Journal of Boredom Studies

Boredom, Faith, and Hope: Some Reflections on the Human Condition

2025-08-30T17:00:30+02:00

This essay explores the intersections of boredom, faith, and hope as fundamental dimensions of the human condition. Boredom, often dismissed as trivial, is here understood as an existential exposure: a confrontation with the absence of meaning, the slowing of time, and the recognition of our dependence on orientation and purpose. Rather than being a passive void, boredom functions as a threshold that invites deeper reflection and transformation. Faith emerges as a response to this exposure. Not limited to religious dogma, faith is framed as the human capacity to believe in what cannot be seen, to trust that emptiness may contain hidden preparation. Through autobiographical reflections, the essay illustrates how faith has quietly shaped moments of uncertainty, offering a way to endure boredom not as despair but as an opening toward new possibilities. Hope, in turn, stretches faith into the future. It reconfigures time by envisioning the void not as permanent but as transitional. Within academic life and personal experience, hope sustains endurance, turning the monotony of stalled projects or unanswered questions into a quiet assurance that tomorrow may bear fruit. Taken together, boredom, faith, and hope form a dialectic: boredom reveals vulnerability, faith sustains endurance, and hope transforms waiting into anticipation. The essay argues that boredom is not the enemy of existence but its most honest messenger. It calls for embracing boredom as fertile ground for creativity, resilience, and renewal, both as a subject of scholarship and as a lived experience that speaks to future generations.

A Car Crash, Phineas Gage, and How I Came to Love Boredom

2025-10-03T17:48:44+02:00

None

Student Boredom, Boring Professors, and Student Burnout. Literary Autoethnography on How and Why I Have Become a Boredom Researcher

2025-09-03T19:17:44+02:00

The essay describes in an auto-ethnographical and literary form the life experiences of academic boredom and academic burnout. It covers in a condensed and subjective manner the last year of the author’s MA studies depicting boring lecturers: Professor Skuka, dr. Langeweile and professor Nudzisz in a vivid, hyperbolic, and ironic way. The main aim of the essay is to explain the Author’s motives and his starting point in choosing to become a boredom researcher.

Recollections of a Former Boredom Scholar

2025-09-09T20:26:55+02:00

None

Review of the Book The Routledge International Handbook of Boredom by Maik Bieleke, Wanja Wolff, and Corinna S. Martarelli

2025-06-04T02:42:28+02:00

Maik Bieleke, Wanja Wolff, and Corinna S. Martarelli (eds.): The Routledge International Handbook of Boredom. Routledge, 2024, pp. 418. ISBN: 978-1-032-22186-1

Understanding Boredom in Ortega y Gasset’s Moral Philosophy

2025-04-26T14:55:19+02:00

The aim of this article is to contribute to the field of boredom studies from a perspective that has not yet been systematically explored: the gaze of Ortega y Gasset. On the one hand, it seeks to acknowledge the influence of Ortega y Gasset’s thought within the context of Spanish philosophy; on the other, it aims to engage with the growing field of Boredom Studies, which has become increasingly established with greater clarity regarding its direction and purpose. This study focuses on Ortega y Gasset moral philosophy, based on the thesis that the core concepts that structure it—life, vocation, project, and absorption—offer valuable insights into understanding the phenomenon of boredom. Ortega y Gasset’s work has been, and continues to be, extensively studied, in line with one of his fundamental ideas: that reality cannot be reduced to a single perspective, and any attempt to comprehend it requires a multiplicity of viewpoints. To this end, the present work also seeks to contribute to the study and understanding of Ortega’s philosophy, with particular emphasis on his ethics of vocation.

When Existence Grows Heavy: Existential Boredom and the Flight from Ourselves

2025-04-02T13:28:43+02:00

This paper presents a theoretical investigation of existential boredom as a fundamental attunement through which key aspects of the human condition are disclosed—namely, the absence of ultimate meaning, ontological freedom, and finitude. Far from being a fleeting emotion or trivial discomfort, boredom is treated here as a mood with ontological significance, capable of revealing our evasive relationship with our own condition as existing beings. By drawing on philosophical reflections ranging from Seneca’s notion of taedium vitae to modern and existential thinkers such as Pascal, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, the study outlines how boredom emerges not merely as a symptom of malaise, but as a privileged site for encountering the burden of existence. Our conclusion is that existential boredom exposes the tension between our structural openness to being and our recurring tendency to flee from this openness, revealing the weight—and the truth—of human finitude.

Finding Something for Yourself: Exploring Boredom Through the Lens of Identity Development

2024-10-08T21:21:35+02:00

Boredom is a complex human experience understood through psychodynamic, arousal, cognitive, and existential perspectives. Despite significant contributions from these perspectives, this paper highlights two key challenges to understanding boredom: the depth of boredom – whether it is a minor or significant aspect of human experience – and the role of personal meaning in theories of boredom. I propose an initial framework for understanding boredom by integrating insights from different theoretical traditions, particularly in relation to identity development. Drawing on the work of Erik Erikson and Ruthellen Josselson, I explore how boredom connects to the experience of Holding and how identity concern and exploration contribute to this phenomenon. I illustrate this framework with examples from in-depth interviews with adolescents and young adults, analyzing their experiences of boredom through life narratives. The paper also offers new insights into the long-term tendency of individuals to experience boredom – i.e., trait boredom.

