Recently I’ve become very interested in boredom. It’s too large a topic to overlook here, given that wellbeing is my focus, and several thinkers, from psychology to literature to management, think that the confrontation of boredom is the key to sustained happiness. The modern author David Foster Wallace became fascinated with the idea of boredom at work, centering his last work “The Pale King” around themes or boredom and human nature. A positive psychology professor Csikszentmihalyi made millions off his “revolutionary” psychological idea that people are the most happy when they are productive, and are most productive when they are in “flow,” a mental state suspended somewhere in between over challenged and under stimulated.

Meditation, when the lack of any external stimulation becomes a state of heightened attention, is essentially the mastery of boredom. If control of internal mental states regardless of events in the external environment is the end of meditation and a stepping stone toward enlightenment, or in our terms, an escape from the hedonic treadmill, then an embracing of boredom becomes the only thing thats important. If you don’t need anything external to stimulate positive feelings (or ward off negative feelings), then your life can be empty while your state of mind perfect.

Schopenhauer writes that discontent is inevitable if we become habituated to whatever good things happen to us. We become bored with new possessions and the thrill of accomplishments wear off. If this type of deep seated boredom is no longer seen as undesireable, then achievement is no longer an end.

I bring up the topic of boredom not to rehash the therapeutic recommendations of philosophy but to present the idea that women and men confront boredom in different ways. If understanding boredom is a key to improving wellbeing, then these differences will give us a different picture of what the road to female and male happiness should look like.

Boredom, which was first coined in the Dicken’s novel “Bleak House,” is the sole subject of Patricia Meyers Spacks’ novel, aptly titled “Boredom.” An English professor at UVA, she spent five years researching the evolution of boredom. The relevant part of her book explores the way that women historically have employed tools to channel attention and to overcome domestic boredom. For example, she mentions that the “invention of boredom as a concept and of the novel as a genre” emerged at the same historical moment, and as women became the primary writers and consumers of the novel, the genre can be seen as a response to the differing circumstances of women at the time.

Spacks thinks that the modern preoccupation with boredom is related to the historical expectations with regard to the behavior of women. If women were morally bound to seek less external stimulation (that is, work or outdoor activity), it may be natural that they were the sex to more often feel and respond to long lasting boredom. Her point is interesting, though the implications for the modern women I'm still mulling over.

In general, I wonder, whether the type of boredom that is most closely linked to wellbeing is the type that Spacks is getting at here. Heidegger, in his “What is Metaphysics,” proposes that there are three distinct types of the boredom. The third, profound boredom, is the feeling of existential crisis in which we ask ourselves such as questions “is there something coming next that should compel me to live on?” This type of boredom is not caring because you are so uninterested with life that your mind tends to wander to the greater questions, which leads to more significant feelings of meaninglessness.

My question is this: is feeling bored in a domestic setting and turning to a good read describing a different type of boredom from the one we associate with depressive or deep unhappiness? Is everyday boredom just a less intense or shorter version of existential boredom? Sparks gender-breakdown hypothesis about females experiencing boredom differently is the most important to us only if the day-to-day boredom is related to Heidegger’s third type.