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This article aims at providing concise but thorough presentation of the state of art in the emerging field of boredom studies evidencing the significance of boredom. The premise of the significance of boredom is to be expounded by documenting its widespread, social consequences, functions and positive outcomes. Boredom has been found prevalent irrespectively of age, gender, culture or social class. It affects all main spheres of human life – work, leisure, education, romantic relationships, and even religious life. It has also been evidenced that boredom has many significant consequences. It has been associated with, among others, risk-taking behaviours, overeating, impulse shopping, or (self-)destructive and violent behaviours. Yet, boredom may serve numerous significant functions as well. As an emotion, it is important for cognition, motivation and communication and has had evolutionary meaning for human beings. In society nowadays, it serves as a defensive mechanism against overload of stimuli, but somehow to the contrary is also found to be a basic mechanism animating current consumerism. Boredom is also conceived to be a catalyst for reflection, self-cognition, creativity, and as a consequence a rudimentary element of culture production and its advances.

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I have previously argued that an Epicurean who has achieved the final telos will still find philosophy worthwhile on hedonic grounds because philosophy prevents painful boredom they might otherwise experience. In response, Justin Bell objected that the Epicureans do not need the kind of explanation I developed because lasting tranquility is rare if not impossible, and even if this were false, it would be better to take philosophy to be worthwhile to the tranquil because of the curiosity it satisfies rather than the boredom it prevents. I reply here that the Epicureans do need the kind of explanation I developed and that Bell’s explanation is less attractive than mine. However, I also concede that my explanation requires an account of Epicurean boredom, which I proceed to sketch here. Borrowing from Westgate and Wilson’s MAC model, I contend that if doing philosophy is worthwhile to the tranquil Epicurean because it prevents boredom, three things must be true: 1) boredom must be an aversive state; 2) the Epicurean must be able to attend to philosophy while tranquil, and 3) philosophizing must have value for the tranquil. I argue that all three conditions are satisfied by the view that philosophy is worthwhile to the tranquil because of the painful boredom it prevents.

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This research presents the conceptualization of habitual boredom and the development of a scale for its measure. Bargdill suggests that habitually bored individuals experience five overlapping psychological themes: ambivalence, passive avoidance stance, passive hope, identity confusion and shame. The authors propose that situational boredom and habitual boredom are two different constructs. Other boredom scales have mixed the two constructs together during their development. This scale of habitual boredom has been developed in terms of the five themes and has been tested through several prior administrations. This paper reports the results of the latest test that reflects modification and refinement of the scale through previous tests. The data indicate that the scale with 35 items is fairly reliable. Each of the five themes measured by the scale is configured by seven items. The current iteration has included two face validity questions. Persons experiencing habitual boredom are at risk of serious psychological impacts since the changing situations does not seem to curb the effects of boredom.

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Existing research suggests that people prone to boredom may have high self-directed attention (i.e., the tendency to focus on one’s inner experiences) but low self-knowledge (i.e., the tendency to possess knowledge of one’s inner experiences), which are two distinct aspects of self-perception. We empirically tested this proposal across multiple studies by examining the relationships between indices of boredom, self-directed attention, and self-knowledge. In Studies 1 and 2, we created a measure of state self-directed attention that possesses good psychometric properties, reliability, and convergent and construct validity. Additionally, we tested and confirmed the hypothesis that experimentally manipulating self-directed attention has no significant impact on boredom (Study 1), but that experimentally manipulating boredom causes a significant increase in self-directed attention (Study 2). In Study 3, we tested and confirmed the hypothesis that trait self-directed attention, trait self-knowledge, and trait boredom are correlated, but psychometrically distinct, dispositional constructs. We also tested and confirmed the hypothesis that trait self-directed attention and trait self-knowledge are uniquely associated with trait boredom (Study 3). Implications and future directions related to furthering our understanding of boredom and aspects of self-perception are discussed.

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I defend that saying in everyday parlance that an architectonic space is ‘boring’ can be an aesthetic judgement and, in such cases, we can talk about a form of aesthetic boredom about spaces. As an emotion (rather than a mood), aesthetic boredom would be the negative or opposite emotion to what might be called our aesthetic excitement about a space. The latter would be our emotional response to what I call the aesthetic quality of inhabitability: the quality of a space which we experience as being responsible for 1) creating possibilities which are significant for us (regarding what we can do and how we can do it in that space), and for 2) enhancing (qualitatively) the experience of realizing those possibilities. Unlike (simple) boredom about a space, aesthetic boredom would be boredom due primarily to the absence of inhabitability thus understood. As to the frustrated desire which, as it is commonly understood, is constitutive of boredom, I will argue that this desire is the one revealed by our constant active search for inhabitability in the spaces in which we find ourselves, or for greater inhabitability when we choose them. Our frustration is a response, not simply to not encountering possibilities, but rather, to realizing that there are none where we expect some. This would explain the considerable strength of our (negative) response to boring spaces. We experience aesthetically boring spaces as spaces that deny both significant possibilities and the enhancement of the felt quality of the experience of realizing them.

