The virtues and frustrations of being bored
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
In 1933, the writer James Norman Hall had a bone to pick with the concise nature of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. It defined boredom as “being bored; ennui.” “To define [boredom] merely as ‘being bored,’ appallingly true though this may be, is only to aggravate the misery of the sufferer who, as a last desperate resource, has gone to the dictionary for enlightenment as to the nature of his complaint,” Hall wrote in The Atlantic.
Hall proceeds to explain that a dictionary can’t help those suffering from boredom; exercise can’t do much either, in his view (“I have climbed mountains, and boredom has climbed with me”). All a person can do, he argues, is hold on until the moment the boredom chooses to leave. But Atlantic writers in recent years have also pointed to the benefits of boredom—how it can slow us down, how it can motivate us. Today’s reading list takes a closer look at what we really mean when we say, “I’m bored.”
On Boredom
The Virtues of Boredom
By Julie Beck
What’s going on under the surface when people feel bored?
Kierkegaard’s Three Ways to Live More Fully
By Arthur C. Brooks
Take a cue from the Danish philosopher: Instead of seeking a new life, go deeper into the one you have.
Boredom Is Good for You
By Jude Stewart
The surprising benefits of stultification
Still Curious?
Other Diversions
P.S.
I’ll leave you with Margaret Atwood’s poem “Bored”:
“I could hardly wait to get
the hell out of there to
anywhere else. Perhaps though
boredom is happier”
— Isabel
What Boredom Actually Means
12
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13.01.2024
The virtues and frustrations of being bored
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
In 1933, the writer James Norman Hall had a bone to pick with the concise nature of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. It defined boredom as “being bored; ennui.” “To define [boredom] merely as ‘being bored,’........
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