REBRANDING BOREDOM MONOTONY REAPPRECIATED
T
he patient cocks his thumbs out and draws his fists to his chest. Music tinkles in the background of the advert as the camera retreats and he turns, with his penis tucked between his legs, his hands performing a charade of nipples. Other patients flick at a light switch and a fountain of water is run from a tap to the puddled floor. One man pings a nurse’s bra strap as she bends over. A woman’s voiceover tells us that the devil makes work for idle thumbs. “Keep yours busy. Text another Virgin Mobile for 3p.” Dickens didn’t invent boredom, but he was the first to write the word in his 1853 novel Bleak House, a serial about an inert Court of Chancery case in a mud-drenched London, and the ‘chronic malady of boredom’. Recently, Motorola honed the term to fit our restless world and began using the term ‘microboredom’ for the thin slices of free time from which they could offer customers relief in the form of Tetris and Snake. Seneca talked of the feeling as a kind of nausea, a diagnosis that lingers on in the complaint of being ‘sick of something’ or ‘bored to death’, and one that propels Sartre’s famous existential tract Nausea. One Roman official was even memorialised in the 2nd century AD with a public inscription thanking him for rescuing an entire town from taedia,
or boredom. But boredom scholar Peter Tooley sees the feeling as a certificate of wellbeing. Like satiety, boredom is not normally for the starving. In the Christian tradition, the ‘noonday demon’ acedia was a word for the listlessness that was a precursor to the deadly sin of sloth. It was a danger that could slither into cloistered lives and leave its victims unable to work or pray. Boredom became both a crime and a punishment when sitting in prison cells became a Quaker penalty in itself. This year, James Ward held a Boring Conference where 500 people bought tickets to gather and listen to talks on electric hand dryers and double yellow lines. Ward is selling boredom, or at least our interest in boredom, back to the masses, at £15 a ticket. It is not a celebration – that would be too stimulating – but a gentle defence of life’s pockets of dullness. Ward works for “a highstreet retailer” and he likes Twitter because the 140 character limit and immediacy of upload guarantees a thought often not worth saying; a Prufrock measuring out lives in Tweets not coffee spoons. At one of Ward’s festivals, William Barrett asked a crowd to brace themselves for five piping-hot minutes of inertia, and recited 415 colours listed in a paint catalogue for his ‘Like Listening to Paint Dry’. There have