Journal of Boredom
Studies (ISSN 2990-2525)
Issue 4, 2026, pp. 1–12
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20098119
https://www.boredomsociety.com/jbs
Living Through
Change: Boredom and the Rhetoric of Modern Experience
Elizabeth
S. Goodstein
Emory University, USA
https://orcid.org/0009-0006-9784-8498
How to cite
this paper: Goodstein, E. S. (2026). Living
Through Change: Boredom and the Rhetoric of Modern Experience. Journal
of Boredom Studies, 4.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17549849
Abstract: After a brief meditation on how a
pluralistic and anti-essentialist approach to Boredom Studies can help us
navigate challenges that characterize interdisciplinary knowledge formations
more generally, this paper takes up the theoretical and practical problem of
thinking boredom as a historically situated, embodied experience (or failure of
experience): not as a timeless crisis of meaning, but rather as a historically
specific configuration of empty, meaningless time. As I show, boredom’s seeming
ubiquity amidst the ongoing social, cultural, and technological transformation
that defines the modern world is at once historically and philosophically
significant. As an index of the problems of meaning that accompany the
challenges of living through historic change, boredom today at once resembles
and differs from past forms and permutations of the experience. Expanding our
sights to encompass the intertwining varieties of malaise in the contemporary
world—not just boredom, but loneliness, anxiety, depression, despair, and all
their siblings—can help counter the personalization of alienation by revealing
the axes connecting individualized suffering to the social, political, and
ecological challenges of our time.
Keywords: Boredom Studies,
interdisciplinary inquiry, Simmel, boredom and change, personalization of
alienation.
The emergence and evolution of
Boredom Studies as an interdisciplinary field over the past twenty years places
us before theoretical, methodological, and practical questions. As in other
interdisciplinary knowledge formations embracing the rubric of ‘Studies’ in or
of a problem or topic, defining the object of study generates quandaries and
controversies, and scholars with divergent disciplinary formations often speak
past one another as they contest the aims and focus of the Studies in question.
In the case of Boredom Studies, the intimate relation between topic and
experience, between boredom research and being bored, also gives rise to a
specific set of challenges, as do (philosophical, but also historical and
psychological) questions about the relationship between language and
experience.
After a brief
meditation on how Boredom Studies can fruitfully approach challenges proper to
interdisciplinary knowledge formations more broadly, this essay takes up the
theoretical and practical problem of thinking boredom as a historically
situated, embodied experience. I contend that we can best address the problems
of malaise, loss of meaning, and boredom in the contemporary world through a
pluralistic and anti-essentialist approach that integrates historical
self-reflection on the relation between boredom and change—between the
proliferation of boredom and modernity’s ongoing social, cultural, and
technological transformations.
***
Boredom is, paradoxically,
fascinating. Indeed, the growth of Boredom Studies over the past twenty years
suggests that the experience may well become more interesting the more we think
about it, with every attempt to pin it down disclosing new questions and
connections. This openness has not, to be sure, prevented repeated efforts to
produce definitive definitions and comprehensive syntheses that aspire to
settle, once and for all, what boredom really is. Such undertakings stand in a
long tradition that includes Reinhard Kuhn’s conception of ennui as idée
force, Heidegger’s existential analytics of Langeweile,
and Kierkegaard’s theology of desire, to name only a few. These efforts often
make fascinating reading, yet in the end they only deepen what seems to be a
fundamental ambiguity in the experience as such. Far from converging on a
common understanding of boredom, different thinkers continue to reach
incongruent conclusions—when, that is, they are not actively contradicting one
another.
Lots
of ink has been spilled trying to reconcile these discrepancies once and for
all, with lumpers subsuming differences under generalizing definitions and
splitters distinguishing different types or dimensions of boredom itself. At
this meta-level, too, interesting work has been generated from a great many
different starting points. In short, the growth of Boredom Studies as a whole
has brought ever greater diversification of methods and perspectives, with the
most compelling work often multiplying, rather than foreclosing, new
possibilities for understanding the experience.
