ARE YOU BORED? PERAMBULATING TO PERDITION!

Are You Bored?

Perambulating To Perdition!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© November 24, 2014

REFERENCE:

This is an excerpt from Time Out for Sanity! Blueprint for Dealing with an Anxious Age.  This is the final volume of a ten-book commitment to TATE Publishing Company, and should be out in early 2015.  

Though love repine, and reason chafe,

There came a voice without reply,

‘Tis man’s perdition to be safe,

When for the truth he ought to die

—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American essayist, lecturer and poet

Is society sick?  You don’t have to reflect on what your parents told you, what was taught in school, or what the media say. What do you think? Societal programming makes this difficult. You are taught to think in a prescribed manner and to take formulated thinking with a smile. You are not programmed to base your thinking on individual experience, but the collective will of other people.

This is a process that is followed and reinforced at every juncture of your life. You are taught what to think, feel and believe, indeed, what is true as society defines truth. Somehow society has fallen prey to its own refining process, coming to believe its own myths and taboos, and taking itself seriously as the last word to everything.

German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), author of Being and Time (1927), was apprehensive of the emerging techno¬logical forces of the 20th century that he called, Machenschaft or “machination.”

With the technological explosion of WWII, he saw machina¬tion assuming quasi-mythological status not unlike an ancient god. He declared it was “the unconditional power of machination and the complete groundlessness of things.” He could see this leading to technological nihilism or the ultimate metaphysical fate of the West.

The existential philosopher envision this disrupting our con-sciousness, or “deworlding of the world.” Stated otherwise, this would be akin to being in the world but not in charge of our exist¬ence. Does he have a point?

The consciousness of what constitutes an emotionally healthy man appears fixed. There is now a push to dispense what clearly are happiness pills to give people an emotional lift, as if life or existence itself cannot provide such a lift. Such recommendations do not come from quacks but trained professionals: psychiatrists and physicians.

The media give experts an awesome stage while reinforcing the low estimate of the public’s mentality. Take the headline in The Tampa Tribune (April 13, 1972): THE AGE OF DEPRESSION, with the following story:

“Never have so many people been so unhappy. A poll has shown one out of two people said they are depressed much or some of the time. Doctors are confirming this in their offices. Even though patients do not use the word, depression, the nature of their symptoms tip it off. Some psychiatrists are calling this the age of depression in contrast to the age of anxiety a generation ago.”

The article goes on to quote Dr. Harold Visotsky (1924-2002), chairman of the department of psychiatry, Northwestern University Medical School. He revamped the Illinois Mental Health System, which much of the nation adopted. He adds, “Today’s depression is becoming epidemic in our part of the world.”

The article makes reference to the novelist Albert Camus and the poet W. H. Auden and their prophecy that we would be entering “what may be decades of depression and apathy.”

Dr. Jan Fawcett, chief of the depression and suicide unit of the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute adds: “Many young people have a hopeless outlook for the future and feel frustrated in try-ing to cope with problems.” Visotsky concurs:

“Both the increasing incidence of suicides among youth and the widespread use of mood elevating drugs, such as amphetamines, indicate that depressions and depressive illnesses are more com-mon than even our statistics reveal. We are seeing significant numbers of young people as new cases, depressed for the first time. It signifies the illness is becoming epidemic.”

It should then come as no surprise that the profession of psy¬chiatry would develop a test for the reader to determine his or her state of depression. Dr. William W. Z. Zung of Duke University has developed such a test with the heading HOW DEPRESSED ARE YOU? Notice it assumes you are sick. Yet, the flippancy of this test is apparent, as it has no personal knowledge of you as an individual. It would appear the test simply wants you to confirm how sick you are.

