Is boredom bad?

Unlike many other newspaper articles, this one admits upfront that it reeks of boredom.

Fortunately, boredom has a scintillating side. In addition to being the official personality provider for Al Gore and Gray Davis, it helps keep the U.S. economy afloat and sometimes causes arctic explorers to dress like women.

However, experts say boredom is wreaking havoc on society, fueling everything from extramarital affairs and drug addiction to coronaries and car accidents.

“Boredom doesn’t get a lot of press,” says Century City psychologist and attorney Rex Julian Beaber, “but it is profoundly destructive.”

Curiously, boredom seems to be a modern ailment. The word didn’t even exist in the English language until after 1750, says Patricia M. Spacks, author of “Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind” (University of Chicago Press, 1995). “If people felt bored before the late 18th century, they didn’t know it,” she writes.

Once the concept had a name, it became universal. Philosophers ruminated over it. Teenagers whined about it. And psychologists churned out a blizzard of research.

“When we are bored,” one scholar concluded, “our attitude toward time is altered, as it is in some dreamlike states. Time is endless, there is no distinction between past, present and future. There seems to be only an endless present.”

One of the more unexpected findings is that the best cure for boredom might be ... more boredom.

Or wearing a polar bear costume. In the war against monotony, people have tried all sorts of unusual remedies.

In 1819, an arctic expedition led by William Edward Parry staved off tedium during the long winter by staging amateur plays in which crew members dressed as women and polar bears. Other icebound expeditions formed accordion orchestras, wrote irreverent newsletters, held beauty pageants using pictures from magazines, opened snowy casinos and attended costume balls in gowns sewn from signal flags.

“Early explorers learned that boredom was their worst enemy,” says Jack Stuster, an anthropologist and author whose Santa Barbara firm, Anacapa Sciences, has consulted with NASA on ways to reduce monotony on long space flights.

If Parry and his men were around today, they’d have a lot more diversions at their disposal -- videos, CDs, cell phones. But they might not be any better off. One of the great ironies of modern life is that “in an age when we have more entertainment available to us than ever before, there seems to be an epidemic of boredom,” writes psychiatrist Richard Winter in the new book “Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment” (InterVarsity Press).

Winter and other commentators believe society is so saturated with movies, TV, video games and advertising that people are losing their sense of wonder.

“Just as a drug user develops a tolerance and needs larger doses to achieve the same effect, so too have we developed a tolerance to amazing events,” concluded a 1999 survey of consumer attitudes by Yankelovich Partners.

In the video-game industry, jadedness is a constant enemy. To boost a game’s “replayability,” designers throw in secret rooms and other curveballs to create a new experience each time the game is played. But the novelty soon wears off, says Rick Giolito, who produced the “Medal of Honor” video game for Electronic Arts. “Every year, the players expect more and more and more. If you came out now with a game that looked like it was made three years ago, they’d say it’s boring.”

The same is true of pornography (a century ago, the sight of a bare ankle made hearts pound), movie special effects and TV game shows.

Part of this is natural. “The human brain is wired to be attracted to novelty,” Beaber says. “Very shortly after we are exposed to something, it loses its power to move us.”

But some observers say the mind’s built-in bias toward the new has been twisted into an obsession. Our culture has let novelty and entertainment invade nearly every corner of life, says anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, a visiting professor at Harvard and the daughter of anthropologist Margaret Mead.

“Taking a shower, brushing one’s teeth, eating a bowl of cereal [and] hundreds of other peaceful activities have been tarted up with flavorings and music and gadgetry, so that after a brief period of novelty they become not bland and comfortingly familiar but irritatingly boring,” she writes in “Peripheral Visions.”

In a speech given some years ago, Bateson recalled her young daughter complaining that “breakfast is boring.”

“Who taught her that breakfast should be unboring?” Bateson wondered. “Mr. Kellogg and Mr. Post have taught the American public that breakfast should be a thrilling meal at which things snap, crackle and pop.”

Expectations of snap, crackle and pop are also poisoning perceptions of marriage, church, work and school, experts warn. Although therapists typically blame adultery and divorce on communication breakdowns or other issues, Beaber sees a more mundane threat: “Pure, simple boredom. No ongoing marriage can ever compete with the arousal level, uncertainty and novelty of a new relationship.”

Not surprisingly, television and movies get fingered as the major villains in this trend. Psychiatrist Winter says the media create a fantasy world that makes ordinary life seem dull and unsatisfying by comparison.

Of course, people once made the same argument about books. “Boredom” author Spacks unearthed an 1839 bridal guide that cautioned: “The indiscriminate reading of novels is one of the most injurious habits to which a married woman can be subject. Besides the false views of human nature it will impart ... it produces an indifference to the performance of domestic duties, and a contempt for ordinary realities.”

If TV isn’t driving the boredom boom, what is? Theories abound. The alleged culprits include capitalist conspiracies, the decline of Christianity, repressed emotions and the Declaration of Independence (apparently, that nonsense about the pursuit of happiness has inspired the masses to seek constant pleasure and grow restless in its absence).

A more plausible hypothesis involves the rise of leisure time. For most of history, daily survival took so much effort that people didn’t have the luxury of being bored, Beaber says.

Another crucial factor was a shift from people believing boredom was their own shortcoming to believing it was caused by outside forces. The transition began in the 1800s, says Spacks, who analyzed books, letters and other literature of the period. Boredom mutated from a personal failure (“It is our own fault if we ever know what ennui is,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in a 1787 letter to his daughter) to something that was inflicted by teachers, pastors, small-town life or other external influences.

