“Dad, I’m bored”: What I learned from my son’s incurable boredom

By Mark O’Connell

About a month ago I walked into the living room and saw my son lying on his back on the rug, gazing up at the ceiling. He gave the impression of having been in that position for some time – hours, perhaps days.

“What’s wrong?” I said, when I asked what he was doing.

He made no response for several seconds and then turned his head slowly and wordlessly in my direction.

“Bored,” he said dully. His eyes were glazed, staring through me rather than at me. “I’m really bored.”

In my seven-and-a-half years of being the father of this particular boy, I had not yet encountered anything quite like this. I had experienced the problem of boredom before, obviously, but only ever in the form of restlessness, expressed as an unwieldy desire to do something. (“Dada, what will we do?” “I have to work, I’m afraid.” “But I’m bored.”)

This was something else. It seemed to me that he had proceeded beyond restlessness, beyond the comparatively trivial desire to make something happen, and into what I suspected might have been an encounter with the meaningless of existence itself.

Normally when my son talked about being bored it was in a tone of plaintive urgency, as though he were talking about how badly he needed to use the toilet. The manner in which he now told me he was bored suggested that he was so bored by his own boredom that he could barely muster the enthusiasm to speak of it at all.

It seemed to me that he had proceeded beyond restlessness into an encounter with the meaningless of existence itself

Later that evening, as he was brushing his teeth and getting ready for bed, I asked him once more how he was doing. He told me again that he was incredibly bored. I adopted my Polonius voice, in which I retail the sort of parental platitudes which are routinely, and justifiably, thrown back in my face.

“Well, you know”, I said, “boredom is the start of creativity.”

“No it isn’t,” he said, spitting a mouthful of toothpaste froth into the sink and reaching for the hand towel. “Boredom is the start of more boredom.”

Was my son right? It was certainly a strong riposte from a seven-year-old. It made me laugh, a little forlornly, but it also struck me as casually profound. It revealed a certain triteness at the heart of my suggestion about boredom and creativity. My insistence on the connection was, in retrospect not only a cliché but strangely puritanical, as though boredom could not be encountered on its own terms but only as a necessary stage on the way to productivity.

As a parent I don’t think I’m unusual in feeling irritated, and even slightly offended, by my child’s boredom. In a wonderful essay called “On Boredom”, Adam Phillips, a psychoanalyst, points out how often “the child’s boredom is met with that most perplexing form of disapproval, the adult’s wish to distract him – as though the adults have decided that the child’s life must be, or be seen to be, endlessly interesting.” He continues: “It is one of the most oppressive demands of adults that the child should be interested, rather than take time to find what interests him.”

Boredom, as we currently understand it, is a fairly recent phenomenon: the term arose in English only in the 19th century. (Its first use in literature is often credited to Dickens: in “Bleak House”, Lady Dedlock is variously described as “bored to death”, and “in the desolation of Boredom and the clutch of Giant Despair”.)

The term’s pre-modern precursor was the concept of acedia, a word used by medieval monks to refer to a state of spiritual listlessness, manifested in an inability to pray or work. Whereas boredom describes a psychological state, acedia was a purely moral phenomenon. It was considered a vice because it was understood as an offence against God. To behold the splendour of His creation, the sheer wonder of one’s own presence within it, and to just…not be arsed? Unacceptable.

Who could have imagined the apocalypse would be so dull?

Traces of this moral content can be found in my own response to my son’s boredom. A child’s boredom presents a peculiar challenge to a parent. Subconsciously it lands as a kind of underhand criticism: the world – and by implication the person who brought the child into it – has been found badly wanting. Unacceptable.

My irritation with my son’s boredom might also have something to do with an unacknowledged sense of loss. One of the things you give up when you have children is the opportunity for a particular kind of boredom: the boredom of having nothing to do. There is plenty of the other kind of boredom, that born of having too many things to do – playing Lego, changing nappies, packing school lunches every morning. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but there are times when I would love to have nothing to do but stare at the ceiling. (It occurs to me now that I do, in fact, spend a fair amount of time staring at the ceiling, but I would argue in my defence that, as a professional writer, this is so close to my job description that it doesn’t really count as the sort of luxurious, gratuitous boredom I’m speaking of here.)

This nadir of my son’s journey into the dark heart of boredom – the moment when I walked in on him staring up the ceiling – occurred in late August. It was a matter of days before he was due to go back to school. He’d been out for over five months by then, much of which had been spent in lockdown. He’d been putting in the sort of screen time that would have been considered unconscionable before the pandemic hit.

Television was the only palliative for his boredom, but, as with any addiction, it merely exacerbated the symptoms. The summer became a cruel cautionary tale about getting what you wish for: a holiday that was not so much endless as interminable. I won’t go into too much detail here, partly because it’s just too boring, but largely because there is precious little detail to go into. There were no events. It was a summer of nothing at all.

For those of us who have avoided the worst effects of the pandemic – who have not lost our livelihoods, or contracted the virus itself, or witnessed friends and family suffer and die – the emotional keynote of this plague year has been boredom. Who could have imagined the apocalypse would be so dull? No four horsemen. No seven angelic trumpeters. No dragon, fiery red with seven heads. Just too many Zoom calls to enumerate and one endless Netflix binge. There has been a great flattening, both of the immediate experience of everyday life and the wider landscape of the future.

There were no events. It was a summer of nothing at all

A friend of mine recently mentioned that his two-year-old son had developed over the summer a surprising interest in watching truck videos on YouTube. There are only so many truck videos out there that are suitable for two-year-olds, and so for weeks on end the child was endlessly watching the same clips. He expressed his dissatisfaction by shouting “Something new! Something new!” at the iPad screen. My friend’s point was that small children have a way of cutting to the raw existential heart of matters. In life, as in YouTube truck content, we are all desperate for the new.

When my son asks “Dada, what will we do?”, one half of my brain immediately starts thinking of ways to get out of the hour-long Lego session I’m staring down the barrel of, but the other half encounters it as a philosophical question. Heidegger thought of boredom as a state of “fundamental attunement” to the world, an undistracted encounter with reality itself.

I’m not sure my son would put it in quite so many words, but maybe this is what he was getting at by informing me that boredom leads not to creativity, but to more boredom. The problem of boredom is, by implication, the problem of existence. We are here for the duration. And there is, as Estragon puts it in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”, “nothing to be done” about it. But then, that statement of existential exhaustion happens to be the opening line of one of the great works of art of the last century. So maybe I was right after all.■

ILLUSTRATIONS: KLAUS KREMMERZ