With
all due respect to efforts both scientific and philosophical to get things
pinned down once and for all, I think we do better to embrace that multiplicity
and welcome the consequent proliferation of differences as a fundamentally
salutary feature of a new sort of knowledge formation. Anniversaries tempt us
to generate syntheses and classifications, to systematize and summarize and
canonize. Yet a radically pluralistic approach seems much better grounded in
our common focus on an experience and phenomenon that looks very different from
different perspectives, in different contexts, and even to oneself at different
moments.
Boredom
Studies should incorporate this diversity by cultivating the radical potential
of genuinely interdisciplinary conversation to keep us unsettled—or at least
capable of revising our assumptions and shifting perspectives and approaches as
the occasion requires. Such methodological pluralism is well-grounded in the
category of boredom itself, with its multiple and ambiguous meanings and
referents. Moreover, maintaining an openness to alternative modes of
interpretation helps keep us attuned to the need for self-reflexivity with
regard to the bigger picture. As participants in an emergent knowledge
formation, we need to ask why this topic appears to be so compelling in the
contemporary world. If Boredom Studies is flourishing, how does this speak to
our moment? How, in particular, should we understand the precipitous rise in
research on boredom in diverse disciplinary contexts in the first decades of
the twenty-first century?
Such
reflexivity keeps intellectual work vital, and it must be historical and
cultural as well as methodological. In privileging particular disciplinary
perspectives, we run the risk of begging the question of what boredom is, which
all too often comes down to whose boredom matters. If boredom is at once a
psychological and a cultural phenomenon, at once an existentially and an
ethically salient problem, a sociologically and a spiritually shaped
experience, there is no a priori justification for privileging any of these
perspectives over the others. If, instead, we attend critically to the
diversity of modes of understanding and talking about boredom and acknowledge
the complexity and multiplicity of the phenomenon itself as a common starting
point, we can start to think differently about the incongruities and
discrepancies revealed by different disciplinary hermeneutics. Rather than
arguing about definitions and minding the boundaries of acceptable arguments,
we can begin to appreciate the value of keeping multiple, at least partially
incommensurable paradigms of explanation in the conversation.
This
is, of course, easier said than done. Taken seriously, interdisciplinary
dialogue also generates increased self-reflexivity about the limitations of
particular disciplinary frameworks. Since what counts as evidence is always
relative to epistemological and other assumptions operative in a knowledge
paradigm, bringing divergent accounts of boredom into conversation can reveal
lacunae in the foundational principles or points of departure that frame
disciplinary perspectives.
Such
encounters can be exciting and disclosive, but they can also make for difficult
conversations. Genuine interdisciplinary dialogue reveals the limits of
expertise by exposing the contingency of epistemic self-assurance: by making
visible that confidence in one’s usual methods of inquiry and analysis marks a
belonging to a particular community of inquiry—and revealing how much the ways
we conceive of knowledge and evidence depend on paradigms others do not share.
Undertaken with seriousness and mutual respect, encounters with other
approaches may well problematize our understanding of truth itself by revealing
the contingency of our most basic assumptions and the relativity of our
conceptions of knowledge, evidence, method, and so on to a particular ‘thought
collective.’[1] And this can be, or at least feel, dangerous,
all the more so in circumstances where institutional precarity is more rule
than exception. Still, as recent developments have underlined, disregarding the
politics of knowledge brings its own hazards, and it is high time for
historical self-reflection on the organization of our thoughtways
(see Goodstein, 2017).
With
these broader considerations in mind, I would like to reflect on what seems to
me to be driving the ascendance of Boredom Studies from outside the academy:
the sheer proliferation of boredom, that is to say the lived experience of
empty, meaningless time, in contemporary life. The seeming ubiquity of boredom
in a time of rapid change—indeed, amidst political and cultural tumult—is at
once historically and philosophically significant. As I have argued elsewhere,
it is also politically salient: even as boredom is provoked, deployed, managed,
and instrumentalized in manifold ways in contemporary life, our capacity to
reflect upon the phenomenon is distorted and obscured by interpretive
frameworks that psychologize malaise and personalize alienation (Goodstein, 2025).