Theses on Self-Awareness in the History of Boredom Studies

2025-06-23T19:58:12+02:00

“Part of establishing the cultural and critical field of boredom studies is,” Michael E. Gardiner and I write in the introduction to the Boredom Studies Reader, addressing: “what is boredom? Not as a means of limiting the possibilities of this emerging discourse, but rather to note the generally accepted personal and social boundaries of the experience of being bored.” Building off this question, the current paper consists of a series of theses that consider the history of boredom as a field of study in the contemporary day through several interrelated ideas about the development of a modern self. Drawing upon numerous treatments of boredom from different disciplinary perspectives, including literature, psychology, art, and philosophy, I argue that in order to understand the history of modern boredom and its developments up to the current day it is necessary to recognize that behind the act of being bored is an imperative towards self-awareness.

Predicting Boredom Based on Gratitude and Integrative Self-Knowledge in Adolescents: With the Mediating Role of the Meaning of Life from Three Existential, Cognitive, and Neurological Approaches

2025-08-22T16:15:24+02:00

Boredom signals a lack of meaning. Gratitude and self-knowledge promote feelings of meaning in life. I proposed accordingly that gratitude and self-knowledge, by engendering meaning, shield against boredom in adolescents. Specifically, I hypothesized that gratitude and self-knowledge prevent boredom by increasing perceptions of meaning in life, through existential, cognitive, and neurological approaches. A total of 238 high school students (both girls and boys) from Shiraz, Iran, participated in this study, selected through a multi-stage cluster sampling method. Participants completed questionnaires measuring trait boredom, gratitude, meaning in life, and integrative self-knowledge. Results indicated that gratitude and reflective self-knowledge significantly and positively predicted the ‘meaning presence’ component, which in turn significantly and negatively predicted trait boredom. The mediating role of the meaning presence was confirmed. These findings suggest that gratitude and reflective self-knowledge reduce boredom by enhancing meaning presence in life. To summarize, gratitude and reflective self-knowledge correspond with the cognitive, existential, and neurological functions of boredom and can predict a decrease in boredom.

State Boredom and Sexual Arousal in Men: No Evidence for Effects on Genital and Subjective Measures

2025-04-14T15:29:45+02:00

Past research alleges boredom to trigger markers of sexual arousal, including sexual sensation seeking, promiscuity, and pornography consumption among men. Yet, this past work relied on self-report and did not directly investigate sexual arousal. We experimentally tested if state boredom increases male genital arousal (via penile string gauges) alongside self-reported arousal. Participants identified as exclusively heterosexual or mostly heterosexual men. They watched boredom-inducing or comparatively neutral control videos, followed by footage displaying either men or women masturbating. Bayesian tests show that despite a successful experimental induction of state boredom, participants did not display different levels of genital or subjective arousal towards preferred or less preferred targets in the boredom condition than neutral condition. Rather, results provided moderately strong evidence for the null-hypothesis. These findings suggest that previously-reported links between trait boredom and sexual sensation seeking, promiscuity, and pornography do not translate to an impact on sexual arousal at state level.

Slow, Complex, Dull? Climate Boredom and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future

2025-03-25T15:31:55+01:00

The article discusses the phenomenon of climate boredom via Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. Based an embodied understanding of boredom—particularly as a literary effect—I considers the novel’s potential to bore through its slow narration of the politics, economics and administration of global carbon sequestration. I posit that the novel’s willingness to bore arises from and resonates with the ways in which it imagines that climate change might be at least somewhat successfully managed. Furthermore, I argue that this may represent a purposeful shift from cli-fi’s perhaps too familiar spectacularizing of climate change’s effects, and that the often delayed, backgrounded or distanced action of the novel serves to redirect interest to the slow, complex and often dull work of climate change’s solving which, while hardly positive, may be more workable than a paralyzing boredom that can emerge as means of distancing climate change. In analyzing Ministry through boredom, I also seek to establish a connection between the phenomenon of climate boredom and critical discussions of literary slowness and complexity, particularly as they are positioned in relation to imaginings of the Anthropocene. Moreover, I want to interrogate this championing of difficult texts in relation to their ostensible aim, which is to shift, inflame and nuance public consciousness on the issue. This article, then, pays particular attention to the ‘caveat’ reader, the bored reader who puts down the text, and thus attends to boredom also as a risk of slow and complex literature.

Philosophy and Anthropology of Boredom in Hans Blumenberg

2025-11-14T13:02:44+01:00

Translation of Ros Velasco, J. (2025). Filosofía y antropología del aburrimiento en Hans Blumenberg. In J. Ros Velasco, E. J. Torregroza Lara, and O. A. Quintero Ocampo (Eds.), Hans Blumenberg. Preguntas contra el miedo (pp. 215–248). Nexofia.