Resting Restlessness: The Human Ontological Necessity of Boredom

Boredom is a manifestation of negativity. Boredom specifically arises as a result of desire. Whereas desire commonly results either in frustration with the inability to achieve ends, or in the satisfaction of achieving them, boredom is the presence of desire which yearns for itself as desire, and as such is a higher form of frustration. In recognition, desire as absolute negativity faces itself as the endless fount of negations which satisfy its self-certainty incessantly. Boredom arises at this level of desire, not at the level of frustration of satisfaction which is immediate to the already existing life of desire. Recognition and boredom are both determinations at the level of infinite desire, and concern the achievement and absence of it. What separates boredom from frustration is that in the former there is a seeking for a negation that has not yet manifested to consciousness as a specific negation, whereas in the latter there is a negation which has already appeared, but which has not been achieved.

Boredom and creativity logically go hand in hand, but are not necessarily experienced hand in hand. When desire experiences its inherent frustration with being separate from its satisfaction, it attempts to move heaven and earth to reach it. It thus achieves satisfaction, but in satisfaction, the negation of the object is achieved, nullifying it as a source of satisfaction in the consumption, and leaving nothing behind. Boredom only comes to be after particular desires are consummated, and is itself a kind of ‘infinite judgment’, an indefinite difference qualified by merely being recognized as not satisfied by any existing particularity before consciousness. In boredom, we don’t know what we want, only that we don’t want what is present to us. Yet there is something specific desired by boredom: we want a specific desire to come forth so that we may enjoy the process of desire anew. We yearn for desire itself, which always exists as a specific desire. Boredom fundamentally occurs under any circumstance where consciousness as desire is ripped or dirempted from its immediate life, where the object of interest appears as the expectation of a beyond from the established. Why? Because the mind is a meta-reflexive entity, which at any point can spontaneously transcend the immediate given, and thus look towards even an empty and indeterminate heaven full of possibilities that, despite being empty, call from within its own nature an negative infinity which is beyond the limitations lived.

Boredom is always already occurring in the domain of creativity. To be bored is to have already transcended the given immediacy of existence, and to have stepped into the ethereal domain of novelty in its immediacy: the abstract negation of all that already is immediately here either in fact or in knowledge. The world and the self close in, they are, and in merely being, they are reduced to nothings by the bored consciousness. Consciousness is itself the active nothinging, this abstraction itself, which has come to be in the desire to determine itself in a way not reducible to all priors. True boredom is an infinite boredom, not as a quantity, but as a quality. There is the boredom of quantity and repetition, which simply desires an empty newness of this or that unit. This is the desire of the car collector who desires every car, or the philosophy book collector who simply enjoys adding another book so long as it is philosophical. Infinite boredom is the boredom of a kind, where what is yearned for is a completely new domain of being. This is the boredom of the wayward artist who tires of painting, of music, of writing, of dancing, and who strains themselves to do what has never been done, or the philosopher who strains to think what has never been thought. The fact that creativity happens at all, requires the moment of boredom even if it is an instant becoming, which consciousness passes over in silence, never noticing, and never agonizing over. To do something new, to persist in working on it with joy, is itself the reality that what used to be has become itself boring.

What boredom is is consciousness’s intuitive negativity in its established stasis. Once settled, it is in the nature of consciousness to relate to its everyday established routine with a familiarity of indifference where the life of consciousness becomes a near independent object of its own, an unconscious machine via habit. In our habit, our mind no longer preoccupies itself with its own nature, that of thinking, but sinks into familiarity and routine, to mere being. The mind, however, thinks by nature, and to think is to observe, to make, and to draw out differences and unities. In boredom, however, all things have been reduced to an immediacy with no meaningful difference to the mind. What is meaningful to the mind is to think, and there is nothing to think in the immediate as such. The mind thus turns away from what already is, and blindly gropes and waits for something new to appear, something which will call forth the need to think precisely because its complex difference is not given at the outset, and thus will call forth the life of the mind.

Consciousness is by its nature determined to orient itself ever towards the new, for the novel is of essential interest both in biological life and in spiritual life. In natural life it is that which is novel that signals consciousness to awake to its surrounding, for anything that is out of the established order is a potential danger. Novelty itself, despite the immediate importance for consciousness, is not the desire of all consciousnesses. Novelty spells both new ways to be free as well as the death of the old. Those accustomed to stasis fear novelty, and those who desire novelty are the enemies of the established, for good or ill. In historical time, boredom’s seeking of novelty, as well as novelty’s own imposition as a consequence of static success, is victorious due to the nature of mind within the necessity of survival. Those who are not primed to notice the new are caught off guard.

Boredom, however, is an internal determination towards the novel which does not begin from the external intrusion of experience on consciousness, but rather is the drive to seek novelty in the static. Boredom is mind’s own internal motor of creativity, forcing upon it the problem of its dissatisfaction with its stasis. Boredom is both a consequence and a cause. It is a consequence of stasis, and it is the cause of novelty seeking and making. Because consciousness is oriented towards novelty, its absence engenders boredom. Boredom in turn is a state of consciousness which is unbearable and forces consciousness to act to seek or create the novelty it craves and needs.

In boredom, consciousness seeks novelty in what is, and what it has accomplished. Boredom itself, however, has no measure for novelty. To boredom, novelty can simply be the endless supplanting of one experience by another, a quantitative boredom. There is a higher boredom which becomes aware of the stasis of this seemingly endless flux. This boredom is what leads to the discovery and generation of new categories, new ways of being. This qualitative difference is noticeable in the quality of mind itself. Children and animals are often satisfied with experiential flux even when that flux is just the same content with a different shape. Mature minds are ones that can come to boredom of the second kind, realizing that the novelty of flux is in fact not a true flux at all.

Boredom is a necessity for the Natural being, the finite being, who is not divine. The divine has no boredom, for it finds the enjoyment of its life in what already is since it is eternal and awaits no future, and it awaits no inspiration since it is the infinite dreamer of dreams. The finite Spirit too can achieve this satisfaction with being, one in which one finds joy in what is just as much as one finds joy in the new.