Here,
though, I shall focus not on the politics of boredom but on the phenomenon
itself, exploring this pervasive experience of the absence of experience—of
empty, meaningless time—as at once consequence and expression of a distinctive
configuration of self and world. On my reading, boredom’s ubiquity reflects
socio-cultural and material conditions that shape the rhetoric of experience as
such in the twenty-first century. I’ll situate this discussion vis-à-vis my
approach to theorizing the relations between boredom and modernity in Experience
without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Goodstein, 2005).
Experience
without Qualities is
often glossed as claiming that boredom is a modern phenomenon, but this is a
confounding simplification. It is, of course, a matter of historical fact that
‘boredom’ entered the English language around the turn of the nineteenth
century. However, my book’s claims about boredom and modernity center not on
that linguistic novelty per se but rather on a much broader phenomenon indexed
by the rapid dissemination of the term: by the middle of the nineteenth
century, there was a flourishing, transnational discourse in which the term
boredom and its synonyms and correlatives in other European language were
deployed by rich and poor, intellectuals and workers, men and women, to
thematize and reflect upon distinctive experiences of temporality connected
with (the rate of) change and problems of meaning in modern life.
Rather than
asserting that boredom itself, whatever that might mean, is a modern
phenomenon, I argue that what needs explaining is the historical circumstance
(to borrow Walter Benjamin’s subtle formulation) that in Europe in the 1840s
“ennui began to be felt in epidemic proportions” [“Die Langeweile
begann in den vierziger
Jahren epidemisch empfunden
zu werden”] (Benjamin, 1982,
p. 165, a. trans.). Whether they understood their experience as a perennial
feature of the human condition or as something novel, all sorts of people began
to participate in a discourse describing experiences of malaise and
stultification, of loss of meaning and hope in the face of the profound social,
cultural, and political transformations underway during this period. Experience
without Qualities asks how we can and should understand that
democratization—a development marked by, yet not reducible to, the emergence
and proliferation of the novel English category. Since the neologism ‘boredom’
comprehends the paradigmatically ‘French’ and ‘German’ linguistic legacies—ennui’s
resonance with existential questions and the suffering tied to pangs of desire
on one hand, and the explicitly temporal experience of Langeweile
on the other—I use this term to refer to the transnational discourse
thematizing increasingly widespread disaffection and malaise in the face of the
ways life and the world were changing amidst what Eric Hobsbawm (1996)
dubbed the dual revolution (cf. Musharbash [2007]
that explores connections between boredom and modernity and modernization in a
non-western context).
Even as Experience
without Qualities argues for a focus on the novelty of that discourse and
explores how and why that distinctive metaphorics
took hold so rapidly, it also underlines how compelling accounts of boredom (by
whatever name) as a trans-historical feature of the human condition can be.
However, such interpretations of boredom as a (potentially) universal feature
of the human condition may themselves begin from multiple ontological and
theological premises and thus understand the relations between experience and
history quite differently, as I illustrate through readings of Reinhard Kuhn’s The
Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (1976)
and Martin Heidegger’s The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World,
Finitude, Solitude (1983).
Experience
without Qualities
argues that neither (paradigmatically ‘philosophical’) accounts of boredom, by
whatever name, as a transhistorical, universal feature of the human condition
nor (paradigmatically ‘sociological’) interpretations of boredom as
psychological symptom of specific socio-cultural, historical circumstances can
give a sufficient account of the transformation manifest in the precipitous
rise of talk and writing about boredom in the long nineteenth century. As I
demonstrate, both sorts of interpretations can be illuminating, yet these
competing understandings of what boredom really is stand in an aporetic
relation. In short, since illuminating accounts can be generated from
diametrically opposed points of departure and since the phenomenon itself looks
quite different from different disciplinary perspectives, it is not at all
clear how we might establish any absolute methodological or definitional
priority in determining what boredom really is. The methodological challenge is
how to think boredom as both a historical and a philosophical phenomenon.