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As the ultimate attempt to transcend, suicide relates to boredom. The intentional taking of one’s own life constitutes the definite disregard of the self and the world—a crisis of existential meaning, heightened by the qualities of the environment. Resonating with the postmodern concern with space and inhabitation, the case of No. 1 Poultry, a building in London by James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates, finalized in 1997, suggests that boredom and architecture organize a flux of information that, in an extreme and fatal manner, surfaces in suicide. Throwing themselves off the public terrace, 25 meters (80 feet) above street level, six deaths have been reported since the economic downturn of 2007. In 2015, a restaurant critic jumped to his death. He wrote in his last blog post, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; […] [Samuel] Johnson was right, I am not tired of London and never have been […] however I am tired of life”. In 2016, a salesman followed the same steps. In his phone, several unsent messages were found. The first read, “I am bored of life and the future possibilities disinterest me”; the second, “I no longer try to adapt myself to others”; the third, “I am not made for this world”; and the last, “I have cracked”. To explore the connection between boredom and architecture, this essay investigates these suicides in relation to the history and design of No. 1 Poultry. If boredom has many intensities and depends on what the surroundings can offer, then such incidents reveal its most radical moment.

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We aim to extend the body of research on boredom as a potentially creativity-enhancing state. Therefore, 124 students were assigned to one of five 6-minute interventions (boredom-discomfort, boredom-equanimity, boredom-continuation, joy, and concentration) and the effects on figural as well as verbal fluency and diversity as measures of creativity were examined. It was verified whether the emotional state changed during the intervention. In addition, the emotional dimensions, valence, arousal, and alertness were controlled before and after the test. Boredom-discomfort, joy, and concentration altered the emotion experienced during the intervention in the intended way. The boredom-equanimity and boredom-continuation groups served as control conditions for various boredom states, and less boredom resulted for subjects in these groups. Figural and verbal measures of creativity were differently influenced by the interventions. For verbal fluency, we obtained a significant interaction between time and group, in particular, the performance differed between the intervention with either concentration, or joy. Verbal creativity decreased after intervention in all groups, most for joy and boredom-discomfort groups and least for concentration. In contrast, figural performance increased in four groups, most for boredom-discomfort but not for concentration. Subsequent analyses revealed significant interaction effects between time and group with respect to both verbal and figural measures of creativity. The interventions had not only short-term effects on subjects' emotions but also, in some cases, a significant longer-term impact on emotion dimensions at the end of the study. After discussing methodological aspects, conclusions are drawn for further research approaches.

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Popular sentiment suggests that boredom ought to lead to creativity despite a lack of research investigating the relationship explicitly. Across two experiments the relation between boredom and creativity was examined via a mood induction and surveys (Experiment 1) and behavioural tasks (Experiments 1 and 2). Results from Experiment 1 indicated that state boredom was in fact associated with poorer performance on the divergent thinking task and that trait boredom proneness was associated with both diminished belief in one’s creative potential and lower levels of engagement of everyday creative pursuits. Results from Experiment 2 again found no relation between state or trait boredom and creativity on a novel creativity task. Clearly, these findings indicate that neither state nor trait boredom promote increased creativity.

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This article addresses the conundrum: if climate change is an “existential threat” to our species and the integrity of our entire planetary ecosystem, why is climate change “boring” for even informed, well-meaning individuals? Three main areas will be addressed. The first task is to discuss how “boredom” itself can be characterized as a relatively coherent and valid analytical concept, and how it might be linked to the climate crisis specifically, through sociology of emotion and psychoanalytical approaches. Second, climate change’s ontological status as what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects” will be examined – entities so complex, and extended across almost limitless time and space, they cannot be comprehended by our usual analogies, perceptions, and metrics. Boredom looms here as affective and libidinal disengagement protecting the psyche from the hyperobject’s unsettling effects of cognitive overreach and emotional dissonance. The third theme is “climate apocalypticism”: endless reiterations of our dystopian future, it is argued, evince a monotonous similarity, resulting in emotional exhaustion, melancholia, and morose resignation – and ultimately boredom. The article’s conclusion will focus on some of the ways in which “climate boredom” might prompt a more critical and engaged collective responses to the climate emergency.