But monotony does have its advantages.

If necessity is the mother of invention, boredom might be the father. Many scientific and artistic achievements germinated in a moment of tedium, Beaber says. “The brain’s need for novelty drives a small portion of the population to create.”

Boredom is also the lifeblood of the entertainment industry, as well as of companies that sell new fashions, cars and magazines touting 101 tips for keeping your sex life interesting.

“Our economy has become very dependent on the whole cycle of boredom, novelty, more boredom, more entertainment,” anthropologist Bateson says.

When left unchecked, monotony can be a menace. Scientists have linked boredom to a host of physical and social ills, including crime sprees, gambling, weakened immune systems, high blood pressure, thrill-seeking, even car accidents.

So, what’s the solution? Not what you might expect.

At first blush, the best antidote to boredom would seem to be constant inventiveness and novelty, but that sets up a vicious cycle. As a “Calvin and Hobbes” comic explains:

Calvin: Getting is better than having. When you get something, it’s new and exciting. When you have something, you take it for granted and it’s boring.

Hobbes: But everything you get turns into something you have.

Calvin: That’s why you always get new things!

One way out of the trap was suggested by the late poet Joseph Brodsky in a 1989 college commencement address on the virtues of monotony. “When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom,” he said. “The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.”

That’s what happened to Kristen Brooks. As part of the PBS series “Frontier House,” she spent several months living like an Old West pioneer in Montana -- without TV, radio, telephone or Internet.

She compares the experience to that of a drug addict going sober. “During the first month, I felt almost a craving for diversions and excitement,” she says. “I think the boredom was like going through withdrawals.”

Once she got past it, an amazing calm and fulfillment settled over her. “I felt like I’ve never felt in my life,” she says. “The clutter in my mind cleared out.”

She adds: “The best part was after the show ended, because I still had all that calm and tranquillity from the frontier, but now with the luxuries of the modern world -- like hot showers and being able to go out to dinner.”

Brooks, 29, was so enthralled by the experience that she has become a life coach, trying to steer others toward inner harmony “without them having to sell their possessions and go live in nature.”

Riding out monotony long enough to reach “the other side of boredom” isn’t easy, but it can be enlightening, according to psychologists, monks, Broadway actors and others who’ve done it.

Instead of rushing to fill the void with a new DVD or other distraction, people should “stop and reflect on the true reason for their boredom and then take appropriate action,” psychiatrist Winter writes. “We can learn and grow from it.”

Anthropologist Bateson says the constant quest for novelty means people miss out on the world around them: “It’s a mistake to assume things are only stimulating if they’re new. If you’re in a meadow filled with birds singing and plants and insects, that’s a stimulating place to be even though it’ll be the same tomorrow.” The trick is learning to experience familiar things in new ways, she says. The person who channel-surfs through life is “like the guy who goes from one woman to another. He’s never going to learn to have a sustained relationship.”

People should also reconsider the value of rituals, she advises. “Reciting a prayer from a book or repeating prescribed gestures would seem to be the antithesis of sincerity, yet such repetition can be the beginning of practice, so that words from a book eventually come from the heart.... Certain kinds of repetition make possible growth and deepening.”

Abbot Francis Benedict, a Catholic monk at St. Andrew’s Abbey near Palmdale, adds: “When you do the same tasks over and over, you can go beneath the surface, beyond the task itself, to the landscape of the soul.”

Benedict, who says he hasn’t been bored in years, acknowledges such techniques aren’t for everyone. Staring into the abyss of boredom can be terrifying, he says: “People fear there’s nothing there, nothing inside themselves worth exploring....They give up too soon.”

So what? says Giolito, the video game designer.

“I think people want to be stimulated. Our society has evolved into that. Otherwise, we’d all be farming and listening to Grandpa tell stories by the campfire. That used to be considered stimulating. Do you want to turn the clock back?”

He sees tremendous freedom in the rise of electronic entertainment. “We’ve gone from communal solutions for fighting boredom [such as storytelling] to individual customization,” he says. “If you’re a military nut, there’s a military cable channel. If you like history, there’s the History Channel.”

But customization has its limits. Perhaps the sagest advice on how to cope with monotony is to simply get used to it.

“One of the things people have to understand is that boredom is a part of life,” Beaber says. “It can be controlled, but never eliminated.”

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Some lively thoughts about boredom

A selection of boredom wisdom:

“A man shooting heroin into his vein does so largely for the same reason you rent a video: to dodge the redundancy of time.”

-- Joseph Brodsky, poet, 1995

“The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”

-- Blaise Pascal, “Pensees,” 1670

“Accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in a few seconds slams the body backward with powerful sensations, but going 60 for hours on the interstate causes so little feeling of speed that we fight to stay awake.... Thrills have less to do with speed than [with] changes in speed.”

-- Ronald Dahl, professor of psychiatry, 1997

“The world isn’t boring, just your perspective of it.”

-- Nate Brooks, 2003, “Frontier House” participant

“Dunbar was lying motionless on his back.... He was working hard at increasing his life span. He did it by cultivating boredom.”

-- Joseph Heller, “Catch-22,” 1961

“By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.”

Lewis Mumford, social philosopher, 1951

“What’s wrong with being a boring kind of guy?”

-- Former President George Bush, 1988

“Now when I bore people at a party, they think it’s their fault.”

-- Henry Kissinger, on the virtues of being famous

Sources: Harper’s magazine, “Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment” by Richard Winter, Newsweek, Times interviews, bartleby.com/quotations.