At the heart of my
argument, then, is not ‘ti esti’—the
question of what boredom is—but rather the question of how to interpret the
evolution in the dominant rhetoric of reflection on subjective malaise in the
period. Why and how do experiences that are understood simultaneously as
epiphenomenal effects and existential crises become so pervasive as to seem
effectively universal by the end of the nineteenth century? I interpret the
emergence of the discourse on boredom (that is, the discourse paradigmatically
represented by the emergence and rapid spread of an English term unknown before
this period) as a symptom of what I call the democratization of skepticism in
modernity. As I show, the boredom that “began to be felt in epidemic
proportions” (Benjamin, 1982, p. 165, a. trans.) in the mid-nineteenth
century was an index of profound dislocation amidst sweeping cultural,
political, and socio-economic change. As inherited modes of
understanding increasingly lost purchase, it registered a felt need for a new
language of reflection on the crisis of experience that accompanied the
seemingly all-encompassing process of transformation bringing a recognizably
modern world into being.
Thus, even as I
recognize the appeal of accounts of boredom, by whatever name, as a
trans-historical, universal feature of the human condition, I contend that such
accounts occlude what we most need to think: the way ‘boredom’ indexes not
sameness but change. Proliferating in and through a new, disenchanted rhetoric
of reflection on subjective experience, the discourse on boredom embodied and
facilitated a wider reframing of problems of meaning in materialist terms. As I
put it in the book’s introduction,
[t]he boredom that spreads
throughout European society in the course of the nineteenth century is thus
less a new feeling than a new way of feeling—or more precisely a form of
reflective distance that becomes a new attitude toward experience altogether
(Goodstein, 2005, p. 3).
Boredom is not, on this view,
singular; as a reflective category, it discloses a multiplicity of
possibilities, becoming a lived metaphor for problems of meaning in the
post-foundational modern landscape Robert Musil described as a world of ‘being
without qualities.’
Past is prologue.
The same dynamic that drove the proliferation of talk about boredom amidst the
epochal transformations of the nineteenth century is making itself felt in the
twenty-first. As a globalized economy and the fruits of technological progress
upend inherited ways of life, remake the media landscape, and foster precarity,
social dislocation, and political upheaval, complaints of boredom (and its
siblings loneliness, cynicism, and anxiety, melancholy and depression) are
burgeoning.[2] All these woes reflect problems of meaning and
questions of value that open onto wider social and political horizons. Yet the
ways such phenomena register the psycho-social and emotional-spiritual impact
of wholescale cultural change tend to be occluded by explanatory models that
systematically displace the focus onto individual subjects and bodies[3]—paradigms that medicalize malaise and
personalize alienation.
In this connection,
it is worth recalling Georg Simmel’s insight that pervasive problems of meaning
are not incidental, subjective epiphenomena. As Simmel’s monumental Philosophy
of Money (published 1900) demonstrates, capitalist modernization comprises
psycho-spiritual as well as social and economic transformation; inner life and
social life are reshaped by the reconfiguration of value and purpose in a
culture organized by money “as the means of means, as the most universal
technology of external life” (1989, p. 676, a. trans.). Money is not a mere
instrument of valuation but rather, as at once signifier and technology,
“bearer and symbol,” of abstraction, “the absolute means that thereby ascends
to the psychological significance of an absolute end” (Simmel, 1989,
p. 307, a. trans.). In the culture borne of industrialization and urbanization,
money increasingly becomes the signifier of value as such. What cannot be
expressed in quantitative terms fades in cultural as well as social
significance, and people struggle to find meaning and purpose beyond the
accumulation of wealth.
