Journal of Boredom Studies

No. 3 (2025)
Articles

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

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  • Stanley Kreiter Bezerra Medeiros,
  • Symone Fernandes de Melo
Stanley Kreiter Bezerra Medeiros
IFRN
Symone Fernandes de Melo
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte
Bio

Published 2025-05-20

Keywords

  • Existential Boredom,
  • Human condition,
  • Ontological attunement,
  • Taedium vitae,
  • Philosophical psychology

How to Cite

Bezerra Medeiros, S. K., & Fernandes de Melo, S. (2025). When Existence Grows Heavy: Existential Boredom and the Flight from Ourselves. Journal of Boredom Studies, (3). Retrieved from https://boredomsociety.com/jbs/index.php/journal/article/view/39

Copyright (c) 2025 Stanley Kreiter Bezerra Medeiros, Symone Fernandes de Melo

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

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.

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