At the start of a recent semester, I showed a YouTube video to my students that lauded the perks of ditching social media. I had hoped to garner sympathy for my “no phones” policy and to persuade them to spend less time on their screens outside of class. I also thought it was a clever accompaniment to the assigned reading from Pascal’s Pensées, where Pascal argues that we seek distraction to avoid living with purpose before God.
Most students struggled to get past the apparent hypocrisy that the video appeared on the world’s second largest social media platform. And its first recommendation flubbed: If you quit social media you’ll be bored, and that’s good because boredom might prompt fruitful self-reflection and spur creativity. Maybe as a third or fourth point—after a sweeter lead—this argument could work. But with so many potent and addictive distractions around us all the time, it’s easier to drown out boredom than to pass through it to the benefits on the far side.
And nobody likes to be bored. Stuck on a tarmac for almost three hours a while back, I remembered how awful it can be. My daughter and I were on our way home to Maine after visiting family in Tennessee when our plane got slammed by a thunderstorm in Charlotte as we landed. Delays and cancellations grounded everything and left our plane without a gate to let us out. And for whatever reason, the air had been turned off and an incessant high-pitched noise rang from either the brakes or the engine. It was maddening. After a couple hours, irrational notions popped into my mind that maybe we were in some kind of social or scientific experiment on group confinement.
Trapped in that hot, tubular prison, I felt what Mary Mann, author of Yawn: Adventures in Boredom, describes as boredom’s “restless irritation.” My daughter somehow slept, while the heat and noise and my anxious thoughts about missing our connection hindered me from doing anything fruitful like reading. I found some diverting entertainment in the bustle around the cabin. But you can watch people for only so long before you risk looking like a weirdo.
We chase this or that goal and don’t quite realize that what pleases us is the hullabaloo of the chase itself.
I was indeed bored beyond any state of boredom I could remember. A drowsy inertia was taking hold and I felt helpless to snap out of it. The late philosopher Harry Frankfurt explains in The Reasons of Love that because boredom entails a lack of interest in what’s going on, “our motivation to stay focused weakens and we undergo a corresponding attenuation of psychic vitality.” When we get bored, in other words, “we tend to fall asleep.”
To be clear, being bored doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something wrong with us. It was hard not to be bored on that Charlotte tarmac (and some students might say the same about my classes). But as Mann explains, boredom might signal “that the train of life has stopped on its tracks, that the narrative is going nowhere.” And so our aversion to boredom, Frankfurt writes, is not “merely a casual resistance to more or less innocuous discomfort.” It is a vigorous resistance to the possibility that there might be something about our interior lives akin to death.
A real brush with death can, of course, awaken a person to care about the things that matter most. The earliest Christians made the contemplation of death routine for this very reason. But that’s a sobering practice and we might rather pick up our phones or turn on the TV for some lighthearted fun. Mann and Frankfurt claim that since boredom threatens our psychic survival, it pushes us to confront ourselves. But usually it’s easier to change the channel.
“I have often said,” Pascal writes in fragment 168 of Pensées, “that all human unhappiness comes from one thing alone, the inability to remain quietly in a room.” And this is why we “so love hustle bustle.” This is why “finding pleasure in solitude is so incomprehensible.” What makes even a king happy, he writes, “comes from the fact that people try constantly to divert kings and provide them with all kinds of pleasure. The king is surrounded by people whose only thought is to divert him and prevent him from thinking about himself.”
Without some kind of diversion to pass the time, boredom might take hold. It might direct us to pay more serious attention to ourselves. And from the noblest king to “the least of his subjects,” this is something we do not like to do. Of course, we find plenty of narcissistic self-regard today all around us and within ourselves. But what Pascal recommends is a more serious form of self-examination, something akin to an Ignatian examination of conscience.
Most of us don’t have affairs of state to distract us. But just the same, Pascal argues, we chase this or that goal and don’t quite realize that what pleases us is the hullabaloo of the chase itself. Because when we catch what we’ve been after and come to a modicum of rest, we don’t know what to do with ourselves. A quiet boredom creeps up, and we might find ourselves questioning from somewhere deep inside: Who are you, where did you come from, where are you going (171)?
For Pascal, these questions reflect more than a vague anxiety about the quality of our lives. There’s a “secret instinct” within us, he writes, “a vestige of the greatness of our original nature,” that knows we are made for something more than psychic survival or for a purpose we give to ourselves (168). It knows that we are made for God, that God claims us for rest and beatitude. So, if we let the buzz of distractions fade and if we’re willing to sustain the silence, we can find God in the stillness. But those are big “ifs.”
Pascal understands that to bear the image of God might feel like too much responsibility and that it’s easier to lose ourselves in pleasant diversions. But he also wants to remind us that Jesus Christ is a God of “love and consolation” and “infinite mercy” (690). So if boredom is a restless irritation that stems from a secret anxiety that our lives have no meaning—or perhaps a meaning from God that we’ve squandered—it’s good to remember that, by the grace of God, our lives’ meaning is not ultimately up to us.
And there is a clear desire today to find quiet from all the distractions. Just as in Pascal’s time, we have our self-help gurus who advise us to “turn inward, stay within yourself. There you will find your rest” (26). This is a fine half-start, but from Pascal’s Augustinian perspective, it’s hollow by itself. Our rest “is neither outside nor within ourselves” but in both. It is in both because it is in God, who is, as Pascal would say with Augustine, “more inward than the most inward place of my heart and loftier than the highest” (Confessions 3.6.11).
And so the good news is that if our modern gizmos and things like social media have allowed us to lose sight of our highest end with unconscious and unprecedented ease, we don’t have far to go to find it. At the precipice of his conversion, Augustine realized that turning to God didn’t require “ships or chariots or feet,” but simply “the will to go” because God is always already more present to us than we are to ourselves (Confessions 8.8.19). And it’s in that same spirit that Pascal tells us that we can find our true happiness quietly in our room. It’s just that our rooms come with much more techno-glitzy noise than they did in seventeenth-century France or ever before. Our unique challenge is to discern how to fight these distractions—to switch them off, turn them down, and to learn again how to be still, even if at first it might feel a little boring.