Simmel’s classic
account of Blasiertheit (in contemporary
psychological jargon, boredom-proneness) as an adaptation to the
modern lifeworld[4] grows out of this analysis of money as
dominant cultural force qua “universal technology” (1989,
p. 676, a. trans.) of modern life. In the face of constant nervous
overstimulation, against the background of an overwhelming ‘preponderance’ (Übergewicht) of objects, institutions, and
impersonal processes over and against mortal individuality, people cope by
numbing and hardening themselves: by becoming unwilling or unable to respond
with feeling to the world around them. On Simmel’s reading, such blaséness is Janus-faced: at once “the faithful subjective
reflex of the fully established money economy” (1995,
p. 121, a. trans.) and a form of lived distance that enables the cultivation of
subjectivity under conditions of constant flux and in the absence of a horizon
of transcendent meaning. This is a crucial point. As Simmel discerned, an
attitude of “reserve with an overtone of hidden aversion […] guarantees the
individual a sort and measure of personal freedom for which there is not even
an analogy under other conditions (1995, pp. 123–124, a. trans.). The birth of cool
out of the spirit of the modern metropolis.
Living with
seemingly constant change can be thrilling, yet it also entails fundamental
dislocation. As Simmel emphasized, the same circumstances that heighten
experiences of individuality and personal uniqueness also generate psychic and
social symptoms of isolation, alienation, malaise, and loss of meaning and
purpose. In our modernity, just as in Baudelaire and Flaubert’s, the discourse
on boredom conjoins exhaustion with change and addiction to incessant novelty.
Time cannot pass quickly enough; it is constantly accelerating, yet passing too
slowly; fervid desires alternate with indifference; keeping up with the world
seems by turns impossible and pointless. The birth of apathy out of the spirit
of historical progress.
My contention,
again, is that what generates boredom’s distinctive mélange of agitation and
malaise is not simply an experience of accelerated, historic change but a
historic change in the quality of experience itself in self-consciously modern
existence, in a world where skepticism has been democratized. In Futures
Past, Reinhart Koselleck connects these axes in a
fashion that underlines the dilemma of the modern subject. When history is
reconceived as progress, he writes, past experience ceases to provide a guide
for action, and “even the present withdraws into inexperienceability
[Unerfahrbarkeit]” (Koselleck,
1979, p. 34, a. trans.).
Experience
without Qualities
explored the ways that evacuation of lived experience in the face of constant
acceleration into the unknown was both registered and thematized in the
nineteenth-century discourse on boredom. There boredom appears now as a
symptom, now as a moment of critical distance from a novel valorization of
change and progress and the accompanying socio-political, technological,
economic, and cultural transformation of everyday life in a rapidly
industrializing and urbanizing world. Today, too, the disorienting dynamic Koselleck described takes concrete form in boredom as a
lived experience of empty, meaningless time, in which (to invoke Bergson’s
distinction [1913]) the ‘mechanistic’ causality that drives
modern science and industry eclipses the embodied temporality of lived time or ‘durée.’
In boredom, the evacuation of experience borne of existential disorientation in
the face of history as progress becomes palpable: the more we measure time, the
less we seem to live in the present.
Simmel identified ‘blaséness’ as the subjective pendant of the ubiquitous
pocket watches by which individual subjects were integrated into the “stable, supersubjective temporal schema [übersubjectives
Zeitschema]” that anchored and coordinated modern
urban existence, into “the technology [Technik] of metropolitan life” as
a whole (1995, pp. 120–121, a. trans.).[5] Similarly, today’s smartphones at once
symbolize and facilitate the adaptive integration of contemporary subjects into
the complex, highly mediated and globalized, transpersonal economic, social,
and geographical networks that have continued to be elaborated upon the
substrate of temporal-structural coordination in the intervening century.
Functioning as a modern subject requires “being connected,” yet the very forms
of technological modulation that facilitate our institutional and social
incorporation into the global economy generate an experienced loss of embodied
reality—a sense of one’s own lived present “withdraw[ing]
into inexperienceability” (Koselleck,
1979, p. 34, a. trans.).[6] In modernity, boredom is not a bug but a
feature.
