Bored to tears: Annual Happiness Conference

By Jackie Randles

This article was published in Living Ethics: issue 69 spring 2007

At Sydney’s annual happiness conference, Jackie Randles couldn’t help but notice an elephant in the room.

At the recent Happiness and its Causes conference in Sydney, I was struck by the simplicity of the recipe: get your mental flow happening by doing things that lead to a state of engagement. Enhance your good feelings by being altruistic and make a real effort to belong to a community. Find a way of expressing your spirituality. Remember that optimism is a skill that can be learned. Could it be that attaining true happiness is really that simple?

This year, as at the same conference last year, I took copious notes and compiled lists of easy techniques for improving happiness. Armed with one hundred and one ways to be happier, during coffee breaks I’d have fleeting conversations with people seeking to come to terms with recurring patterns of dissatisfaction in their lives – at work, in relationships and with life generally.

Listening to their stories, and to the myriad of speakers with expert credentials in the theory and practice of happiness, I couldn’t help but notice that the restlessness people try to ward off in various ways seemed something akin to boredom.

Boredom can arise when we cannot do what we want to do or when we have to do something we don’t want to do. But what happens when we have no idea of what we want to do? Or what we really want to do?

At the Happiness and its Causes conference, where everyone was searching for ways to inject more meaning into their lives, I wondered about the nature of boredom; how and why it afflicts us and why we cannot seem to overcome it by any act of will.

As children, many people will remember interminable bouts of boredom. The older we get, the more proficient we become at getting rid of time – today the culture of busyness afflicts young and old alike. Yet as many conference participants would attest, busyness can often be accompanied by a deep sense of emptiness.

great pretenders one and all

In 2007, a global survey conducted by a multinational management consultancy firm found that less than 20% of respondents reported being engaged at work. More than 80% of people interviewed admitted that they were bored with their jobs. Some weeks later, a well-respected Australian business blog discussing these results was inundated with posts heartily endorsing the research findings.

Many of the posts were from people who described themselves as senior executives. It’s highly likely that in the workplace, many people pretend to be much more engaged than they actually are – after all, who would admit to being terminally bored to their CEO? When you’re bored to tears at work, you might start to look for another job that might suit you better. But once ensconced in your new role, you soon find yourself bored again.

How many people do you think are bored with their relationship? A quick glance at the self-help shelf in a bookshelf indicates that the issue is common enough to warrant numerous publications addressing relationship ambivalence, re-kindling desire and the art of settling. A serial monogamist, you might change relationships every few years only to find yourself once again faced by that nagging yearning for … what?

existential longing

Freud found parity between grief and melancholy: both contain loss, but whereas the person who grieves has a distinct object of loss, the melancholic does not know precisely what he has lost. In a similar vein, Schopenhauer described boredom as a “tame longing without any particular object”.

In The Philosophy of Boredom, Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendson remarks that boredom lacks the charm of melancholy – a charm traditionally linked to wisdom, sensitivity and beauty. At the same time, despite its debilitating effects, boredom lacks the seriousness of depression. But left to its own devices, boredom can lead to addiction, delinquency, self-destruction and sorrow.

On the other hand, when we crave engagement at all costs, we struggle to cope with the every day monotony of life, usually at great cost to our own happiness. Perhaps our rush for diversions could be masking a fear of the emptiness that surrounds them.

Indeed, numerous presentations at this year’s Happiness and its Causes conference were about mindfulness and the benefits of clearing one’s mind of mental clutter. Buddhist nuns explained simple techniques for tuning in to the monkey mind, to accepting the jumble and clutter of the thought process and detaching from it altogether.

It’s easy to blame boredom on external events – lack of opportunity, not enough money, zero responsibility at work, illness, a boring job, relationship ambivalence, no excitement socially, nothing to look forward to … while it can be gratifying to blame someone else when you’re bored, you have to ask yourself how much your boredom is really influenced by these kinds of these factors.

The perennially bored know how detrimental boredom can be to their emotional wellbeing, but is there any good that can come of it?

It goes without saying that many aspects of life are just plain boring – but at the same time, people can get pleasure from all kinds of things for a whole range of reasons, especially Buddhists. There’s a whole bunch of things people can do to fill in time and eradicate boredom – but perhaps what we really need are tools to help us embrace boredom and begin to indulge in the very nothingness of being.