretch freely, or be part of a family or herd. True, many wild animals die from adverse conditions or are killed by predators; but animals kept in farms do not live for more than a fraction of their normal life span either. [The factory farm] deprives animals of their most basic natural activity, the search for food. The result is a life of utter boredom, with nothing at all to do but lie in a stall and eat.

Diary of a Country Priest: So I said to myself that people are consumed by boredom. Naturally, one has to ponder for a while to realise this – one does not see it immediately. It is a like some sort of dust. One comes and goes without seeing it, one breathes it in, one eats it, one drinks it, and it is so fine that it doesn’t even scrunch between one’s teeth. But if one stops up for a moment, it settles like a blanket over the face and hands. One has to constantly shake this ash-rain off one. That is why people are so restless.7 It

Our ability to detect and measure the passage of time is burdensome. The conception and sensation of time bears down upon all of us. It weighs us down; it compresses our souls. There is a variety of ways to escape the dull passage of time or the fearfulness of our accelerating march towards death. We must choose our mechanisms for dealing with the inexorability of time and our finiteness. We can fill our void with work or pleasure, laughter or pain, and fretfulness or courage. We can seek a sense of purposefulness or acknowledge the meaninglessness of life. We can seek to escape the drudgery and pain of life through alcohol, drugs, or pleasure seeking, or by working to support our families and create artistic testaments to our worldly existence.

Heidegger considers the human condition coldly and announces that existence is humiliated. The only reality is "anxiety" in the whole chain of being. To the man lost in the world and its diversions this anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual climate of the lucid man "in whom existence is concentrated." This professor of philosophy writes without trembling and in the most abstract language in the world that "the finite and limited character of human existence is more primordial than man himself." His interest in Kant extends only to recognizing the restricted character of his "pure Reason." This is to conclude at the end of his analyses that "the world can no longer offer anything to the man filled with anguish." This anxiety seems to him so much more important than all the categories in the world that he thinks and talks only of it. He enumerates its aspects: boredom when the ordinary man strives to quash it in him and benumb it; terror when the mind contemplates death. He too does not separate consciousness from the absurd. The consciousness of death is the call of anxiety and "existence then delivers itself its own summons through the intermediary of consciousness." It is the very voice of anguish and it adjures existence "to return from its loss in the anonymous They." For him, too, one must not sleep, but must keep alert until the consummation. He stands in this absurd world and points out its ephemeral character. He seeks his way amid these ruins.

Basically, walking is always the same, putting one foot in front of the other. But the secret of that monotony is that it constitutes a remedy for boredom. Boredom is immobility of the body confronted with emptiness of mind. The repetitiveness of walking eliminates boredom, for, with the body active, the mind is no longer affected by its lassitude, no longer draws from its inertia the vague vertigo of an endless spiral. In a state of boredom one is always seeking something to do, despite the obvious futility of any activity. When walking, there is always something to do: walk. Or rather, no, there’s nothing more to do because one is just walking, and when one is going to a place or covering a route, one has only to keep moving. That is boringly obvious. The body’s monotonous duty liberates thought.

It is certainly possible that an individual can, qua individual, suffer some failure of meaning, as in pathological boredom or depression. But any given social world is also a nexus of common significances, saliences, taboos, and a general shared orientation that can also either be sustained or can fail. Indeed one of the most interesting aspects of such a social condition, shared meaningfulness, or intelligibility, is that it can fail, go dead, lose its grip, and a very great deal of what interests Hegel is simply what such shared practical meaningfulness must be that it could fail, and how we should integrate our account of action into a fuller theory of the realization of such a condition and its failure. (His general name for the achievement and maintenance of such a form of intelligible life is “Sittlichkeit” and his case for this sort of priority of Sittlichkeit over strictly individualist accounts of mindedness in-action has not, I want to argue, been properly appreciated.)

Darkness will always be a servant of light. Sound will always be a servant of motion. Matter will always be a servant of space. Time will always be a servant of eternity. Chance will always be a servant of fate. Speech will always be a servant of silence. Perception will always be a servant of awareness. Truth will always be a servant of reality. Freedom will always be a servant of responsibility. Desire will always be a servant of pleasure. Boredom will always be a servant of monotony. Experience will always be a servant of consciousness. Weakness will always be a servant of strength. Maturity will always be a servant of growth. Certainty will always be a servant of conviction. Curiosity will always be a servant of fascination. Ignorance will always be a servant of knowledge. Virtue will always be a servant of discipline. Wealth will always be a servant of risk. Power will always be a servant of influence. Science will always be a servant of nature. Philosophy will always be a servant of wisdom. Religion will always be a servant of customs. Art will always be a servant of creativity. The present will always be a servant of the future. The mind will always be a servant of the soul. The natural will always be a servant of the spiritual. The world will always be a servant of the universe.

