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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do,” begins Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In Lewis Carroll’s classic novel, young Alice is spurred to imagine a dream landscape populated by fantastical creatures and characters, from the White Rabbit to the Queen of Hearts. The same impulse should inspire us to tackle tedium this festive season, not as a blight but as a bonus.
At this time of year, a high state of expectation and excitement often combines with the inescapable festive ritual to trigger moments of boredom. No family gathering will be complete without at least one child’s sulky declaration “I’m bored”, followed by repeated appeals for something to do.
Too often, such pleas will be satisfied with screen time (“It’s Christmas, let them do what they want for once”). Where Alice, in the opening paragraph of Carroll’s fantasy, complained that her older sister’s book had “no pictures or conversation” in it, smartphones, tablets and television offer an infinity of distracting images and chat. Supercharged by generative artificial intelligence, tireless apps can now craft “original” stories, songs and even virtual playmates for adults and children alike.
There is wonder in this new technology, but it is not a lasting solution to tedium. In fact, digital media use may be making people more bored than ever. A study of US high-school students between 2010 and 2017 suggested a notable increase in the frequency with which they agreed they were “often bored”, as the penetration of digital and social media increased. Overuse of digital media can destroy attention spans and induce feelings of meaninglessness. Switching constantly between screen-based content feeds a craving for more excitement, while instead exacerbating boredom.
Long before the advent of the smartphone, philosopher Bertrand Russell distinguished between “stultifying” and “fructifying” boredom. Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary is the fictional epitome of stultification and its malign consequences, “boredom, quiet as the spider . . . spinning its web in the shadowy places of her heart”. Suffering from ennui, the bored can divert into unwelcome and reckless behaviour, including those festive staples of substance abuse, gluttony, arguments and affairs. Compared with such alternatives, it might be preferable to stare at an illuminated oblong of amusement for a while.
It would be much better, though, to focus on Russell’s second definition of boredom as a fruitful state of mind. As Alice discovered, boredom can trigger extraordinary flights of imagination. Enforced idleness helped Charles Darwin, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and Isaac Newton create their masterpieces and achieve their breakthroughs. Neuroscientists suggest that the pursuit of constant excitement is a path to cognitive burnout. Periods of boredom can relieve pressure on the overloaded brain and provide a welcome stimulus to creativity. Even dull jobs, which AI promises to abolish, leave space for inspiration. Think of Albert Einstein’s undemanding work in the Swiss patent office, which freed his mind to consider the further reaches of his theory of relativity.
In 1930, Russell wrote in The Conquest of Happiness: “A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase.” Nearly a century later, we are confronted with myriad temptations away from the path of boredom. But when tedium strikes, resist the urge to dive down a rabbit hole of endless scrolling or short-term gratification. Embrace, instead, the kind of boredom that, properly cultivated, can bear rich fruit.