The featured article (May 13, 1972) of “The National Observer” carried this caption: BOREDOM EPIDEMIC, “The Illness of the Age.” Journalist Peter T. Chew (1924–2006) wrote:

“Admiral Byrd so feared it that he took twelve strait jackets on his Antarctic expedition. Lindbergh complained of it repeatedly on his flight to Paris. Bertrand Russell wrote, ‘Half the sins of mankind are caused by fear of it.’ Erich Fromm calls it ‘the illness of the age,’ the root cause of violence and drug addiction. Boredom

has always been with us. But behavioral scientists make a strong case that chronic boredom is epidemic in our industrial society. They call ours ‘the land of the free and the home of the bored.’”

The article than unleashes a compelling cadre of experts to support this conclusion. Again, the premise assumes the reader is bored and needs someone in authority to wrench him or her from boredom. It is the old ruse of the self-filling prophecy: how we see others is how we expect them to behave. Sociological relativism suggests society is normal inasmuch as it functions, and pathological inasmuch as it is unable to adjust to the demands of society.

THE PERENNIAL SICKNESS: BOREDOM!

Boredom has defined by Cynthia D. Fisher in terms of its main central psychological processes: "an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest and difficulty concentrating on the current activity."  It is an affective experience associated with cognitive attentional processes for which the subject has more than enough skill.

There are three types of boredom, all of which involve problems of engagement of attention.

These include (1) times when we are prevented from engaging in wanted activity; (2) when we are forced to engage in unwanted activity; or (3) when we are simply unable for no apparent reason to maintain engagement in any activity or spectacle. 

Proneness to boredom is a tendency to experience boredom of all types. Recent research has found that boredom proneness is clearly and consistently associated with failures of attention, which are linked to depression, and strongly correlated with attentional lapses as with depression. 

Although boredom is often viewed as a trivial and mild irritant, proneness to boredom has been linked to a very diverse range of possible psychological, physical, educational, and social problems.

Boredom is a condition characterized by perception of one's environment as dull, or tedious, and lacking in stimulation. This can result from leisure and a lack of aesthetic interests.   For example, a person may feel alienated and passive when immersed in work found tedious.  T

There is an inherent anxiety in boredom; people will expend considerable effort to prevent or remedy it, yet in many circumstances, it is accepted as suffering to be endured. Common passive ways to escape boredom are to sleep or to think creative thoughts (daydream). Typical active solutions consist in an intentional activity of some sort, often something new, as familiarity and repetition can lead to boredom.

Boredom also plays a role in existentialist thought when ere one is confined, spatially or otherwise.  On the other hand, boredom may be met with various religious activities, partly because boredom may be taken as the essential human condition, to which God, wisdom, or morality are the ultimate answers. This is in fact how it was taken by existentialist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

Martin Heidegger wrote about boredom in “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics” and “What is Metaphysics?” in 1929-1930, perhaps the most extensive philosophical treatment ever of the subject. He focused on waiting at railway stations in particular as a major context of boredom. 

Søren Kierkegaard remarks in Either/Or (1843) that "patience cannot be depicted" visually, since there is a sense that any immediate moment of life may be fundamentally tedious.

Blaise Pascal in the Pensées (1664) discusses the human condition in saying "we seek rest in a struggle against some obstacles. And when we have overcome these, rest proves unbearable because of the boredom it produces … only an infinite and immutable object – that is, God himself – can fill this infinite abyss."

Without stimulus or focus, the individual is confronted with nothingness, the meaninglessness of existence, and experiences existential anxiety.

Heidegger states this idea as follows:

"Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals being as a whole." Schopenhauer used the existence of boredom in an attempt to prove the vanity of human existence, stating ... for if life, in the desire for which our essence and existence consists, possessed in itself a positive value and real content, there would be no such thing as boredom: mere existence would fulfil and satisfy us."

Erich Fromm speaks of boredom as a common psychological response to industrial society, where people are required to engage in alienated labor. According to Fromm, boredom is "perhaps the most important source of aggression and destructiveness today."

