When you’re bored—really bored—it feels like forever. A lived eternity. And so for some people, boredom turns into negative revelation: of the meaninglessness of it all, the senselessness of life itself. But this nihilistic dynamic should not be taken at face value; rather, it requires an investigation of how we got to this feeling. 

We often differentiate such extreme boredom from the everyday sort by translating it into French. But the distinction between ‘ennui’ and ‘boredom’ is hardly compelling. In French, ennuis are by no means always existential, and the contrast is tricky since it’s so often been used to tell apart whose boredom really matters. (Children and housewives are bored; ennui is for philosophers and poets.) Moreover, for those who are prone to boredom, it’s often hard to draw the line between such “deep” boredom and the garden variety malaise. Under the right conditions, the everyday discontent can quickly magnify into a full-blown existential crisis. 

It may seem natural to assume boredom is a universal feature of the human condition. On this view, what we call boredom has always been around, at least in the west—that what the Romans called taedium vitae, the desert monks acedia, Dürer melancholy, Baudelaire ennui are all the same thing, traveling under different names. 

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"Boredom is an abstract crisis of desire—one at home in a secularised world where attention has become a commodity"

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But it’s quite misleading to think about boredom in ahistorical terms. The category itself is a relatively recent entrant into a long and complex history of cultural, intellectual, theological, and philosophical reflection. Disregarding the longer genealogy, and conflating boredom with very different modes of human experience, obscures its connections to capitalism and to the industrial-technological remaking of everyday life in the modern world.