The empty eternity
of everyday modern boredom today expresses the hollowness that echoes through
lives in which a sense of transcendent purpose has become elusive at best. To
be sure, such experiences of empty, meaningless time may spur creativity and renewed
commitment to life and action; profound boredom may also lead to fundamental
theological, anthropological, and philosophical insights. As I have already
emphasized, accounts of boredom (by whatever name) as a universal,
philosophically salient feature of the human condition have their virtues. But
boredom’s prevalence and interest these days mostly leads in a diametrically
opposed direction: away from self-reflection into a lived experience of
impotence, insignificance, and helplessness in the face of the overweening
technologies of modern life and toward hopelessness and despair amidst
increasingly implausible narratives of perpetual economic ‘growth’ and
techno-scientific and social progress. As precarity increases among the
erstwhile middle classes, whose work lives are being shaped to an ever-greater
extent by the requirements of machines and information processing, the longing
for purpose and ‘creativity’ and the cultivation of ‘mindfulness’ and ‘wellness’
are being instrumentalized in the service of preventing ‘burnout,’ enabling
people to maintain their fitness and availability for work that many experience
as meaningless (Goodstein, 2025).
What we face in
boredom today is not a timeless crisis of meaning as such but a historically
specific configuration of empty, meaningless time: a temporal mode brought
about when the future eclipses the present and, to invoke Kosselleck’s
metaphor, the horizon of experience shrinks into oblivion. Burnout is the
psychic equivalent of repetitive stress injury through exposure to modern
bureaucratic life, in which goals and targets proliferate in the absence not
just of meaningful ends and goals but even of comprehensible reasons and
purposes for required actions and activities.
The boredom so
pervasive in contemporary life cannot be understood by isolating individual
experience from a socio-economic and cultural reality and historical context in
which progress has become ideology. And as Simmel observed in his reflections
on Berlin’s boredom-prone metropolitan subjects at the turn of the twentieth
century, the ever-increasing ‘hypertrophy’ of an objective ‘culture of things’
over and against individual human beings, with their limited capacities for
integrating and responding to burgeoning cultural, technological, and material
complexity, has both psychological and social consequences. Since then, the
webs of ‘technologies of life’ that enable modern life have grown far more
extensive and elaborate, and these consequences have likewise intensified.
In the intervening
century, the experienced disproportion between the impersonal, accumulated
achievements of science, industry, and institutionalized social achievements
over and against individual existence and potentiality has continued to grow.
In our highly networked existence, hyperbolized forms of mediation are
displacing—and, ever more frequently, replacing—embodied connection. To be
sure, these technological innovations can be profoundly enabling and even
liberating. But their predominance too often undermines the orientation toward
lived experience as such that anchors human life in social and natural worlds.
In the twenty-first century, the evacuation of experience that accompanies all
these changes—so palpable in our uncanny dependency on technologies that we
ourselves grow by objectifying, quantifying, and depersonalizing ourselves for
the profit of transnational corporations (Zuboff, 2019)
is making itself felt in disconcerting ways on a mass scale and (as in its
classical modern antecedents) taking forms that both discursively and
materially link phenomena of malaise, disassociation, and loss of meaning to
living through historic socio-economic, cultural, and technological
transformation.
With the narrative
of progress losing plausibility even as the trajectory of global warming grows
more catastrophic, its effects less predictable with every passing year,
complaints of climate-related anxiety, grief, despair, and desperation have
grown rampant, notably among younger people. As the social, political, and
technological effects of isolation, loss, and the atrophy of human connection
during the COVID-19 pandemic continue to resonate in social fragmentation,
violence, and an ‘epidemic of loneliness,’ dislocation in the face of
accelerating global transformation finds expression in ‘solastalgia’ as a new
form of homelessness, of a creeping bereftness in the
world being brought about by climate change.[7]
In another register,
this fundamental disorientation of lived experience becomes palpable in the
extreme ambivalence with which human beings are greeting the world-destroying
and world-transforming potency of the technologies so brilliantly and misleadingly
branded ‘artificial intelligence.’ The distinctive mélange of apocalyptic and
utopian visions, existential dread, depressive withdrawal, and irrational
exuberance being evoked by the nihilistic prospect that AI will, as its
prophets aver, very soon completely change everything resonates powerfully with
Baudelairean visions of ennui and self-destruction.