For him, the search for thrills and novelty that characterizes consumer culture are not solutions to boredom, but mere distractions from boredom which, he argues, continues unconsciously. Above and beyond taste and character, the universal case of boredom consists in any instance of waiting, as Heidegger noted, such as in line, for someone else to arrive or finish a task, or while one is travelling somewhere. The automobile requires fast reflexes, making its operator busy and hence, perhaps for other reasons as well, making the ride more tedious despite being over sooner.

CAUSES AND EFFECTS OF BOREDOM

Although not studied widely, research on boredom suggests that it is a major factor impacting diverse areas of a person's life, including career, education, and a sense of autonomy with the bored possibly showing symptom of clinical depression.

Boredom can be a form of learned helplessness, a phenomenon closely related to depression. Some philosophies of parenting propose that if children are raised in an environment devoid of stimuli, and are not allowed or encouraged to interact with their environment, they will fail to develop the mental capacities to do so.

In a learning environment, a common cause of boredom is lack of understanding; for instance, if one is not following or connecting to the material in a class or lecture, it will usually seem boring. However, the opposite can also be true; something that is too easily understood, simple or transparent, can also be boring. Boredom is often inversely related to learning, and in school it may be a sign that a student is not challenged enough, or is too challenged. An activity that is predictable to the students is likely to bore them

A 1989 study indicated that an individual's impression of boredom may be influenced by the individual's degree of attention, as a higher acoustic level of distraction from the environment correlated with higher reports of boredom.

Boredom has also been studied as being related to drug abuse among teens. In the wider population, boredom has been proposed as a possible cause to pathological gambling behavior, as pathological gamblers seek stimulation to avoid states of boredom and depression.

In the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) has the character Lord Henry Wotton say to a young Dorian Gray: "The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness."

Popular artist Procol Harum, John Sebastian, Iggy Pop, the Deftones, Buzzcocks, and Blink-182 have all written songs with boredom mentioned in the title. Other songs about boredom and activities people turn to when bored include Green Day's song "Longview,” System of a Down's "Lonely Day,” and Bloodhound Gang's "Mope."  Douglas Adams depicted a robot named Marvin the Paranoid Android whose boredom appeared to be the defining trait of his existence in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The 1969 Vocational Guidance Counsellor sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus established a lasting stereotype of accountants as boring.  The Yellow Pages used to carry an entry under Boring, "See civil engineers" (referring to the "tunneling" meaning), but this was changed in 1996 to "See sites exploration.”

Society’s health or sickness is never confined to the rigors of logic. Experts have no hesitation to proffer faulty syllogisms on suspect data, as they are always in a state of subjective wonder hypothesizing in catchy hyperbole.

As you can see, considerable emotional intelligence of both popular artists, and established social thinkers has been devoted to the subject of boredom, which is a societal obsession if not sickness.  Syllogisms of logic have failed to be successful in training the mind to draw conclusions that are ameliorating to this problem.

The take away from this is boredom is a societal problem somewhat limited to the morality of the time. We witnessed this when the American Psychiatric Association declared homosexuality a sickness, a moralis¬tic not a scientific assessment. Now, in 2015, psychiatrists desig¬nate it a lifestyle choice. Even the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy of Pope Francis I is wrestling with homosexuality finding a way to include people of that persuasion to be practicing Catholics in good faith.  The brilliant Irish playwright, dramatist and novelist, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) suffered mightily for his sexuality more than a century ago.  Morality, alas, is in the mind of the times.

Treating scientists as priests on high has encouraged sloppi-ness in thinking and cheating in research. We forget that much of research is repetitive and therefore boring with often contradictory results.  Such findings are as inevitable as those that are meaningful and can be replicated are rare.  There is the famous case of the painted mice at Manhattan’s Sloan-Kettering Institute (Time, April 29, 1974). This illustrates the pressure for results at any cost. The best minds have been unable to understand the blur between what is so and what is not, between fact and fiction. We have depended on scientists and other experts to penetrate our confusion only to find they are often found as human and as confused as we are.