The Wit's Guide to Boredom

Or, ennui will rock you

Detail from Saint Jerome in His Study, Jan van Eyck, 1445

Only boring people are bored, parents sometimes lie to their children — and of course they know better. How many Magna-Tile towers, swing pushes, diaper changes, and pages of the Potterverse are actually interesting? Meaningful, vital, formative, sure, but also dull. There’s a reason they call parenthood the longest shortest time.

“Notoriously insensitive to subtle shifts in mood, children will persist in discussing the color of a recently sighted cement-mixer long after one’s own interest in the topic has waned.”
— Fran Lebowitz

But what if the most meaningful things are least interesting? The idea of umami culture — describing things you enjoy for reasons you can’t explain — was a tidbit I offered up in my 2017 book Elements of Taste: Understanding What We Like and Why to describe phenomena like real-time videos of train travel, Karl Ove Knausgaard novels, and oddly satisfying videos. Being willing to engage with the world at its least engaging can be quietly thrilling.

“Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.”
— Walker Percy

Superficially dull hobbies like trainspotting and mailbox photography are of interest to many, as are the photographer Martin Parr’s excellent collections of Boring Postcards. As Parr told an interviewer,  “they’re absolutely interesting — the title is a way to get people’s attention. In fact they have this whole layer of information and revelation about the society behind them.”

“If you really care about a serious cause or a deep subject, you may have to be prepared to be boring about it.”
— Christopher Hitchens

Perhaps the most boring people are interesting. Just as the political spectrum is said to be a circle, with the far left indistinguishable from the far right, so the outer limits of boredom may be fascinating. Clive James’s 1978 review of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s biography is a masterpiece of the form. “Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it,” he begins, and continues:

“If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.”

But, wouldn’t you know it, the book gets better because “so thoroughly has the truth been siphoned out that you might even find yourself getting interested in the consequent vacuum.”

“Boredom is rage spread thin.” — Paul Tillich

Who among us will own up to being a bore? The bored need the boring, just as The Joker needs The Batman to punch up his punchlines. “What makes a few people bores when the rest of us are so fascinating?” asked John Updike in a terrific 1960 New Yorker essay, which also featured this excellent quip:

“A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.”

The definitive modern work on the subject is Elisa Gabbert’s 2020 poem “New Theories on Boredom.” It originally appeared in the New York Review of Books and lives on via Reddit, where commenters have incorrectly found it boring. It’s also in her new collection Normal Distance, out next month. She distinguishes bad boredom (banality, or “boring because simple”) from good boredom (tedium, or “boring because complex”), and suggests good boredom is slow-interesting, engrossing but “at a pace that sometimes resembles boredom.”

The poem develops these ideas in a series of aphorisms, an inherently unboring way to communicate:

Whether something is boring or not has nothing to do with how good it is.

We’re in the bargaining stage of civilization, and it’s boring.

It takes a special kind of mediocrity to be offensive and boring at the same time.

If a bore droned on in the woods and all the trees paid close attention, would it matter? And so Gabbert gets to the key revelation that all boredom scholars find (if they don’t nod off on the way), one that brings us back to that bedrock of boredom, the parent-child relationship:

Did you know that you can trick people into being more interesting by being more interesting yourself?

I used to be bored around my parents, which made them boring. In my thirties I was shocked to learn that I didn’t know everything about them.

So if you have to spend time with boring people, try being DAZZLING.

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Quote Vote

“I never vote for anyone. I only vote against.” — W.C. Fields

Last week I offered you Champagne and instead you chose boredom. Unless it’s from the Champagne region of France, you intimated, it’s merely sparkling ennui. What subject will you pick this week?

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Speaking of…

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A great novelist’s boredom

Patricia Highsmith's dark genius

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If you made it through Get Wit Quick No. 163, congrats. Elisa Gabbert also asks why we don’t get bored in the shower, a subject explored in GWQ No. 73. “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity” is a perky quip incorrectly credited to Dorothy Parker and totally out of character for a woman whose poem about suicide methods ends with the line “you might as well live.” That Updike piece ended with this great note: [The remaining hundred and eighty thousand words of the confession, while of indubitable interest to the specialist, are well in excess of the needs of the general reader.] General readers enjoyed Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting but specific ones liked it even more. Drum your fingers on the ❤️ below.