Meanwhile, the technological delivery devices for all of this are busy chewing
up our time and focus and thereby diverting and generating boredom and anxiety
in approximately equal parts.
Situating the
contemporary discourse on boredom and related forms of subjective malaise in
this wider cultural context illuminates the need to move beyond
discipline-specific paradigms and framings to a pluralistic conversation that
connects sociological, cultural, psychological, philosophical, and political
perspectives on contemporary problems of meaning in a genuinely
interdisciplinary fashion. Setting aside the question of what boredom is to ask
how it appears and how lived problems of meaning are evolving in our own
modernity can help Boredom Studies become a site for practical and theoretical
interventions that affirm the significance and complexity of lived experience
under conditions when both thought and experience seem increasingly endangered.
In the face of ever more totalizing forms of cynicism and the wholesale
instrumentalization of culture, expanding our sights to encompass the
intertwining varieties of malaise in the contemporary world—not just boredom,
but loneliness, anxiety, depression, despair, and all their siblings—can help
counter the personalization of alienation by revealing the axes connecting
individualized suffering to the social, political, and ecological challenges of
our time.
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[1] The term is Ludwik
Fleck’s (1980 [published 1935]).
The question of the historicity of (conceptions of) boredom is at the heart of
many of these theoretical difficulties, not least as the assumption that
boredom is an ahistorical and (potentially) universal experience is so deeply
engrained in empirical studies. See Goodstein (2020) on the methodological implications of that
erasure of historical perspective. Boddice (2024) highlights related problems in Emotion
Studies due to neurophysiologists and lab psychologists ignoring the work of
their colleagues in history.
[2] The intersection of loneliness and
social media and the negative (mental and physical) health impacts of both have
become sites of particular concern. See for example the U.S. Surgeon General’s
2023 Advisories on Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation (a) and Social Media and Youth Mental Health (b).
[3] A case in point: amidst the
wreckage of contemporary civil society, as millions juggle multiple menial jobs
just to survive, we are regularly admonished that ‘social connection’ is
important for ‘mental health.’
[4] It is, of course, quite possible to
disagree regarding the meaning and nature of ‘blaséness’ and the relation of
both to the designation ‘boredom proneness.’ However, the objections raised
above concerning using definitions to establish one’s preferred perspective on
an inherently ambiguous experiential category also apply here. My point is that
we ought to pay careful attention to the way Simmel situates the experience
that he calls blaséness as a complex, multi-dimensional, psycho-spiritual, and
physiological adaptation of the metropolitan subject to the conditions of life
in the socio-historical world of the modern money economy. What matters, that
is, is not Simmel’s terminology but his phenomenological perspective and
nuanced socio-cultural and philosophical analysis—an approach that discloses
dimensions of boredom that are foreclosed by more circumscribed accounts of
blaséness as a psychological state.
[5] As E. P. Thompson
(1967) demonstrated long
ago, the imposition of capitalist time discipline over the course of the
industrial revolution was tied up with political and ideological struggles over
the meaning and purpose of work in human life and culture. These questions have
by no means been definitively settled but continue to recur and echo in
discourses of ‘work/life balance’ in the twenty-first century.
[6] As is well known, the sheer
presence of cell phones is quite distracting, particularly for those highly
dependent on these devices in everyday life (Ward et al., 2017).
[7] The term was coined by Glenn
Albrecht to describe “the lived experience of the desolation of a much-loved
landscape” (as he puts it in his foreword to Solastalgia: An Anthology of
Emotion in a Disappearing World [Bogard, 2023, p. xv; see
also psychologist Susan Clayton’s “A New Word for New Feelings” in the same
volume, 2023]).