Contentment has no enemies, despair has no friends; apathy has many acquaintances, satisfaction has many friends. Joy has no enemies, sorrow has no friends; grief has many acquaintances, happiness has many friends. Forgiveness has no enemies, bitterness has no friends; vengeance has many acquaintances, sympathy has many friends. Truth has no enemies, falsehood has no friends; dishonesty has many acquaintances, trustworthiness has many friends. Patience has no enemies, intolerance has no friends; restlessness has many acquaintances, long suffering has many friends. Sincerity has no enemies, deceitfulness has no friends; hypocrisy has many acquaintances, genuineness has many friends. Kindness has no enemies, hostility has no friends; meanness has many acquaintances, hospitality has many friends. Charity has no enemies, stinginess has no friends; miserliness has many acquaintances, generosity has many friends. Pleasure has no enemies, pain has no friends; boredom has many acquaintances, excitement has many friends. Faith has no enemies, despair has no friends; doubt has many acquaintances, courage has many friends. Wisdom has no enemies, ignorance has no friends; folly has many acquaintances, prudence has many friends. Virtue has no enemies, vice has no friends; immorality has many acquaintances, goodness has many friends. Love has no enemies, wrath has no friends; anger has many acquaintances, compassion has many friends. Life has no enemies, death has no friends; regret has many acquaintances, existence has many friends. Time has no enemies, procrastination has no friends; fate has many acquaintances, destiny has many friends.

Most religions and philosophies have consequently taken a very different approach to happiness than liberalism does.3 The Buddhist position is particularly interesting. Buddhism has assigned the question of happiness more importance than perhaps any other human creed. For 2,500 years, Buddhists have systematically studied the essence and causes of happiness, which is why there is a growing interest among the scientific community both in their philosophy and their meditation practices. Buddhism shares the basic insight of the biological approach to happiness, namely that happiness results from processes occurring within one’s body, and not from events in the outside world. However, starting from the same insight, Buddhism reaches very different conclusions. According to Buddhism, most people identify happiness with pleasant feelings, while identifying suffering with unpleasant feelings. People consequently ascribe immense importance to what they feel, craving to experience more and more pleasures, while avoiding pain. Whatever we do throughout our lives, whether scratching our leg, fidgeting slightly in the chair, or fighting world wars, we are just trying to get pleasant feelings. The problem, according to Buddhism, is that our feelings are no more than fleeting vibrations, changing every moment, like the ocean waves. If five minutes ago I felt joyful and purposeful, now these feelings are gone, and I might well feel sad and dejected. So if I want to experience pleasant feelings, I have to constantly chase them, while driving away the unpleasant feelings. Even if I succeed, I immediately have to start all over again, without ever getting any lasting reward for my troubles. What is so important about obtaining such ephemeral prizes? Why struggle so hard to achieve something that disappears almost as soon as it arises? According to Buddhism, the root of suffering is neither the feeling of pain nor of sadness nor even of meaninglessness. Rather, the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction. Due to this pursuit, the mind is never satisfied. Even when experiencing pleasure, it is not content, because it fears this feeling might soon disappear, and craves that this feeling should stay and intensify. People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. In meditation, you are supposed to closely observe your mind and body, witness the ceaseless arising and passing of all your feelings, and realise how pointless it is to pursue them. When the pursuit stops, the mind becomes very relaxed, clear and satisfied. All kinds of feelings go on arising and passing – joy, anger, boredom, lust – but once you stop craving particular feelings, you can just accept them for what they are. You live in the present moment instead of fantasising about what might have been.

