The 'B' word

That summer vacations are just around the corner is clear from the frenzied parental search for ways to keep their wards from boredom. Boredom has long ceased to be a vacation phenomenon. And as people only too used to tossing that word around, parents cannot point fingers. The dreaded 'B' word, a fuller description perhaps for the age-oldexperiences of dullness, lassitude and tedium, may have made it to thedictionary only in the 18th century, first in 1768 as a verb ('to bore') andthen in 1852 as a noun ('boredom'). Yet, with every generation, the idea appearsto have taken giant leaps. "The world is eaten up by boredom," remarked author Georges Bernanos. "You can't see it all at once. It is like dust...stand still for an instant and there it is, coating your face and hands. To shake off this drizzle of ashes you must be forever on the go. And so people are always on the go." Although you would seldom catch such people twiddling their thumbs, the phenomenon of ennui, which Oscar Wilde famously called the only horrible thing in the world, "the one sin for which there is no forgiveness", is manifesting itself in our personal, professional and public lives with, ahem, boring regularity. Curiously, boredom, which gotequated by sociologist Jean Baudrillard to a pitiless zooming in on theepidermis of time where every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores ofthe face, is meriting a good deal of contemporary attention.Author-researcher and University of Calgary professor Peter Toohey recently brought out a treatise on boredom, chronicling its cultural history, tracing its roots to a combination of human responses ranging from disgust to melancholia, and calling it the fallout of leisure opportunities. France is all set to replace Gross Domestic Product with publicennui as a measure of popular happiness and economic success.Inspired by the growing recourse in the US, like elsewhere, topastimes such as television, iPod, web surfing, texting and tweeting, Trail End,an American historic house museum, recently concluded an exhibition titled 'NoTime For Boredom', examining how people spent their free time before the adventof television, radio and the internet. A survey carried out inAustralia suggests that half of the top 10 product categories on which mobileshoppers spent the most money in 2010 - music, software, games, movie ticketsand books - are about killing boredom. Unravelling boredom's linksto clinical depression, pathological gambling behaviour and substance abuse,modern research suggests that a conscious but idle brain is given to actionssuch as recalling autobiographical memory or conjuring hypothetical events,using up only 5% less energy, but making time drag. When everybodyalready has so much to do, one wonders why boredom should even rear its head inthe first place. Perhaps we are so excessively engaged and engrossed with oureveryday lives that when we do get a few moments of respite, we don't quite knowwhat to do with them.If imbuing free time with meaning is increasingly about television, video games, social networking, instant messaging, cellphones, iPods and numerous other trappings of post-modern life, the plethora of available choices or the inability to pick one - a handicap aptly described by Filipino artist-philosopher Danny Castillones Sillada as 'decisional exhaustion' - can only exacerbate boredom, while exposing us to the seamier side of multitasking. Viktor Frankl's Sunday Neurosis or depression resulting from the emptiness accompanying the end of a working week is far more rampant today than when it was propounded over six decades ago. In suggesting an antidote to boredom, Dale Carnegie may well have advised us to throw ourselves into some work that we believe in with all our heart and to live and die for it in order to find real happiness. Turns out we are bored of believing as well.