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“Oh! Ennui! Ennui! What an answer to everything,” wrote French author Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly (quoted in Kuhn 1976, 332). In a sense, d’Aurevilly was right. Boredom can be thought to be an answer to everything because it arises in response to almost any situation. Given enough repetition or expo¬sure, nearly everything can strike us as boring—even our dearest possessions, activities, ideas, or relations. But d’Aurevilly was also, in an important sense, wrong: although boredom can be a response to almost any situation, it is not necessarily a solution. In its wake, boredom leaves behind both beneficial and harmful outcomes. On the positive side, new habits, opportunities, and careers often start with the thought “I am bored.” The realization that we are bored can move us to form prosocial intentions and to find meaning in our situations. It can even be the spur we need in order to engage in creative acts. “I painted because I was bored,” G. W. Bush admitted in an interview (Bush 2017); “Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawn¬ing,” Marcel Proust (1982, 866) writes in his Remembrance. All the same, boredom has a darker side. Unhealthy eating habits, binge drinking, drug use, arson, the theft of a military tank, sadistic behavior, mass killings—all have been attributed to boredom. “I guess I was just bored,” Keith Eugene Mann said explaining why he scorched sixteen acres of wild forests in North Carolina (Washburn and David 2016). “Fact is I had no reason to do it, I just thought . . . fuck it, life is boring so why not?”, a gunman who killed twelve people posted on social media during the time of his despicable act (Baer 2018).
Is boredom morally significant? It’s complicated. To be in a position to answer the question properly, we need to know what boredom is and what it means to say that a psychological phenomenon is morally significant. Yet, for some, the answer was always clear. Decades ago, Bertrand Russell (2006 [1930], 38) declared that “boredom is a vital problem for the moralist since half the sins of mankind are caused by it.” Russell’s claim is, of course, an exaggeration (but see Fromm 1973). Nonetheless, his hyperbole is instruc¬tive. In trying to understand better our own psychology and role in our social context, we cannot afford to ignore boredom’s force. Indeed, Russell’s claim is a useful reminder of Søren Kierkegaard’s astute observation that despite its “calm and sedate nature,” boredom has a remarkable “capacity to initiate motion” (1987 [1843], 285). It is perhaps in its capacity to move us in various ways that we can discern most clearly boredom’s moral colors.