El tedio está ligado a un modo de pasar el tiempo en el que el tiempo mismo no es un horizonte de posibilidades, sino algo que debemos pasar

El vacío del tiempo en el tedio no es un vacío de sucesos, porque en la actualidad siempre sucede algo, aunque no sea otra cosa que la contemplación de cómo seca la pintura sobre la pared. El vacío del tiempo es un vacío de sentido

Un criterio para distinguir el tedio situacional del existencial podría ser la consideración de que, mientras que el primero contiene la añoranza de algo que se desea, el segundo añora el deseo mismo

Es como si toda la reflexión naciese de una mirada sentimental reflejada en un nostálgico espejo retrovisor [...] Una esperanza exagerada, tal vez; de ahí que dé lugar a esa ausencia, a ese vacío. Anticipamos un duelo metafísico que está basado en una ausencia que quizá demos por supuesta. El sentido que buscamos en la ausencia de sentido, la experiencia que buscamos en la ausencia de experiencia y el tiempo en la ausencia de tiempo, ¿no serán sólo ilusiones? La conciencia de una pérdida no garantiza que hayamos perdido algo y, por tanto, tampoco habría nada que recuperar

El ser humano tiene necesidades que determinan bien la naturaleza, bien la sociedad, bien la fuerza de la imaginación. Cuando los objetivos no se ven cumplidos, nos vemos abocados al sufrimiento; cuando los alcanzamos, obtenemos el tedio como resultado. En razón de la insatisfacción en el mundo real, el hombre crea un mundo imaginario, y así es, en efecto, como nacen todas las religiones: como un intento de sustraerse al tedio (paráfrasis de Schopenhauer)

Como si hubiese huido de mí todo lo que he poseído, y no hubiese de satisfacerme si regresase - Franz Kafka

For a writer, grief is a reservoir, boredom is recuperation and happiness is rust.

Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach yours to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach yours to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology — all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone; they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired, quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more important life, and they can. Don't let your own children have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age, . . . there's no telling what your own kids could do. (p. xxii) — John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction

this loss of meaning reduces human life to something analogous to an existence that is purely animal.

At the same time, boredom is inhuman because it robs human life of meaning, or possibly it is an expression of the fact that such a meaning is absent.

Love may seem to be enough when one does not possess it, but when one has, it will always be insufficient.

Time collapses, implodes, into a vast, empty present.

Dasein is bored because life lacks a purpose and a meaning – and the task of boredom is to draw our attention to precisely this.

We seek to be occupied because it liberates us from the emptiness of boredom.

All humans are lonely, some more than others, but no one escapes loneliness

As mentioned, boredom is not a question of work or freedom but of meaning.

Boredom is the ‘privilege’ of modern man. While there are reasons for believing that joy and anger have remained fairly constant throughout history, the amount of boredom seems to have increased dramatically. The world has apparently become more boring.

If boredom increases, it means that there is a serious fault in society or culture as a conveyor of meaning. Meaning has to be understood as a whole. We become socialized within an overall meaning (no matter what form this takes) that gives meaning to the individual elements in our lives. Another traditional expression of such an overall meaning is ‘culture’. Many theoreticians of modernity have concluded that culture has disappeared and that it has been replaced, for example, by ‘civilization’. If boredom increases, this is presumably because the overall meaning has disappeared. There naturally is a mutual relationship between the overall meaning and the submeanings, i.e., between culture on the one hand and cultural products on the other – and we can also ask ourselves to what extent things are still bearers of culture. Do things still thing?, to quote Heidegger. To put it another way: Do the things have a cohesive influence on a culture?

One does not know what to do with time when one is bored, for it is precisely there that one’s capacities lie fallow and no real opportunities present themselves.

The work seemed to me to be completely meaningless, and I completed it almost like an automaton.

God had a more powerful meaning-providing force than Coca-Cola and Elvis, and no matter how beautiful Marilyn Monroe was, she was hardly in the same league as the Christ’s Mother.

I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle, you can never think of them as real again. That’s what more or less has happened to me’,

By completely ignoring the emotions, including boredom, the emotions were to be made to cease, hopefully to be replaced by a profound peace of mind, something close to the ataraxia of antiquity

Some people get bored; others get creative.

Each of us is a god exploring what it is like to be a non-god, before returning to our divinity. The suspicion must be that we were bored with our perfection. How insufferable to be perfect forever. Perfection is so dull. We need a world of becoming to relieve the monotony of the world of perfect eternal being.

Boredom is a kind reminder that we've shadowed our creativity

I rather live with challenges that to die out of boredom

الملل أشدة قسوة من التعب.

The state of boredom must be avoided, because it kills more than war.

Boredom is the root to curiosity.